Coffee Through The Camera's Lens Margaret Bourke-White Gerry Badger's Choice of Company Photobooks Photography

Coffee Through The Camera's Lens. A Project on Brazil. Photographs by Margaret Bourke-White. Home Economics Department. American Can Company, New York, 1936. 12 reproductions with captions on loose plates (3 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.) plus additional sheets of the same size with map of Brazil, and classroom assignments on the history and production of coffee. Printed card folio with pocket holding contents. 

"Are you studying about Brazil? Then make a COFFEE-PROJECT book because COFFEE is the principal crop of Brazil..."--from the inside copy

Published at the height of the Depression, these images of heroic workers doing it the old way are here put to overtly didactic use as part of a social studies lesson on the history and production of coffee in Brazil. 

A scarce Depression era document. 

For Parr and Badger, Coffee Through The Camera's Lens illustrates the Bourke-White 'conundrum': the photographer of hard-hitting social documentary such as You Have Seen Their Faces who earned far more most women in the country for doing high paying commercial and industrial work.

Open publication - Free publishing - More life magazine

Open publication - Free publishing - More photography

In April 1936, Margaret Bourke-White was sent on a two-month assignment to Brazil to photograph coffee growers and manufacturers for American Can Company. These pictures were shot just before the publication of YOU HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES, and share a common intimacy with the book's images of American tenant farmers in the South. The subject of the present photograph, however, is surprisingly agreeable. Instead of concentrating on harsh labor conditions, this picture of a Brazilian girl expresses determination, strength and beauty. Photographed from below, the wide-brimmed hat forms a halo around the girl's head, lending her an angelic appearance.