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