The Hands of Fortune: Margaret Bourke-White’s Magazine Photographs of Manual Work in the Early Years of the Depression

In 1931, Fortune published an article entitled ‘American Workingman’, a survey of labor in the midst worsening Depression, with emblematic composite image hands at work to indicate manual character and diverse jobs industrial work. The picture conveys polysemy as synecdoche labor, witnesses prevalence close-up depictions other features on specific industries, from which these fragments derived. This explores implications Fortune’s representation ‘hands labor’ time escalating conflict, defined by redundancies, strikes, protests. If was self-styled ‘super-class’ publication for corporate elite, conceived ‘heads’ industry, then what extent do othered operate ideologically represent labor’s compliance crisis? abstracted were ubiquitous modernist photography, Bourke-White’s images also equated putative subgenre Communist iconography, hand, or fist, connoted proletarian solidarity strength. Yet leftist militant agitation provoked antipathy Fortune, so I examine magazine more broadly relations intensified 1930s. consider further automatic allude narrative ‘technological displacement’, workerless factories, response strikes.