The New Tractor, Tractorstroi, Russia
Margaret Bourke-White American
Not on view
After a course in photography given by Clarence White at Columbia University sparked her interest in the medium, Bourke-White became a professional photographer of architectural and industrial subjects. Her work impressed Henry R. Luce so much that he hired her as associate editor and principal photographer at Fortune, which published her pictures in the lead article of its first issue, in February 1930. That year the magazine sent her to document the status of industry and rearmament in Germany and from there to Russia, whose wholehearted revolutionary embrace of modernization fascinated her. In photographs such as this one made in an American-designed tractor factory, she documented the people and machines that symbolized Russia's advancing industrialization process.
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