Bourke-White, Margaret. A Collection of Light Original 35mm Slides of Iconic Photographs.

Including the famous front cover of the first Issue of Life Magazine. United States, c.1960s. Eight 35mm positive transparencies in professional archival mounts (each labelled with title, date of original photograph, and institutional catalogue code “PHO 20TH C US”). Red archival stamp to each mount. In very good. Transparencies clean, colours strong, mounts uniformly labelled and stamped. Excellent for exhibition or archival research reference.

Comprising the following images (with mount titles):

Wheat Field & Smoke Stacks, Ruhr Valley, Germany (1930).
Head of North Korean Soldier (1952).
Internat. Harvester (1933).
First Cover of LIFE Magazine – Fort Peck Dam, Montana (1936).
Gold Miners, South Africa (1950).
Fabric/Spindle Machinery – Otis Steel / Industrial Study (c.1930).
Louisville Flood Victims – WPA Project (1937).
Abstract Textile / Conveyor Blades – International Harvester (1933).

These mounted slides consistent typography, accession coding and red collection stamp indicate that these originated from a formal visual-arts slide library, likely used for lectures on documentary photography, industrial modernism, and the Life magazine school.

They reproduce some of Bourke-White’s most important works, including her celebrated Fort Peck Dam cover—the very first issue of LIFE magazine (23 November 1936)—as well as key documentary images from the Ruhr industrial complexes, the American Midwest, and the Korean War. Collectively they illustrate the range of her practice: industrial abstraction, documentary humanism, New Deal America, and global reportage.

Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) was one of the great visual chroniclers of the 20th century: the first female war correspondent in combat zones, the first accredited female photographer with the U.S. Army Air Forces, and among the earliest practitioners of industrial and architectural photography whose modernist aesthetic transformed corporate and editorial imagery. Her collaborations with Fortune and Life made her one of the most widely reproduced photographers of her time. Study slides of her work—particularly institutional originals such as these—are now collectible artefacts in their own right, documenting mid-century pedagogical and curatorial practices.

These eight slides offer a cross-section of Bourke-White’s shifting concerns: from the monumental industrial romanticism of the 1930s (grain elevators, mills, steel works) to the moral reportage of the FSA era (Louisville Flood) and the geopolitical tensions of the 1950s (Korea; South African labour). Such a set reflects how art-historical teaching institutions constructed the canon of American documentary photography. The selection is significant in that it juxtaposes her formal, machine-age compositions—where pattern, scale and metallic geometry dominate—with deeply humanist images of displacement, labour and war. Surviving teaching-slide collections of this quality are increasingly scarce as universities deaccession analogue materials.

[WR]