Feb 25, 2016 - Sale 2406

Sale 2406 - Lot 83

Price Realized: $ 32,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 18,000 - $ 22,000
(MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE) (1904-1971)
At the time of the flood, Louisville, Kentucky. Silver print, 8 3/4x11 3/4 inches (22.2x29.8 cm.), with Bourke-White's embossed facsimile signature blind stamp on recto, and the Life Gallery of Photography and edition hand stamps, plus a caption, credit, and edition notation 45/50 + 10 ("an edition of 50 plus ten silver prints"), in pencil, on verso. 1937; printed 1998
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Additional Details

Purchased from the Time Life Gallery of Photography, in 1998, with the accompanying Certificate of Authenticity.

In January 1937, the Ohio River flooded Louisville, Kentucky and its surrounding areas, resulting in one of the largest natural disasters in American history. LIFE magazine's first woman photojournalist, Margaret Bourke-White, who was given this special assignment, jumped on a plane to Louisville, where she recorded the devastasting event for the nation's popular picture magazine.

Bourke-White's humanist depiction shows a long line of Louisville's African American residents, who are dressed in heavy winter coats, lined up outside a relief agency. Her striking image draws the sharp economic contrast perpetuated by segregation: in contrast to their weary faces, the billboard for the National Association of Manufacturers above them depicts a happy Caucasian family under a banner reading 'World's Highest Standard of Living. There's no way like the American Way.'

In addition to recording the disaster, Bourke-White's powerful repesentation addresses the widening racial divide, and the economic gap, during the late Depression, between the middle and working classes, a social condition heightened by this natural disaster. The topicality of extreme hardships faced by minorities renders Bourke-White's image an icon of visual culture.

The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, p. 136-37.

For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White, p. 124.

Picturing the South: 1860 to the Present, p. 124.

Therese Mulligan & David Wooters, Photography from 1839 to Today: George Eastman House, p. 592.