The Portland Museum of Art is featuring a selection of Photographer Margaret Bourke-White. The photographs are on display at the Portland Art Museum until March 20. Admission to the museum is free every Friday from 5 to 9 P.M.
Much of Bourke-White’s work revolves around discovering the beauty and art in industrial structures and factories that were built primarily for function and not form. Her most famous works are of construction sites, including her pictures of the crenellations of the Fort Peck dam in Montana that appeared on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine. It is these early works that are displayed at the Portland Museum of Art. The photographs cover her work from 1927 to 1936, and represent much of her professional career before the Depression drove her to focus more on issues of social equality.
Bourke-White’s photographs are imaginative and breathtaking, forcing you to see her subject matter in a new light. Her use of interesting angles, lighting, and narration create strong compositions that truly do speak a thousand words. Dams look like castles, turbines look like bike spokes, and the Soviet Union looks like Mid-West America.
Often her photographs show a single lonely figure among the giants: A man leading a donkey past a field of oil derricks, another stepping briskly down the steps of the capital building, another almost lost in shadow as he welds parts together for International Harvester. One of her most powerful photographs shows a boy holding a sledgehammer over his shoulder. He’s dressed in thick furs and large mittens to protect him from the Soviet winter. He’s not old enough to grow a beard, but his eyes are ancient
Margaret Bourke-White’s career contrasted sharply with her personal beliefs. She was a photojournalist, one of the only women of the 1930’s, who made her career capturing the beauty of American industry in her work for magazines and corporations, and in the process glorifying her subjects. Yet in her heart she was a socialist and a pioneer of civil rights. Her studio was located in the Chrysler building, the epicenter of commerce in the 1930’s, but she was also one of the only photographers in the world welcomed in the Soviet Union, as a guest of the government. She has done extensive work for Chrysler, NBC, Campbell’s Soup and others, and published several liberal socialist books.