Charles Sheeler

In 1927 Ford hired him to photograph the River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. The factory was the largest in the world, covering two thousand acres, designed to produce the new Model A from raw materials to finished car on a single site. Sheeler spent six weeks photographing it. The resulting images made smokestacks and conveyor belts look like cathedrals. They were published in magazines, exhibited in galleries, and became some of the most reproduced industrial photographs of the twentieth century.

He turned the photographs into paintings, applying the clean geometry of Cubism to American factories, grain elevators and skyscrapers. The style was called Precisionism: hard edges, flat planes, no visible brushwork, no people. The buildings are the subject. They are rendered with a clarity that makes them look more real than photographs, which was the paradox Sheeler spent his career exploring.

His close friend Morton Schamberg, a painter who shared his interest in machinery, died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. The loss pushed Sheeler further into the work. Between 1926 and 1931 he also shot celebrity portraits and fashion for Vogue and Vanity Fair, which paid better than painting and kept him in contact with a world that had nothing to do with factories.

He collaborated with Paul Strand on Manhatta, a 1921 film of New York City that is one of the earliest American avant-garde films. It runs six minutes.