PORTLAND, MAINE.- The first major exhibition devoted to the critical early years in the life and work of photographer Margaret Bourke-White is on view at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, through March 20, 2005. Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936, featuring approximately 150 photographs, is the first exhibition to fully explore her important early images, many of which have not been seen by the general public since the early 1930s. The exhibition is organized by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

Beginning with her earliest pictorialist view of Cleveland’s Terminal Tower in 1927 and culminating with her well-known 1936 photographs for the cover and lead story of the first issue of Life magazine, the exhibition will explore the formative years in Bourke-White’s career, during which she developed her aesthetic vision and forged new territory into the field of photojournalism.

Bourke-White, one of the 20th century’s best-known female photographers, strode brazenly into a field dominated by men to become not only a famous photojournalist but also a celebrity personality. Trained in modernist compositional techniques, Bourke-White photographed with an artist’s eye, discovering beauty in the raw aesthetic of American industry and its factories. Her 1929 photograph Chrysler, Gears emphasizes the immensity of the gear—the worker, placed barely inside the frame, is there only to provide a sense of scale.

By 1928, Bourke-White’s photographs were appearing in newspapers and magazines across the United States. From 1928 until 1936, she supported herself through corporate and magazine assignments and advertising. Her magazine work, though less lucrative than the corporate assignments, allowed for abstraction and compositional freedom. In these forceful works, it is apparent that she understood the drama of the diagonal and the curve. She framed many of her photographs so that similarly shaped forms appeared repeatedly on a diagonal across the field of view and seemed to continue into infinite space beyond. In Oliver Chilled Plow: Plow Blades, 1930, a close-up of the shiny steel surfaces verges on complete abstraction.

In 1929, Bourke-White was invited to become the "star photographer" for the new Luce publication, Fortune magazine. Luce’s plan was to use photography to document all aspects of business and industry, an idea that had never been tried before. Bourke-White’s career is unimaginable without her relationship with Luce’s media empire. Her swashbuckling style, her ingenious and relentless self-promotion in an age that admired self-made men and their fortunes, her reverence for industry itself, and her photographic homages to capitalism and technology made her the perfect lens for Luce’s vision.

Bourke-White moved to New York City in 1930 and later that year was sent abroad to capture the rapidly growing German industry. Greater ambitions for this trip took her to the Soviet Union, where no foreign journalist had previously been allowed to document the country’s progress. The Soviet Union had built more than 1,500 factories since 1928 under a rapid industrialization plan, and Bourke-White was intent on capturing its growth on film: "With my enthusiasm for the machine as an object of beauty, I felt the story of a nation trying to industrialize almost overnight was just cut out for me." The Soviet images differ from her other work in their incorporation of human subjects as the emphasis. In fact, the photographs from the USSR are overwhelmingly narrative and were a significant step for Bourke-White in her development as a photojournalist. To supplement her salary from Fortune, Bourke-White continued to search for extra ways to generate income. She accepted several assignments to produce mural-size photographs, which culminated in 1933 when NBC hired her to create the biggest photographic mural in America for the rotunda of their studios in Rockefeller Center. In 1935 she began taking aerial photographs for several airlines, which gave her skills that she used on many of her future photographic assignments.

The exhibition venue schedule is as follows: John and Mable Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL, (October 25, 2003-January 4, 2004); the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, (February 14, 2004-May 2, 2004); the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, (November 13, 2004-January 9, 2005); the Portland Museum of Art, (January 19, 2005- March 20, 2005); the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK, (April 13, 2005-June 12, 2005); the Frick Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh, PA, (June 24, 2005-September 4, 2005); and the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, (September 24, 2005-January 15, 2006).