Congratulations to Josie Johnson!

Johnson received a PN Project Grant in 2021 and used the funds to complete and publish the article: Pictures for the Taking: Margaret Bourke-White’s Soviet Photographs in Magazines.

Abstract

Between 1930 and 1932, the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White made three separate trips to the Soviet Union, where she created a suite of images that would be published and exhibited extensively over the following decade. This article considers the spread of these photographs in magazines. A close analysis of Bourke-White’s photographs in each issue reveals that editors tended to favor images with marked aesthetic interest over those with overt political meanings. This preference explains how her photographs so fluidly traversed disparate ideological and aesthetic contexts where they were used to support a wide variety of interpretations regarding the Soviet state.

Margaret Bourke-White, Untitled, 1930, from The Working Woman, November 1934, cover. © 2021 Estate of Margaret Bourke-White; image courtesy of the University of Michigan Library (Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Research Center)