The New Tractor, Tractorstroi, Russia

Margaret Bourke-White

1930 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

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.

Artist

Margaret Bourke-White

Date

1930

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987