BOURKE WHITE MARGARET (1904 1971) Oil Tanks Standard Oil Co

Sale 2166 - Lot 318

Unsold

Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500

BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET (1904-1971)
"Oil Tanks, Standard Oil Co. of Ohio." Warm-toned ferrotyped silver print, 9 1/2x13 1/4 inches (24.1x33.7 cm.), with Bourke-White's hand stamp and a caption label on verso. Early 1930s

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Additional Details

This photograph is one of a group purchased in Cleveland, Ohio in 1992.
Modern Photography (1933-1934), 35.

Founded in the late 19th-century by John D. Rockefeller, along with other businessmen, scientists and industrialists, Standard Oil, whose offices were located in Cleveland, Ohio, was heavily criticized for eliminating its local competition as well as that in the northeastern United States. When Bourke-White moved to Cleveland in the late 1920s to pursue architectural and industrial photography, she quickly started documenting factories and steel structures throughout the city.

Like her earlier work at the Otis Steel Mill and Terminal Tower, Bourke-White depicted the storage tanks of Standard Oil with a formal visual elegance previously unseen in American photographic expression. During the 1930s Bourke-White's compelling photographs reveal the inherent beauty of pattern and repetition. In this picture Bourke-White captures how gently the light reflects off the side of perfectly-shaped industrial containers. In effect, the viewer is introduced to a new style of photography, one that re-presented the industrial idiom within the language of modernism.