Wendall MacRae

Wendell MacRae (1896-1980) was an accomplished American photographer whose long career combined commercial success with a distinctive personal artistic vision. Born in Metropolis, Illinois, MacRae held various positions early in life, including with the government, for which he traveled extensively. This early period of movement across the United States and abroad exposed him to a wide range of subjects and settings that would inform his mature photographic practice.

MacRae's work with film as a medium began about 1924, and in 1930 he opened his own photographic business. Recognition and success came quickly, and he was included in an exhibition at New York's Julien Levy Gallery, one of the most important venues for photography and Surrealist art in America during the interwar years. Being shown at Levy's gallery placed MacRae within the small but influential circle of American photographers who were bringing the medium into serious artistic conversation with contemporary painting and sculpture during the 1930s.

As a commercial photographer, MacRae's longest-running assignment, from 1934 to 1941, was as photographer for a weekly publication published by Rockefeller Center at the height of the complex's construction. This extended project gave him unparalleled access to one of the great American architectural projects of the twentieth century, and his images of the rising Rockefeller Center towers, the workers who built them, and the dramatic new spaces of midtown Manhattan remain among the defining photographic documents of that era. His approach combined the documentary discipline of a commercial photographer with the compositional sophistication of a serious artist, producing images that carry both journalistic authority and lasting aesthetic value.

MacRae's photographs are held in significant American collections, where they remain vital records of one of the most transformative periods in American urban history. He is remembered today as a skilled documentarian whose commercial work rose consistently to the level of art.