Margaret Bourke-White
(American, 1904–1971)
[Hydro-generators, Niagara Falls Power Co., Niagara, New York]
Object Details
Artist
Margaret Bourke-White
Date
1928 (negative), ca. 1965 (print)
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Image: 19 1/4 × 15 1/2 inches (48.9 × 39.4 cm)
Mount (Matted): 27 15/16 × 22 1/16 inches (71 × 56 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of the artist, Class of 1927, and LIFE Magazine
Object
Number
65.554
Bourke-White’s close-ups of dynamos at the Niagara Falls power plant showed an increasingly sophis(…)
Bourke-White’s close-ups of dynamos at the Niagara Falls power plant showed an increasingly sophisticated formal vocabulary that began to probe the abstraction of the machine. This gradual shift foreshadowed the sharp detail of her later photographs and reflected the work of contemporaries like Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. (“Margaret Bourke-White: From Cornell Student to Visionary Photojournalist,” curated by Stephanie Wiles and presented at the Johnson Museum January 24 – June 7, 2015)
