Modern was now Margaret Bourke-White at the PMA BY CHRIS THOMPSON

A woman can, I believe, in the last analysis, make good as easy as a man, but the opening steps of the game are harder.

Margaret Bourke-White’s résumé is a chronology of firsts. She was the first foreign journalist permitted to photograph the conditions of labor and laborers in the Soviet Union, she shot the cover for the first issue of Life magazine, she was the first woman accepted as an Air Force war correspondent — in 1942 her convoy to North Africa was hit by torpedoes and she and her fellow survivors spent eight hours floating in lifeboats before their rescue by the British Navy — and she was one of the first photographers to get shots of both German cities gutted by air raids and the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps. Life subsequently refused to publish these photographs, so she wrote a book in 1945/6, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s Thousand Years, and published them herself.

There are few professions that give a woman an opportunity to see so many sides of life as that of photographer. Her profession will bring her into contact with all kinds of people and will lead her into all imaginable situations.

Bourke-White’s 1931 photograph "Goodyear Zeppelin: United States Airship ‘Akron,’ " in the Portland Museum of Art’s current exhibition of her work, shows the giant flying machine being rolled out from its hangar, watched by a line of spectators who are made miniature by its size and shape, and at the same time grounded in their mass by its awkward buoyancy. The photograph is framed in duralumin, the metal concoction used to construct the zeppelin’s girders. At each level and to the last square inch, in what it denotes and what it connotes, in its subject and in its staging, it is a visual artifact that holds the afterglow of its historical moment: a time when modernity still had a future.

I went into all kinds of places to get the photographs. Backstage at NBC, where I photographed the very switches and cables which are controlling the sound of my voice at this instant.

"Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936" is the first serious study of the early work of an artist whose skill and savvy stand her among the greats of 20th-century photography. Today it is fashionable to attend to the ways in which one’s life might also be one’s art; Bourke-White lived the sort of life that made it neither necessary nor interesting to have to belabor this artfulness, though she cultivated it with rigor and with cunning. In a photograph from 1930 we see her perched, camera in hand, on the neck of one of the great beaked gargoyles of the Chrysler Building, where from 1930 to 1934 she kept her studio. Another 1943 photograph shows her standing in a high-altitude flight suit beneath the propeller of an Air Force bomber, squinting and smiling in the sun and wind and clutching her flight goggles in one hand and her Graflex camera in the other. New York Times art critic Sarah Boxer wrote, "If she could have climbed any higher, there is no doubt she would have."

I had to take my photographs with my camera propped up on a rock and I leaning on my elbows while I focused on the ground glass. It was sometimes very funny because the men would begin pitying me. I, of course, was having the time of my life but the men would say, "Poor little girl . . . how hard you have to work for your living . . . How are you getting along? Do you own your own camera yet?" I would answer, "All but the last payment."

These are photographs of labor, taken at a time when labor was visible — as the activity of work but also, and more importantly, as a force. In some we see modern manufacture at its most seductive: the fluted flows of a row of glistening TWA airplane wings, waiting on wheeled carts for the next step in their assembly; the industrial sublime of a blast furnace, every one of hundreds of thousands of rivets in exactly the right place, revealing the delicacy that holds together the gargantuan complexes of iron and steel. But here, in these early works, we also see the lives of second-phase New Deal workers and their lovers and spouses and kids, posing, dancing, and drinking. Her 1935 was the near inverse of our 2005; it saw the founding of the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Act and its guarantee of collective bargaining, the Social Security Act, and the groundwork for the Fair Labor Standards Act three years later, which would give American labor a maximum work week and a minimum wage. This was a decisive moment in Bourke-White’s life and, so, in her work, which shifted from portraits of American economic success to an engagement with the complex social issues underlying it.

Always I found that being able to chat with miners or gossip with lumberjacks or joke with electricians was just as important as being able to converse with the presidents of these companies if I were taking their portraits. Which does not mean that this latter quality is one to be ignored, because a photographer must first of all have poise; all her dealings are with people. First she has to "sell" those people, which means that she must build up a feeling of confidence in her ability, and secondly, she has to work with them when she is photographing them, and her skill in doing this helps to determine her results.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com

"Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936" shows at the Portland Museum of Art, through March 20. Design historian Victor Margolin presents "Streamlining and the American Design Aesthetic, 1925-1939" Feb. 6. Call (207) 775-6148.

Quotes from Margaret Bourke-White are excerpted from a 1934 interview on Women’s Radio Review, NBC Radio, reprinted in Stephen Bennett Phillips’ Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936 (Washington and New York, 2003).