Oct 15, 2015 - Sale 2393

Sale 2393 - Lot 87

Price Realized: $ 11,875
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 9,000 - $ 12,000
BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET (1904-1971)
Molten Steel, Otis Steel Company. Silver print, 12 3/4x9 1/2 inches (32.4x24.1 cm.), with Bourke-White's signature, in pencil, on mount recto. 1928-29
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Additional Details

As a young child, Bourke-White's father took her to the steel foundry that was forging his printing presses. She recounted in her 1963 autobiography, "To me at that age, a foundry represented the beginning and end of all beauty…[it] was so vivid and alive that it shaped the whole course of my career."

While photographing steel production at the Otis Steel Company in Cleveland, Ohio, Bourke-White discovered a process to allow the glowing magma appear on black and white film. Her subsequent book, "The Otis Steel Company -- Pioneer," received national attention and led to a prolific career which included many firsts. Bourke-White was the first American female war photojournalist and first female photographer at Life magazine, as well as the first foreign photographer to document industrialization of the Soviet Union.