Fort Peck Dam (1936) – Margaret Bourke-White

It’s quite hard to take a creative shot of a dam that is front-page worthy, but Margaret Bourke-White impressively did so. After she was tasked to cover the Fort Peck Dam construction in Montana for Life, she produced this magnificent photo that showed the scale of humans and this massive project.

Bourke-White did it artistically by illustrating how the castle-like structure could make humans feel so small. Then dubbed as the world’s largest dam, the construction was completed in six years and gave employment to 50,000 people. However, it also reportedly claimed the lives of 60 workers, some of whom were victims of the 1938 landslide.