Cleveland Harbor

Artist Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904–1971)

Date1929

MediumGelatin silver print mounted on board

DimensionsImage / sheet (including border): 13 1/4 × 9 13/16 inches (33.7 × 25 cm)
Mount: 20 × 15 15/16 inches (50.8 × 40.5 cm)

ClassificationsPhotographs

Credit LineGift of Diann G. Mann, Class of 1966, and Thomas A. Mann, Class of 1964

Terms

Photographs
Gelatin silver print
Board
American

Object number2018.095.021

Label CopyBourke-White moved to Cleveland, an industrial capital, after graduating from Cornell in 1927. Her career in photography had started at Cornell—she sold pictures of the campus to help finance her studies—and in Cleveland she initially relied on commissions from fellow alumni as she built her photography business. Improbably for a female photographer of the time, she was drawn to the Cleveland Flats, the industrial zone along the floodplain of the Cuyahoga River. For Bourke-White, the shipyards, warehouses, foundries, and mills formed “a photographic paradise.” Her celebratory images of steel manufacturing attracted the attention of the publisher Henry Luce, who was about to launch Fortune—a magazine dedicated to “vividly portraying, interpreting and recording the Industrial Civilization.” On his invitation, Bourke-White moved to New York City in 1929, becoming Fortune’s first staff photographer. ("Celebrating Reunion at the Johnson," text by Kate Addleman-Frankel and presented at the Johnson Museum May 25-July 28, 2019)

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