Margaret Bourke-White
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free encyclopedia)
Margaret
Bourke-White (1904 – 1971) was an American photographer and
photojournalist.
Bourke-White was born in the Bronx, New York, to Joseph White (who came
from an Orthodox Jewish family) and Minnie Bourke, the daughter of an
Irish ship's carpenter and an English cook; she was a Protestant. She grew
up in Bound Brook, New Jersey (in a neighborhood now part of Middlesex),
but graduated from Plainfield High School. Her father was a naturalist,
engineer and inventor. His work improved the four-color printing process
that is used for books and magazines. Her mother, Minnie Bourke, was a
"resourceful homemaker." Margaret learned from her father perfection, from
her mother, the unabashed desire for self-improvement." Margaret's success
was not a family fluke. Her older sister, Ruth White, was well known for
her work at the American Bar Association in Chicago, Ill., and her younger
brother Roger Bourke White became a prominent Cleveland businessman and
high-tech industry founder.
In 1922, she began studying herpetology at Columbia University, where she
developed an interest in photography after studying under Clarence White
(no relation). In 1925, she married Everett Chapman, but the couple
divorced two years later. After switching colleges several times
(University of Michigan, where she became a member of Alpha Omicron Pi
sorority; Purdue University in Indiana, and Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio), Bourke-White enrolled at Cornell University, lived in
Risley Hall, and graduated in 1927. A year later, she moved to Cleveland,
Ohio, where she started a commercial photography studio and did
architectural and industrial photography. One of her clients was Otis
Steel Company.
Margaret's success was due to both her people skills and her technical
skills. Her experience at Otis is a good example. As she explains in
Portrait of Myself, the Otis security people were reluctant to let her
shoot for many reasons: First, steel making was a defense industry, so
they wanted to be sure national security was not affected. Second, she was
a woman and in those days people wondered if a woman and her delicate
cameras could stand up to the intense heat, hazard, and generally dirty
and gritty conditions inside a steel mill. When she got permission, the
technical problems began. Black and white film in that era was sensitive
to blue light, not the reds and oranges of hot steel -- she could see the
beauty, but the pictures were coming out all black. She solved this
problem by bringing along a new style of magnesium flare (which produces
white light) and having assistants hold them to light her scenes. The
result of her being able to work well with both people and technology
resulted in some of the best steel factory pictures of that era, and these
pictures earned her national attention.
In 1929, she accepted a job as associate editor of Fortune magazine. In
1930, she became the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet
Union. She was hired by Henry Luce as the first female photojournalist for
Life magazine.
Her photographs of the construction of the Fort Peck Dam were featured in
Life's first issue, dated November 23, 1936, including the cover. This
cover photograph became such an iconic image that it was featured as the
1930s representative to the United States Postal Service's Celebrate the
Century series of commemorative postage stamps. "Although Bourke-White
titled the photo, 'New Deal, Montana: Fort Peck Dam,' it is actually a
photo of the spillway located three miles east of the dam," according to a
United States Army Corps of Engineers Web page.
During the mid-1930s, Bourke-White, like Dorothea Lange, photographed
drought victims of the Dust Bowl. Bourke-White and novelist Erskine
Caldwell were married from 1939 to 1942, and together they collaborated on
You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a book about conditions in the South
during the Great Depression.
She also traveled to Europe to record how Germany, Austria and
Czechoslovakia were faring under Nazism and how Russia was faring under
Communism. While in Russia, she photographed a rare "smiling Stalin" while
in Moscow, and Stalin's grandmother when visiting Georgia. Bourke-White
was the first female war correspondent and the first woman to be allowed
to work in combat zones during World War II. In 1941, she traveled to the
Soviet Union just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggression. She was the
only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. Taking
refuge in the U.S. Embassy, she then captured the ensuing firestorms on
camera.
As the war progressed, she was attached to the U.S. army air force in
North Africa, then to the U.S. Army in Italy and later Germany. She
repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting.
"The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the
Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled
out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life
staff as 'Maggie the Indestructible.'" This incident in the Mediterranean
refers to the sinking of the England-Africa bound British troopship SS
Strathallan which she recorded in an article "Women in Lifeboats", in
Life, February 22, 1943.
In the spring of 1945, she traveled through a collapsing Germany with
General George S. Patton. In this period, she arrived at Buchenwald, the
notorious concentration camp. She is quoted as saying, "Using a camera was
almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the
horror in front of me." After the war, she produced a book entitled Dear
Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the
brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.
"To many who got in the way of a Bourke-White photograph — and that
included not just bureaucrats and functionaries but professional
colleagues like assistants, reporters, and other photographers — she was
regarded as imperious, calculating, and insensitive."
She had a knack for being at the right place at the right time: She
interviewed and photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just few hours before his
assassination. Eisenstaedt, her friend and colleague, said one of her
strengths was that there was no assignment and no picture that was
unimportant to her. She also started the first photo lab at Life.Bourke-White
is known equally well in both India and Pakistan for her photographs of
Gandhi at his spinning wheel and Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah,
upright in a chair.
The photojournalist also was "one of the most effective chroniclers" of
the violence that erupted at the independence and partition of India and
Pakistan, according to Somini Sengupta, the writer of an arts section of
the New York Times. Sengupta called Bourke-White's photographs of the
episode "gut-wrenching, and staring at them, you glimpse the
photographer's undaunted desire to stare down horror." The photographer
recorded streets littered with corpses, dead victims with open eyes,
refugees with vacant eyes. "Bourke-White's photographs seem to scream on
the page," Sengupta wrote. The pictures were taken just two years after
Bourke-White photographed the newly captured Buchenwald.
Sixty-six of Bourke-White's photographs of the partition violence were
included in a 2006 reissue of Khushwant Singh's 1956 novel about the
disruption, Train to Pakistan. In connection with the reissue, many of the
photographs in the book were displayed at "the posh shopping center Khan
Market" in Delhi, India. "More astonishing than the images blown up large
as life was the number of shoppers who seemed not to register them,"
Sengupta wrote. No memorial to the partition victims exists in India,
according to Pramod Kapoor, head of Roli, the Indian publishing house
coming out with the new book.Margaret also recorded the Korean War. There,
rather than spend time at the front, she concentrated on the Chiri
Mountain area in the south of Korea. She spent her time there because
there was a behind-the-lines guerrilla war being fought in the area, and
the human drama of the conflict was more evident.
During the 1950s, Bourke-White was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. She
had just turned 50 when she had to slow her career to fight off the
disease, initially with physical therapy, then with brain surgery in 1959
and 1961.
She wrote her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, which was published in
1963 and became a best seller, but she grew increasingly infirm and
increasingly became more isolated in her home in Darien, Connecticut. Her
living room there "was wallpapered in one huge, floor-to-ceiling,
perfectly-stitched-together black-and-white photograph of an evergreen
forest that she had shot in Czechoslovakia in 1938." A pension plan set up
in the 1950s "though generous for that time" no longer covered her
health-care costs. She also suffered financially from her personal
generosity and "less-than-responsible attendant care."
She died in Connecticut, aged 67.
