Beveling Armor Plate for Tanks, Gary, Indiana

Date

1943

Creator

In 1943, Bourke-White was sent to the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, to photograph women who had taken industrial jobs in place of men drafted into the service. [...] In this photograph, a strong composition of a line of welders projects a sense of industrial scale. Rows of similar or identical objects was a favorite trope for Bourke-White, who often use similar compositions of identical products in exact rows to convey manufactured efficiency in her Fortune assignments, such as the rows of plow blades photographed at the Oliver Chilled Plow Company in South Bend in 1929. Here, each of the women concentrates on her task with professional competence and military precision. They are distinguished by their uniforms, but their individual characteristics are disguised: their hair is identically bound tightly to their heads, and their eyes are hidden beneath goggles of black glass, their hands in heavy leather gauntlets. The raw steel plate lying out before them plots a strong diagonal, balanced by the line of workers who diminish in size as they recede into the distance. Once woman, at the center, reaches forward to create a visual fulcrum for this balanced collaborative process. from Acton, A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame: Twentieth Century (Notre Dame, 2019)