Getty Museum
Wheels
Creator
Charles SheelerAmerican Photographer · 1883–1965
All works by this person →> My interest in photography, paralleling that in painting, has been based on admiration for its possibility of accounting for the visual world with an exactitude not equaled by any other medium. The difference in the manner of arrival at their destination--the painting being the result of a composite image and the photograph being the result of a single image--prevents these media from being comp
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1939
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Close-up, this monumental object becomes a different object. The drive wheel and rounded edges of the locomotive's condenser cylinders are barely contained within the frame, which harnesses the engine's powerful movement. With this photograph, Charles Sheeler demonstrated the camera's ability to represent the dynamism of the Machine Age. Sheeler was a Precisionist painter whose style was marked by sharply defined geometric forms and flat planes of focus. Fittingly, he took this photograph while on a commission from *Fortune* magazine to create a series of paintings entitled "Power." Like many photographers, Sheeler frequently used his camera in the same way that a painter uses a sketchbook. This photograph was eventually used as a study for a painting, but it has the strength of a fully realized image.
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