A Steel Will

Determined to make impactful images of this “photographic paradise,” Bourke-White established a studio in Cleveland, taking on commercial work for the city’s business elite while passionately lobbying to gain access to Otis Steel mill. In the winter of 1927–1928, she broke through when she received a letter of introduction to Elroy Kulas, the mill’s president. “The thing I wanted to do most in the world was to take the first successful steel photographs,” she later recalled telling him.

Kulas was initially skeptical of Bourke-White’s proposal, fearing that the photographer would faint from the heat like another recent female visitor, but he eventually granted her nearly unrestricted access. For the next five months, Bourke-White took full advantage of the arrangement, visiting the mill nearly every night after working on paid commissions during the day.

Woman vs. Machine

Bourke-White made hundreds of exposures that winter, although she deemed most of them failures. She constantly adapted new techniques and materials, such as the special-effects magnesium flares she used for artificial lighting. But the hulking darkness and mammoth scale of the mill presented countless challenges, and she struggled with shooting images inside its walls.

After five months of work, she believed that she had produced only a dozen great images of industrial subjects such as the “hot pigs,” towering smokestacks, two-hundred-ton ladles, and flying sparks. She conceded, “Despite my enthusiasm I needed orientation. I needed to go through a kind of digestive process before I could even choose viewpoints on my subjects.”

This “digestive process” can be seen in Bourke-White’s Otis Steel Works (1928), a photograph that distills the mill’s exterior to a series of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal forms. The image portrays the mill’s internal yard in a quiet moment—no cars carry coke down the railway tracks, and the smoke from the chimneys dissolves into a fine haze. Lively textures play against the heavy machinery: billowy smoke, smooth rails, hard earth. Puffs of white steam seem included by design, appearing as almost a living thing amid the massive manufactory.

Between the steel, iron, and smoke, it is easy to overlook the two minuscule workers in the distance, standing near the tracks like specters. Their diminutive portrayal is consistent with Bourke-White’s early tendency to focus on machines rather than their operators. Even when she includes workers in her images of the mill’s interior, as in this work, they are visually subsumed by machinery, as though they are merely more of its moving parts.

Bourke-White’s portrayal starkly contrasts with nineteenth-century artistic antecedents. For example, Thomas Pollack Anshutz’s iconic Ironworkers Noontime of 1880 depicts laborers during their midday break at a nail factory in Wheeling, West Virginia. Anshutz locates the nation’s productivity in the bodies of American workers—the factory buildings are of secondary concern. Fifty years after Anshutz’s painting, the notable absence of laborers in images, such as those by Bourke-White, came to characterize the industrial depictions by Precisionist artists, who represented heavy manufacturing in terms of its architecture, not its operators.

Elsie Driggs in Pittsburgh

While Bourke-White was photographing the steel-making process in Cleveland, painter Elsie Driggs was portraying the industrial environment of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Like Bourke-White, Driggs had potent memories from her childhood of her exposure to heavy industry. When she was eight years old, she and her family moved from Sharon, Pennsylvania, where her father worked for a steel company, to New Rochelle, New York. As the night train to New Rochelle passed through Pittsburgh, her parents woke her to see the sky ablaze over the working steel mills, and she vowed to eventually return to Pittsburgh to paint that roaring nocturne.

As an adult, Driggs trained at the Art Students League in New York with the figurative painters George Luks, Maurice Sterne, and John Sloan. After studying for a year with Sterne in Italy from 1922 to 1923, she returned to New York, where she exhibited her own figurative watercolors and oils at the Daniel Gallery. In 1926, after saving enough money, she announced that she would travel to Pittsburgh to paint the steel mills from her childhood.

Her Own Vantage Point

However, upon arriving in Pittsburgh, Driggs was disappointed to discover that there were no sulphurous flames to be seen—the steel mills had long-abandoned the fiery Bessemer process, and “the sky was totally black.” The artist turned her attention to the monumental architecture of the mill itself, locating poetry in the interplay between the industrial colossus and the darkened skies above. She described how “the particles of dust in the air seemed to catch and refract the light to make a backdrop of luminous pale grey behind the shapes of simple smoke.”

Driggs quickly set out to secure access to Pittsburgh’s Jones & Laughlin Steel. Although she was armed with letters of introduction from her art dealer and a prominent collector, the steel mill viewed her with suspicion as both an artist and a woman; management saw her as a potential labor agitator or a spy from a rival firm. Driggs responded by changing course: “By the time they decided I was quite harmless, I didn’t care if I went in there anymore.” Instead she climbed uphill toward her boarding house, looking down on the mill’s smokestacks and girders and recognizing that the view she beheld “shouldn’t be beautiful. But it is.”

From here, Driggs recorded her first impressions of the mill in pencil—“it was all I had so I drew it.” The resulting preparatory drawings for Pittsburgh (1927) and Study for Blast Furnace (1927) possess a precise elegance that amplified the might of the machine. However, the paintings that Driggs made from these sketches are more dramatic and less exact.

A Secret Knowledge

Although both Bourke-White and Driggs were responding to what the latter termed an “inevitable rightness” in the steel mill, they adopted different approaches that contributed to their creation of two very distinct bodies of work. While Driggs drew the mills from a safe distance up on the hill, Bourke-White exposed herself to some of the same physical dangers that threatened Otis employees. Driggs improvised an elegant solution when she was denied access to the Pittsburgh mill. Bourke-White, on the other hand, refused to be rejected by Elroy Kulas, setting the course toward the nickname she would later earn from her colleagues at Life magazine: “Maggie the Indestructible.”

Over the course of their self-designed artist residencies, the two women sought to reveal the allure of steel mills through highly personal images. They both tangled with the unconventional beauty of the subject, which they perceived as a form of secret knowledge. While Driggs acknowledged that “this shouldn’t be beautiful,” Bourke-White felt “these industrial forms were all the more beautiful because they were never designed to be beautiful.”

Working in their respective media, both artists favored the exuberant or sublime effects of industrial architecture over the human aspects of industrial production. This preference may have been motivated, in part, by the ecstasy of the era: in 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew over the Atlantic, the Westinghouse Company debuted the Televox robot, and the Machine Age Exposition thrilled audiences with the design of the modern world. It was a time when the products of heavy industry provided the means for exhilarating experiences. Steel made the Machine Age possible, and these artists sought to make apparent the splendor of steel itself.

This essay was adapted from Lauren Palmor’s “Confronting the Colossus: Two Artists Face the Steel Mill,” published in Cult of the Machine (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with Yale University Press; 2018).