s
| For more information about this article or gallery, please call the gallery phone number listed in the last line of the article, "For more info..." |
March Issue 2004
Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC, Offer Two Major Photography Exhibits
The Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte will present the exhibitions, Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927 - 1936, and Through the Eye of the Camera: 19th and 20th Century Photography from the Royal & SunAlliance Collection, both will remain on view through May 2, 2004.
No one word so readily captures the personality and drive of Margaret Bourke-White than fearless. Fearless in being first to capture an image of pouring molten steel so close-up her face turned sunburn-red while the finish to her camera blistered. Fearless in climbing out on gargoyles perched 61 stories atop the Chrysler Building to photograph the New York skyline and the 180 foot finial crown to what was then the tallest building in the world prior to the completion of the Empire State Building. Fearless in her unrelenting push to be the first foreigner permitted to photograph the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union in 1931. Fearless in capturing the unpredictable turmoil and danger of Mahatma Gandhi and India casting off the yoke of British colonialism. Bourke-White's photographs for Fortune and Life magazines and her 1931 book Eyes on Russia made her an American celebrity and a role model for women.
Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927 – 1936, is the first exhibition devoted to the critical early years of her career, exploring her emergence as one of the 20th century's best known female photographers. Many of the 160 photographs on display have not been seen by the general public since first being published. The exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and is supported by the Phillips Contemporaries and Trellis Fund. Its North Carolina appearance is made possible by the Goodrich Corporation.
"Some critics feel that Bourke-White wasn't an artist because she never shot anything that wasn't a photo assignment or commission," stated curator Stephen Bennett Phillips. "But these early photographs show her remarkable control of design and composition."
Bourke-White's fascination with the industrial world originated with her father, Joseph White, an inventor and engineer for a New Jersey printing press manufacturer. At age eight he took her inside a foundry. The drama of what she saw there stayed in her mind for years. She studied at Columbia University under Clarence White, one of the great photographers of the period, where she encountered Arthur Wesley Dow's theories of composition focused on modern design and principles of abstraction.
Bourke-White began her career in Cleveland in 1927, quickly gaining notice as an architectural photographer in portraying the grand mansions of the industrial magnates living along Euclid Avenue. She recognized early the financial potential of developing the power of the industrial photograph as an aesthetic medium. Cleveland was in its heyday of expansive industrial growth, captured in Bourke-White's photos of the industrial foundries and steel mills of the Cuyahoga River basin and by the city's new symbol of economic prosperity - The Terminal Tower.
Bourke-White romanticized the power of machines through close-ups, dramatic cross lighting and unusual perspectives in presenting industrial environments as artful compositions. Her lush photographs of stacked copper pipes, massive piles of braided aluminum cable, the gleam and symmetry of Sikorsky S-42 airline propellers or a close-up of the steel surfaces in Oliver Chilled Plows: Plow Blades borders on complete abstraction. Within a year, Bourke-White's work appeared regularly in national magazines, ultimately landing her the position as first photographer for Fortune magazine in 1929, and later, the photographer for the cover of the first issue of Life magazine in 1936.
By 1930 Bourke-White moved to New York City with a studio in the Chrysler Building and Fortune magazine assignments that took her around the globe. Her work in capturing the explosive growth of Russian industry on her second trip in 1931 marked a turning point in which human subjects became the emphasis. Bourke-White returned to the United States with a greater sympathy for the suffering of the American worker. Eager to combine her skills in photography with a growing social conscience, Life magazine provided her the outlet she was looking for. Her first assignment, New Deal, Montana: Fort Peck Dam set the tone for the magazine for years to come with her portrayal of life in the town of New Deal and the construction of the dam.
The exhibition features 160 photographs by Bourke-White as well as archival materials from the first decade of her career. A 208 page catalogue, published by Rizzoli International Publications and written by Stephen Bennett Phillips, Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, is available in the Mint Museums Shops for $45 in hardback only or by calling 704/337-2037 or e-mail at (sfisher@mintmuseum.org).
"(Daguerreotype images) must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science. Variations in shade, and the gradations of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth itself in the supremeness of its perfection." - Edgar Allan Poe
What better to accompany a major study of the early work of Margaret Bourke-White than a historic and aesthetic overview of the history of American photography. Through the Eye of the Camera: 19th and 20th Century Photography from the Royal & SunAlliance Collection will both surprise and please photography buffs in largely achieving an ambitious collection goal. The exhibition is organized by Martha Mayberry, Mint Curator of Prints and Drawings, and made possible with funding provided by Royal & SunAlliance.
Igor Stravinsky by Arnold Newman
The exhibition of 57 photographs is a pictorial history of a nation as it expanded, achieved, agonized and matured from its frontier origins to its role on the world stage today. The roster of 37 artists is a virtual who's who of exceptional talent and vision that impacted the evolution of the field. Included are photographs by Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Matthew Brady, Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Curtis, Lewis Hine, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eadweard Muybridge, Joel Meyerowitz, Arnold Newman, Alfred Stieglitz and Jerry Uelsmann.
Ansel Easton Adams
"The photographs of the American West form an impressive part of the Royal & SunAlliance Collection," stated Marianne Fulton, Artistic Director for The Light Factory Photographic Center, in Charlotte, in her guest essay in the accompanying gallery brochure. The potential of the power and influence of photography is evident in Carleton Watkins' Grizzly Giant, Mariposa Gove, California. The vast scale of western landscape is represented by the tremendous tree trunk that dwarfs the pictured man as the trunk's base pushes against the side of the image. Such pictures for the US government geological surveys doubled as highly marketable prints back East. Watkins' and William Henry Jackson's panoramic mountain views were instrumental in convincing Abraham Lincoln to sign the Yosemite Bill in 1864, creating the first national park.
The emotional power of the photograph to cause an outcry for changing custom or law is starkly evident in Lewis Wickes Hine's A Little Spinner in a Georgia Cotton Mill, 1909. Hine documented working conditions for the National Child Labor Committee beginning in 1908. Hine lowered his camera to the child's level, dwarfed by the mammoth machinery and silhouetted by tall, shadowy adult figures in the background, as if guarding against the girl's factory escape.
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was the early champion of photography being accepted as art, insisting that as one-of-a-kind objects, they were as legitimate a medium as painting. As a gallery owner, Stieglitz presented critical commentary on photography and on the work of such artists as Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier and Robert Demachy through his fine art journal Camera Work. As a photographer, Stieglitz settled on contemporary American city life as a favorite subject.
Joel Meyerowitz
Eliot Porter
Photography as art was enhanced by a variety of influences, from magazine exposure to collectors, galleries and museums and by such professional contributions as the delicate images of nature as captured by Eliot Porter, a pioneer in the use of color photography in the 1940s.
George N. Barnard
Through the Eye of the Camera includes exhibition themes of historic and social documentary, architecture, naturalism, urban/rural landscapes and portraiture. Photography process includes daguerreotype, albumen print, collotype, photogravure, gelatin silver print, and color techniques explored by photographers in the 1980s.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the museum at 704/337-2000 or on the web at (www.mintmuseum.org).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2004 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2004 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.