Art in Iron and Steel - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 4

gain recognition for photography as an art form on a par with painting. His early work showed
steady technical innovation, as he took photographs in snow, in rain, and at night. He is considered
the father of modern photography as an art form. In addition to making a series of four hundred
prints of his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe, and also four hundred prints of cloud patterns related to emo-
tions, Stieglitz captured with his camera memorable images of New York's Flatiron Building and
other structures. (O'Keeffe herself, so well-known for her abstract floral forms and southwestern
themes, painted views of the East River, dominated by rooftops and industrial smokestacks, and the
Brooklyn Bridge that crosses that river.)
In the 1930s, Margaret Bourke-White, who established a reputation for photographing industrial
sites, produced photo essays of Russia and the Soviet Union, and would go on to become the first
official woman photojournalist to cover World War II. Some of her most widely known work was
produced for Life. Her first assignment for the new publication was to photograph dams the Public
Works Administration was constructing in the northwest United States, and she focused her efforts
on the enormous (four-mile-long) Fort Peck Dam in northeastern Montana. Her famous portrait of
the earthen dam's concrete spillway structure appeared on the cover of the inaugural issue of the
magazine, dated November 23, 1936.
Edward Steichen, another pioneer in photography as an art form, was attracted to both the glam-
our of Hollywood (Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin were two of his subjects) and the squalor of
the battlefield. He led the photography division of the Army Air Service in World War I, and headed
the U.S. Navy photography unit in World War II. As director of the photography department of the
Museum of Modern Art, he organized the Family of Man exhibition in 1955. Steichen also photo-
graphed the Flatiron Building.
Joseph Stella, known for painting abstract themes (aquatic life and jungle foliage), returned
throughout his life to the subject of the Brooklyn Bridge and often abstracted New York City in
his paintings. The East River and Brooklyn Bridge also captured the imaginations of poets. In his
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Walt Whitman wrote about the river scene that so many commuters
saw each day. He was one of them, and he reveled alike in the sunset and the ships in the harbor
and the contrast of the foundry chimneys against the sky. When the Brooklyn Bridge superseded the
ferry, it also succeeded it as an inspiration to poets such as Hart Crane, whose topic-length poem
The Bridge is perhaps the best known.
Although many painters, photographers, and poets have seen art and humanity in the products of
engineering and technology, not all artists have. Many in the late-nineteenth-century Parisian artist-
ic and literary community found the Eiffel Tower “an offense to good taste” and characterized it
as coming from the “baroque, mercantile imaginings of a machine builder.” The builder, Gustave
Eiffel, defended his wrought-iron tower as “beautiful in its own right.” He also defended the works
of engineers generally: “Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy
us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures?” He further
held that “there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do
not apply.”
Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with noth-
ing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank