Keith de Lellis Gallery is pleased to present a multi-artist exhibition of American industrial photographs from the first half of the 20th century. The exhibition will open on February 25 and run through April 23rd.

Beginning in the 1920s, industry—and all that it stood for—captivated American photographers. Heroic images of workers and machinery embodied the ethos of a nation transformed. Productivity equalled prosperity and photographers made pictures for both personal artistic expression and advertising, and for the glossy pages of magazines like Fortune and Life. No medium could better record the art of industry than the photograph—its very creation a product of man and machine.

The 1920s and 30s marked the pinnacle of the machine age in America. Pictures of smoke and steam, silhouetted by humble hard-working laborers, made for images that were both romantic and dramatic. The new vision with its jazzy compositions, along with cool, clean and precise abstractions, pulsed toward a new modernist aesthetic.

Factory automation, modern transportation and the assembly line were all factors that fuelled the growth of America as an industrial society. In the world of photography, advertising and industry was a rapidly expanding career option. Photographers were inspired by numerous exhibitions that presented commercial photography as an art form. The first industrial salon of photography, held in Detroit in 1933, plus Margaret Bourke-White’s success and notoriety as a photographer of industry, stimulated a new generation of photographers.

The Industrial landscape, with its interplay of geometric architectural shapes, is a recurring theme in photography from the mid-1920s through the 1940s. In 1925, a Baltimore photographer, Holmes Mettee, made soft-focus otherworldly landscapes out of a bustling industrial site. Harold Corsini and Russell Lee’s later images of a Humble Oil Refinery in Baytown, Texas were taken in 1944 and 1949 respectively. These images, made for Standard Oil, depict gleaming silver tanks as barren, cold and modern architectural structures like something out of science fiction. Both earlier and later works are a study in contrasts, and each is emblematic of the period in which it was produced.

Factories and their inner secrets attracted photographers eager to reveal their hidden mysteries. In the late 1920s, the glory of Cleveland’s Otis Steel mill is evident in Margaret Bourke-White’s monumental study of glowing molten steel being poured from huge iron cauldrons. Harold Costain’s remarkable image of sugar sacks piled as high as the pyramids is from his 1935 series taken at the Jack Frost Sugar plant in Long Island City.

Still lifes of factory-produced goods along with details of machinery mimicked the clean lines and abstract form of modern sculpture. Margaret Bourke-White used a mirror distortion to create an exciting abstraction of large metal bolts for the Birdsall & Ward Nut & Bolt Company in 1929. Edward Quigley, a Philadelphia photographer, made a simple and elegant study of files for the Henry Disston Tool Company in the late 1930s. Charles Carbonaro’s 1940 photographs of a milk bottling plant transformed machinery into abstract and geometric forms; its shiny metallic surfaces turned into rhythmic patterns.

This group exhibition features the work of the following photographers: Ralph Bartholomew, Margaret Bourke-White, Charles Carbonaro, Harold Corsini, Harold Haliday Costain, Gordon Coster, Russell Lee, Sol Libsohn, Herbert Matter, Holmes Mettee, John Muller, Edward Quigley, Edwin Rosskam and Charles Rotkin.

As photography replaced illustration in magazine editorials and in advertising, the photograph was the logical choice as the art form best suited to document dynamically and artfully the industrial revolution as it progressed toward the age of modernity.