Charles Sheeler lived during a time of dramatic economic, social and political change in the United States. Primarily a painter, [[[Charles Sheeler]]] turned to photography around 1912 in order to make a living. Initially he worked on assignments from Philadelphia architects to photograph their buildings while beginning to exhibit his paintings and photographs.
In 1912, after studying at the School of Industrial Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he began to support himself as an architectural photographer. From 1910 to 1919 he spent weekends in Bucks County where his interest in the beautiful expression of function in vernacular art and architecture, particularly that of the Shakers, became a subject for both paintings and photographs.
In the 1920s, while working as a commercial photographer for Cond'e Nast, he was associated with artists who are now called Precisionists for the precise way in which they treated their themes, particularly industrial subjects.
After a solo exhibition at the Downtown Gallery in 1931, he was known primarily as a realist painter, though beginning in the 1940s he sought to capture the overview of images as seen by the moving eye in semi-abstract paintings. Sheeler's achievement was that he was both a distinguished painter and photographer and found a rationale for "machine art" between the world wars.
Sheeler was associated with a group of painters called the Precisionists, known for their realistic style of painting. Sheeler focused strongly on industrial subjects and was a distinguished photographer of machines; surprising based on the fact that the subject was rather unpopular between the wars.
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