BIO
Josie Johnson

Johnson received her Ph.D. in the History of Art & Architecture from Brown University where she studied the history of photography. She has held curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Josie is currently the Capital Group Foundation Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.

PROJECT
All Eyes on Russia: Margaret Bourke-White’s Early Soviet Photographs
2019

In 1930, the young American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) traveled to the Soviet Union on her first trip abroad. Her auspicious visit occurred during a moment of improving Soviet-American relations and increased experimentation with photography as a mass medium. Despite her self-proclaimed ignorance of Russia, Bourke-White capitalized on these favorable conditions and created a suite of images that would be published and exhibited extensively, propelling her rise to stardom as America’s most famous female photojournalist of the twentieth century.

This dissertation examines the creation and afterlife of Bourke-White’s Russian photographs. I compare a set of diverse venues that displayed her work, from Bourke-White’s first book, Eyes on Russia (1931), to Soviet propaganda magazines (1930–1934), to a set of photomurals in the Soviet consulate in New York City (1934). I situate these photographs between the American traditions of Documentary photography and commercial photography, on one hand, and their supposed political and stylistic opposites of the Russian Avant-Garde and Socialist Realism on the other. This survey reveals how Bourke-White’s striving for stylistic innovation and political neutrality left her photographs open to a wide variety of interpretations as they traversed disparate ideological and aesthetic contexts into the postwar era.

The support of the Palmquist Grant enabled me to spend an additional two weeks combing through the extensive records in the Bourke-White archive at Syracuse University. The correspondence, bills, clippings, memos, photographs, and other documents in this archive provide crucial context for my study of Bourke-White’s early work in the Soviet Union.

OUTCOMES

A portion of the dissertation was presented at the March 2020 conference Future States: Modernity and National Identity in Popular Magazines, 1890–1945, hosted by the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton. The conference took place online, and is archived here: futurestates.org/*

Another section will be presented at the IFA/Frick Collection Graduate Symposium on the History of Art in October 2020. Two excerpts will be published in a forthcoming special issues of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (“Re-Reading American Photographs,” November 2020 and the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (“Word and Image on the Printed Page: Modern Periodicals, 1900–1950,” Spring 2021). Each of these presentations and publications benefitted directly from the research I was able to complete with the support of the Palmquist Grant.