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Bourke-White: Now,
Get the Whole Picture
Show lets
us see photos in a new light
By HOWARD KISSEL
Daily News Staff Writer
 robably
the most familier photograph in the Margaret Bourke-White exhibit at the SoHo Triad Fine
Arts Gallery, 107 Grand St., is that of a line of refugees from the Louisville flood, all
black, standing under a billboard image of a jolly middle-class white family bearing the
legend, "Highest Standard of Living in the World."
If it is her best-known image, it is perhaps because she is regarded largely as a
photojournalist. She was one of the four original staff photographers for Life magazine
(another was Alfred Eisenstadt). Her photo of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana was the cover
image of its very first issue, in 1936.
Among the most familiar of the photos in the show are those of Gandhi at the spinning
wheel and the liberation of Buchenwald.
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| Flood victim paddling a boat
made out of wash tubs in Kentucky in 1937. |
But as is made clear in the retrospective — the first significant exhibit of her
work in many years — Bourke-White's talents went far beyond simply recording the
news.
"A small number of academics recognize her greatness," says Sidney Monroe,
one of the three founders of the gallery.
"For the average person, she is not generally named in the company of the greats,
which is where she belongs."
This will be clear to anyone who looks at her photographs of heavy industry, which have
the same voluptuous power as the well-known nature photographs by her contemporary Edward
Weston.
"The purpose of art is to find beauty in the big thing of the age," she wrote
in 1929. "Today that big thing is industry."
The exhibit, which runs through Oct. 18, coincides with the publication of a new book,
"Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer" (Bulfinch Press, $65). The book has a text
by Life reporter Sean Callahan, who helped her on the first collection of her work,
published in 1971, just after she died following a long battle with Parkinson's disease.
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| Gold miners in Johannesburg,
1950 |
Callahan notes that she reinvented herself every decade. After her "celebration of
industrial esthetics" in the '20s, "she was struck by conscience in the early
'30s," using her talents to photograph the Depression. In the '40s, she was the first
woman accredited as a war correspondent, the first to shoot an Air Force bombing mission.
In the '50s, illness cut short her career.
All but three photographs in the show are new platinum prints made from original
negatives in the Bourke-White archives at Syracuse University. They range in price from
$700 to $1,500, except for the Louisville print, which is $5,000.
The three original prints — a rarity in an era that did not recognize photography
as a fine art — are more expensive.
A photograph of a bridge in Italy, signed by Bourke-White on the matting, is $7,000.
A small photo a Pan Am jet, taken in the '30s, is $7,000, and a shot of the George
Washington Bridge, taken from an angle that creates unusual visual rhythms, is $15,000.
Original Publication Date: 09/10/1998
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