Power & Paper
Margaret Bourke-White, Modernity, and the Documentary Mode
Carleton University Art Gallery
It's remarkably odd to see the word "power" associated with paper like this. As a medium, paper began its long slow decline some time ago, and along with it, the dizzying power of newspaper ownership. The Citizen Kanes of the near future own technology, chips, and software, means that allow owners to communicate with "the masses" on scales unheard of via paper. Newspapers are no longer the tool of choice for quick efficient mass communication. Replaced to some degree by radio and television, the Net continues to alter this field irrevocably.
Power and Paper comes as a timely reminder of just how far we've come - and how quickly. One of the original staff photographers for Fortune magazine, American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) photographed the first cover of Life magazine, on newsstands November 23, 1936. It was as typically industrial as Bourke-White's photography was at the time—an image of a massive dam near Fort Peck, Montana. The editors didn't get what they had expected—a photo essay about the dam's construction. As they described in its written introduction, instead Bourke-White delivered "a human document of frontier life which, to them (the editors) at least, was a revelation."
While working for Life magazine, Bourke-White photographed the Depression, London during the Blitz, Stalin and the Kremlin. She became the first female war correspondent, working in Italy and Russia, and later, photographing the Korean War. Towards the end of the Second World War, she photographed the liberation of German concentration camps. Candice Bergen portrayed Bourke-White in a role made famous in the film, Gandhi, where Bourke-White photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi during the post-war struggle for Indian independence.
Next to all this work, this traveling exhibition, put together by the Boston University Art Gallery, is a bit of a let down. Simply put, it's not her most famous work. Nonetheless, it is a great opportunity to look at her early work when, along with her personality, her photographic direction was still in development.
It represents Bourke-White's earlier purer "industrial" phase, where she like many of those around her, was completely enamoured by the potential of the machine. Later in her career, it was the photographing of human misery created by natural and socio-political disaster that brought her to a greater understanding of the relationships between people and machines or technology. Only at that point was Bourke-White more able to empathize with the human beings in this relationship. These experiences broadened her awareness of socio-political realities and pushed her to becoming a documentary photographer, something ironically seen as "anti-aesthetic" at the time.
About eighty fine black and white photographs represent the work she produced on a 1937 commission from the International Paper and Power Company. The corporation wanted photographs of their "Canadian operations". Bourke-White flew north to Trois Rivières, southwest along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers to the capital and northwest to Témiscaming, photographing forests, loggers and their camps, and pulp and paper mills.
Working at publisher Henry Luce's magazines, Bourke-White was immersed in a time and space swimming with the ideology elevating machines to new heights. Some of that is evidenced in this work. In "Newsprint" Bourke-White even creates a couple of true abstractions—images where the objects cannot be identified, something further emphasized by the scale of the objects being unclear and the absence of the human body.
Combined with these, are photographs of the humble home circumstances of loggers and mill workers. The juxtaposition of the two kinds of imagery creates an electric tension. If anything, this is underscored now. Machines once again, are coming into their own, except unlike Bourke-White's time, today's machines are not lumbering beautiful giants. The machinations of post-industrial hegemony unfold in micro-machines, as capable of the most surreptitious surveillance as they are of entering the human body and conducting microscopic repairs invisible to our second-rate human vision.
On this level, Bourke-White's mind is revealed. Seemingly documentary photography in fact was the product of sophisticated manipulations, beginning with the imaginings of the woman who made them. In this case, her masterful abilities were at the disposal of a multinational corporation. Partially this was aided by her career spanning a period of significant leaps in photographic technology. Flash technology, for instance, led to the imaging of subjects hitherto unseen in photographs.
"I believe...that any great art which might be developed in this industrial age will come from industrial subjects, which are so powerful and sincere and close to the heart of life. It seems to me that huge machinery, steel girders, locomotives, etc., are so extremely beautiful because they were never meant to be beautiful," Margaret Bourke-White writes in 1930. "They are powerful because the industrial age which has created them is powerful and art, to be of any importance as a reflection of these times, must hold the germ of that power."
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 2000
Power and Paper comes as a timely reminder of just how far we've come - and how quickly. One of the original staff photographers for Fortune magazine, American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) photographed the first cover of Life magazine, on newsstands November 23, 1936. It was as typically industrial as Bourke-White's photography was at the time—an image of a massive dam near Fort Peck, Montana. The editors didn't get what they had expected—a photo essay about the dam's construction. As they described in its written introduction, instead Bourke-White delivered "a human document of frontier life which, to them (the editors) at least, was a revelation."
While working for Life magazine, Bourke-White photographed the Depression, London during the Blitz, Stalin and the Kremlin. She became the first female war correspondent, working in Italy and Russia, and later, photographing the Korean War. Towards the end of the Second World War, she photographed the liberation of German concentration camps. Candice Bergen portrayed Bourke-White in a role made famous in the film, Gandhi, where Bourke-White photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi during the post-war struggle for Indian independence.
Next to all this work, this traveling exhibition, put together by the Boston University Art Gallery, is a bit of a let down. Simply put, it's not her most famous work. Nonetheless, it is a great opportunity to look at her early work when, along with her personality, her photographic direction was still in development.
It represents Bourke-White's earlier purer "industrial" phase, where she like many of those around her, was completely enamoured by the potential of the machine. Later in her career, it was the photographing of human misery created by natural and socio-political disaster that brought her to a greater understanding of the relationships between people and machines or technology. Only at that point was Bourke-White more able to empathize with the human beings in this relationship. These experiences broadened her awareness of socio-political realities and pushed her to becoming a documentary photographer, something ironically seen as "anti-aesthetic" at the time.
About eighty fine black and white photographs represent the work she produced on a 1937 commission from the International Paper and Power Company. The corporation wanted photographs of their "Canadian operations". Bourke-White flew north to Trois Rivières, southwest along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers to the capital and northwest to Témiscaming, photographing forests, loggers and their camps, and pulp and paper mills.
Working at publisher Henry Luce's magazines, Bourke-White was immersed in a time and space swimming with the ideology elevating machines to new heights. Some of that is evidenced in this work. In "Newsprint" Bourke-White even creates a couple of true abstractions—images where the objects cannot be identified, something further emphasized by the scale of the objects being unclear and the absence of the human body.
Combined with these, are photographs of the humble home circumstances of loggers and mill workers. The juxtaposition of the two kinds of imagery creates an electric tension. If anything, this is underscored now. Machines once again, are coming into their own, except unlike Bourke-White's time, today's machines are not lumbering beautiful giants. The machinations of post-industrial hegemony unfold in micro-machines, as capable of the most surreptitious surveillance as they are of entering the human body and conducting microscopic repairs invisible to our second-rate human vision.
On this level, Bourke-White's mind is revealed. Seemingly documentary photography in fact was the product of sophisticated manipulations, beginning with the imaginings of the woman who made them. In this case, her masterful abilities were at the disposal of a multinational corporation. Partially this was aided by her career spanning a period of significant leaps in photographic technology. Flash technology, for instance, led to the imaging of subjects hitherto unseen in photographs.
"I believe...that any great art which might be developed in this industrial age will come from industrial subjects, which are so powerful and sincere and close to the heart of life. It seems to me that huge machinery, steel girders, locomotives, etc., are so extremely beautiful because they were never meant to be beautiful," Margaret Bourke-White writes in 1930. "They are powerful because the industrial age which has created them is powerful and art, to be of any importance as a reflection of these times, must hold the germ of that power."
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 2000
