Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, silver gelatin photograph, 14” x 11”, 1936
June, 2015
IMAGINE, IF YOU CAN, A WORLD IN WHICH PHOTOGRAPHS WERE A
RARE FORM
of artistic documentation whose workings few understood.
Imagine the United States in the first third of the twentieth century, with
illiteracy and poverty key defining characteristics of the pitiable lives led
by you and most everyone you knew. Images had nearly the power and drama, then,
that they did during the Counter-Reformation in Europe, when the Catholic
Church fought back against dull Protestantism with paintings as theatrical as
opera sets, their shadowy depths filled with depictions of gruesome martyrdom—lit
only at the moment of a would-be saint’s transmutation from agonizingly human
into gloriously divine. Radiant sculptural forms of gold and silver reflected
not merely the material wealth but the spiritual wealth of a religion that had
dominated that part of the world for roughly a millennium. Bring yourself back
now, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and from Europe to the
United States, populated by the shell-shocked heroes of the Great War dancing
with pretty little flappers, their bobbed hairdos gleaming, and the gangsters,
with their molls, who kept the country’s beak wet during Prohibition; imagine,
finally, on a late fall day in 1929, stock-market millions vanishing within
hours, heartlessly slamming shut the doors to the anything-goes twenties.
(While you’re at it, imagine the unthinkable: Wall Street investors with such
an overwhelming sense of responsibility that they jumped out of skyscrapers
rather than face their own— and their clients’—financial ruin.
Incomprehensible!) Meanwhile, the Great Depression loomed in the
drought-stricken plains of America’s heartland. In the mind’s eye, these times
could only have existed in grayed-out shades of black and white. Color, it
seems, had been forgotten.
Unlike now, when anybody with a cell phone can, and
unfortunately does, take pictures of everything from their breakfast to their
genitalia—and makes them available to an unwitting public—only a very few of
those initiated into the science of the lens and the alchemy of the darkroom were
able to make photographs in the 1930s. Margaret Bourke-White was one of the
few, and she led a charge of firsts: the first woman to photograph for LIFE
magazine (for you post-Millennials, sort of the Internet of its time), the
first accredited female war photographer (in World War II), and the first
Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union to record the proletariat’s
triumph of mega-industry over the ease and comfort of privileged individuals.
In that heyday of pioneering photographers whom Bourke-White
epitomized, black-and-white photography equaled photojournalism, which equaled
truth with a capital T. This Truth was on a par with the same truth Americans
revered in Norman Rockwell’s “real-life” scenes lifted straight out of a
Mayberry without the laugh track, long before there was a Sheriff Taylor, Opie,
Deputy Fife, or Aunt Bee. Or even television, for that matter. When images were
few and far between, they had a credibility that is lost today in a thick
overlay of irony and sheer disbelief. In the 1930s, if it appeared in LIFE
magazine, or the Saturday Evening Post, or the newspaper, it was flat-out real.
Viewers lacked the objectivity to read meaning into a
photograph as social commentary, for example, any more than the illiterate
could read the black marks scratched into the white page.
The always-excellent Monroe Gallery presented their exhibition of silver gelatin photographs by Margaret Bourke-White as art,
finding that, for her “as an artist,” photography served “as an instrument to
examine social issues from a humanitarian perspective. She witnessed and
documented some of the twentieth century’s most notable moments, including the
liberation of German concentration camps by General Patton in 1945...”
Bourke-White’s picture, “German civilians made to look at instruments of
torture and execution at Buchenwald concentration camp, 1945,” is hardly an
icon of objectivity. Nor should it be; some truths are beyond apprehension. Not
to quibble with our dearly held ideals of photojournalism as an act of
witnessing and documenting, but black-and-white imagery exists, among other
reasons, when color cannot hold the entirety of its content. We demand this
state of in-between-ness from art when what it depicts is too awful for mere
reproduction.
While today you can find images of gore online anytime you
choose to search for them, that they are not generally reproduced ad infinitum
speaks to our understanding of the power of imagery. What Warhol repeated in a
nightmarish grid (Jackie’s grief-stricken face on Air Force One en route from
Dallas), and Picasso abstracted in his Guernica, Bourke-White reflected in the
faces of her “German civilians” at Buchenwald.
Finally, when her country needed shoring up in 1936, during
the height of the Depression, LIFE, a burgeoning publication that would become
our society’s pocket mirror for at least a couple of decades, chose for its
very first cover Bourke-White’s symbol of capitalism’s ultimate success. Her
Fort Peck dam picture, all art-deco curves and fat-cat angles, describes more
than the enormous potential for hydroelectric power: It is an image of America
rediscovering her own righteous might, an America that, like the photographer
“Maggie the Indestructible,” would liberate us from ourselves. There was the
evidence, right in front of us in it-mustbe-true black and white. —Kathryn M Davis
Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, silver
gelatin photograph, 14” x 11”, 1936 ©Time Inc.
--The exhibition continues through June 28, 2015
