"New Deal, Montana: Fort Peck Dam, Diversion Tunnel" was photographed in 1936 by Margaret Bourke-White, who was on assignment for Life magazine to document the construction of the multimillion-dollar public works project. Note the worker at the bottom. Her boldly blocked photograph of the dam itself was printed on the cover of the inaugural edition of Life. Click photo for larger image. Related Story: Special events round out exhibit

Margaret Bourke-White was a household word in the early decades of the 20th century, a celebrity whose persona and derring-do were the equal of the voluminous arresting images she created as a photojournalist and a commercial photographer.

It was Bourke-White's imposing cover shot of the newly built Fort Peck Dam in New Deal, Mont., monumental and staunch, that dramatically introduced the inaugural issue of Life magazine on Nov. 23, 1936.

She'd joined Fortune magazine as its first photographer in 1929, and her journalistic work brought her widespread fame, but before that she'd acquired a professional reputation as a photographer of architecture and especially of industry and was making a good living from corporate commissions.

"Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design 1927-1936" at The Frick Art & Historical Center, an excellent exhibition that originated at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., examines the early years of her career. More than 150 vintage photographs illustrate her evolving style and social consciousness through images that are as far-ranging as the fiery cavernous 1920s Otis Steel Mill in Cleveland and the factories and farms of the emerging Soviet Union.

Bourke-White was born in 1904 in New York City. Her father, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Rochester, N.Y., was an engineer and amateur photographer. Her mother, born in lower Manhattan to Irish immigrants, attended Pratt Institute.

She entered Columbia University in 1921 -- the year after women were given the vote and during a period of economic expansion -- where she took a photography class with the noted Clarence H. White and became a friend of photographer Ralph Steiner. Three universities, a marriage and a divorce later, she graduated from Cornell, then moved to Cleveland to pursue architectural photography.

Through determination, chutzpah and luck, Bourke-White gained access where no one had previously, certainly no woman. Described as "a quintessentially modern woman" by exhibition curator Stephen Bennett Phillips, she played both sides of the gender card, wearing tailored slacks when it was rare for women to do so and negotiating business deals with giants of commerce, but also employing her feminine wiles if she thought it would gain her favor.

In Cleveland, she won the confidence of the builders of a new skyscraper, the Terminal Tower, and became the project photographer in 1927, eventually renting a studio in the building. Several images, such as "Terminal Tower, Cleveland: Skyline," are in the pictorialist style then in fashion, softened by blurred focus and moody atmosphere; but there are also strikingly crisp modernist interpretations like "Terminal Tower, Cleveland: Twilight View" -- in which the skyscraper is shown in silhouette, reflected in water -- and the nearly abstract "Terminal Tower, Cleveland: View from Arches."

Early in her career, photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White made a good living from corporate commissions. Using principles of design described by Arthur Wesley Dow, Bourke-White created dramatic images that found beauty in industrial subject matter, such as "Oliver Chilled Plow: Plow Blades." Click photo for larger image.

That same year she talked the Otis Steel president into giving her access to the male-only mill grounds, and with characteristic perseverance and the availability of new technological developments overcame the challenge of capturing images under the hellacious factory conditions. Later she sold several of her photographs to the company president, who commissioned others. One of these -- a glowing hot interior prominently featuring a suspended 200-ton ladle -- earned her first prize in an exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art the following year.

Other photographs show Bourke-White's indebtedness to principles of design discussed by Arthur Wesley Dow in his 1899 book "Composition." The repeating patterns made by stacks of aluminum rods, rows of women's shoes or a nested infinity of speakers suggest the magnitude of material and production that typified the Machine Age. Some photographs are breathtakingly gorgeous, such as the dramatically lit, elegant "Oliver Chilled Plow: Plow Blades," which exemplifies Bourke-White's ability to find beauty in subjects generally considered prosaic, gritty and rough.

Among her most indelible images are several of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, which she was hired in 1929 to document the construction of. For formal quality and impact, the portrait of a modern city presented in "Chrysler Building: Gargoyle Outside Margaret Bourke-White's Studio" and the futuristically delineated "Chrysler Building: Tower" are unsurpassed.

Bourke-White had continued to maintain her home base in Cleveland, but in 1930, in a calculated move fed by ambition and her savvy for self-promotion, moved her studio to the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building and hired industrial designer John Vassos to create a sophisticated interior suitable to the fashionable address. Though not permitted access to the building's terraces, she entertained high society friends and clients on them, where she also housed her pet alligators and turtles. (Bourke-White majored in biology in college and began an interest in herpetology as a child). The economic effect of the Depression caused her to fall behind in rent payments, and in 1934 she moved to a Fifth Avenue address.

	Aluminum wire coils titled: "Aluminum Company of America: Wire." Click photo for larger image.

Bourke-White was the first foreign photojournalist to document the rising industrial capacity of the Soviet Union, between 1930 and 1932. A resultant book, "Eyes on Russia," is displayed along with its engaging cover image of a heavily-clothed, bowed and spattered worker, "USSR: Stalingrad, Red October Rolling Mills, Iron Puddler."

She was not without detractors, some accusing her of being a communist sympathizer. As Thomas Smart, the Frick's director of collections and exhibitions, points out, people at the time were questioning the role democracy/capitalism may have played in creating the Great Depression, and looking at other ideologies such as communism and fascism. Bourke-White "was present when the big movements were vying for supremacy," he says.

Her trips to the Soviet Union increased her empathy for workers and influenced the way she depicted humans -- once minuscule and/or stylized as formal element -- in her photographs, as did a collaboration with Erskine Caldwell, author of the novel "Tobacco Road," documenting Southern tenant farmers. (They married in 1930; Caldwell filed for divorce in 1942 while Bourke-White was traveling with the military in Europe as the first woman accredited as a war correspondent by the U.S. Air Force.)

Writer James Agee, having covered the devastating drought of 1934 with Bourke-White, refused to work with her on a 1936 Fortune magazine project about Alabama sharecroppers, enlisting photographer Walker Evans instead. The two men considered Bourke-White a fashionista materialist and her photographs inferior and lacking in sensitivity to their subjects. Curator Phillips notes, for perspective, that they would have most probably marked her as an outsider -- lacking their social class and intellectual pretensions -- whose advertising work was an inferior genre. ("Walker Evans and James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," an exhibition of work resulting from that collaboration, is at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, through July 17.)

Bourke-White's career was cut short by the onset of Parkinson's disease in 1953. By 1957 she was unable to continue working as a photojournalist, and on Aug. 27, 1971, she died.

But her images live on as symbols of their historic period, windows not only into its commercial, political and cultural moments but also upon the many aesthetic considerations of the day.

Catalog revelations

A very fine catalog, with curator's essay and reproductions of the exhibited photographs and contemporaneous works, accompanies the exhibition.

Among appended material is a radio interview Mademoiselle magazine conducted in the 1930s with Bourke-White that makes one shudder with its chatter about fashion and its references to working women as "girls." Following discussion of risks taken when photographing from airplanes, for example, the interviewer says: "It's all simply fascinating, Miss Bourke-White. But tell me, what did you wear besides the parachute? A regulation aviator's outfit? They always looked so clumsy for women to me." Perhaps worse, the answer: "I considered my airplane costume the triumph of the trip. For it was one of those great strokes of economy that make a woman feel she is just the cleverest thing with budgets in the world," and then the celebrated photographer goes on to describe how she adapted a previously purchased ski suit.

But the interview, as the images themselves, is a vivid reminder of how much the culture has changed over seven decades.

An index, bibliography and chronology ensure its place as a reference work for historians and collectors ($45, cloth).

"Bourke-White" continues through Sept. 4 at 7227 Reynolds St., Point Breeze. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. For information, call 412-371-0600 or visit www.frickart.org.