Margaret Bourke-White
(American, 1904-1971)

"United States Airship 'Akron' (Zeppelin)", 1931

silver gelatin print
unsigned. Matted, glazed and presented in its original duralumin frame affixed with a presentation plaque.
sight 13" x 18-1/2"

Notes: On August 8, 1931, Margaret Bourke-White took this historic photograph of the first U.S. Zeppelin, the U.S.S. Akron (powered by helium instead of hydrogen), as it was launched from its hangar at the Goodyear Airdock in Akron, Ohio. To commemorate the event, the Goodyear Company had a limited number of Bourke-White's photos encased in specialty Art Deco frames made from the same duralumin metal used in the construction of the ship, and presented them to the company's executives, engineers and naval officers involved in the execution of the airship. Another set of limited prints were set aside for the Goodyear tire dealers as sales awards for achieving outstanding quotas. As the plaque affixed to this work indicates, this one was presented to Robert L. Speck of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for the fiscal period of July-August 1931. Both the airship and Margaret Bourke-White's pioneering work as one of the most accomplished photojournalists of the first half of the 20th century represent a momentous time in U.S. history, marked by burgeoning discoveries in industry and technology. Bourke-White gained early national recognition in the late 1920s with her photographs of bridges and factories, capturing the refractive nuances of steel through the use of magnesium flares. In 1930, Bourke-White, an associate editor and photographer of Fortune magazine, became the first Western photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry. In 1936, she became the first woman photojournalist for Life magazine (a position she held until her retirement in 1969), and the first female war correspondent and only foreign photographer allowed behind enemy lines when Germany invaded Moscow in 1941. Bourke-White, best known for her commercial images of commerce and industry at the height of the Great Depression and later World War II, are, in the words of art historian Sharon Corwin, a haunting testimony of the "promise of capitalist production" in an unstable world where "consumers were unable to keep pace with production." References: "Margaret Bourke-White, United States Airship "Akron", 1931. Akron Museum of Art. Accessed 14 March 2017; Brannan, Beverly W. "Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971): Prints and Photographs Reading Room". Library of Congress, 2015. Accessed 15 March 2017; Corwin, Sharon, Jessica May, and Terri Weissman. American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, p. 112.