Margaret Bourke-White’s study of the Chrysler Building’s stainless-steel eagle poised above the Manhattan cityscape is a perfect example of American photographic Modernism. Although she worked within the visually conservative field of editorial and magazine photography, Bourke-White incorporated avant-garde compositional strategies into her images, creating a visual style that was both functionally documentary and visually dynamic.

In 1930, Margaret Bourke-White was hired to photograph the construction of what would become one of New York City’s most elegant skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building. She was deeply inspired by the new structure and especially smitten by the massive eagle’s-head figures projecting off the building. In her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White wrote, ‘On the sixty-first floor, the workmen started building some curious structures which overhung 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue below. When I learned these were to be gargoyles à la Notre Dame, but made of stainless steel as more suitable for the twentieth century, I decided that here would be my new studio. There was no place in the world that I would accept as a substitute.’ When the building’s management initially refused to rent to a woman, Bourke-White secured a recommendation from Fortune magazine, her principal employer at the time, and opened her studio shortly thereafter. She hired John Vassos to design the deluxe interior, whose clean modern lines echoed the building’s bold and graceful exterior.

Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White’s studio in the Chrysler Building

The Chrysler Building itself was fertile subject matter for Bourke-White, with the gargoyles a focal point. In her handling, one of the building’s most distinctive features, inspired by medieval architecture, becomes a Modernist icon. This print, with its rich tonality, inked black borders and signed mount, is a distinctively early print of the image.
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- Provenance
  James Danziger Gallery, New York, 1996
- Literature
  Phillips, Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936, p. 11
  Silverman, For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White, p. 58
  Mulligan and Wooters, eds., Photography from 1839 to Today, p. 588
  Stravitz, The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon, Day by Day, p. X