Charles Sheeler
1927
Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company

Gelatin silver print
23.5 x 18.8 cm (9 1/4 x 7 3/8 in)
 
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.1)
 
© The Lane Collection
 
Curatorial description
 
A realistic painter as well as a photographer, Sheeler rarely failed to uncover harmonious coherence in the forms of indigeneous American architecture. His series of photographs of the Ford plant near Detroit was commissioned by the automobile company through an advertising agency. Widely reproduced in Europe and America in the 1920s, this commanding image of technological utopia became a monument to the transcendant power of industrial production in the early modern age.
 
For an analysis of this photograph: Juliet Hacking (ed.), 2012, Photography: The Whole Story, (Prestel), pp. 206-207
 
LL/6357