Machinery at Boulder Dam

In the early 1930s, engineer and photographer Ben Glaha was hired to document the building of the Hoover Dam (formerly known as Boulder Dam), which upon its completion in 1936 was the highest dam in the world (726 feet). As the project’s official photographer, Glaha recorded every stage of the construction, producing a vast body of photographs and motion-picture footage. Glaha, an admirer of the American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, was fascinated with the beauty of functional forms. This image, which emphasizes a radiant light sparkling off the shiny, new metallic surfaces of the dam’s machinery, epitomizes Glaha’s modernist celebration of the geometric perfection of industrial forms.