Margaret Bourke-White

Gift of the Photographer to William Hazard Knowles, 1930s

By descent through family

Lee D. Witkin, A Ten Year Salute: A Selection of Photographs in Celebration, The Witkin Gallery, 1969-1979 (Danbury, New Hampshire, 1979), p. 103 

Jonathan Silverman, For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White (New York, 1983), p. 58

Therese Mulligan and David Wooters, eds., Photography from 1839 to Today: George Eastman House, Rochester, NY (Köln, 2000), p. 588

David Stravitz, The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon, Day by Day (New York, 2002), p. X

Stephen Bennett Phillips, Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design 1927-1936 (The Phillips Collection, 2003), p. 11

Margaret Bourke-White was commissioned by the Chrysler Corporation to photograph their new, 77-story, 1,046-foot skyscraper in 1930, while it was still under construction. In her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White says of her first glimpse of the Chrysler Building gargoyles, ‘On the sixty-first floor, the workmen started building some curious structures which overhung 42^nd 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.’ (p. 78).

It was from this space on the southeast side of the Chrysler Building that Bourke-White photographed one of the two imposing gargoyles accessible to her. Fearless, Bourke-White often delighted in climbing out onto the gargoyles themselves, 800 feet above the street, to photograph the city. She affectionately named the gargoyles 'Min' and 'Bill.'