Margaret Bourke-White

File:Margaret Bourke-White.jpg

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971)

Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American photographer and photojournalist most famed for her photoessays taken while traversing the globe for Life Magazine. In addition to being the first female photographer to work on a major magazine, during the "Golden Age of Photojournalism", she accomplished other "firsts" as well. She was the first woman accredited as a war photographer and the first woman to fly on a bombing mission (World War II). During her long and diverse career she covered landmark events of the twentieth century and brought to the world's attention important issues from poverty in the American South to the horror of Nazi concentration camps.

She was known for her sharp instincts and her willingness to get the story under any circumstances whether that required sitting atop a gargoyle on the Chrysler Building in New York City or waiting at the feet of Mahatma Gandhi to take one of her most memorable pictures. Some of her most important works included recording the birth of new nations (Pakistan) and the death of dictatorships (Josef Stalin).

Early life and career

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. Her father was a naturalist, engineer and inventor, her mother, Minnie Bourke, a "resourceful homemaker."

In 1922, she began studying herpetology at Columbia University, where she developed an interest in photography after studying under Clarence Hudson White. In 1925, she married Everett Chapman, but the couple divorced a year later. After switching colleges several times (University of Michigan, Purdue University, Indiana, and Western Reserve University, Ohio), Bourke-White enrolled at Cornell University, and graduated in 1927. A year later, she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she became an industrial photographer at the Otis Steel Company.

Life and Fortune - career in photojournalism

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.

File:Stamp-ctc-life-magazine.jpg

USPS stamp depicting LIFE magazine cover bearing Fort Peck Dam photograph

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.[3]

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.

World War II and death camps

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.

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. 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.

Recording history in the making

India-Pakistan partition violence - 1946

In 1946 Life sent Bourke-White to India to cover the emergence of that country's independence from Great Britain. Her photo-essay, The Caste System, shows children, working under dire conditions as cheap labor, most vulnerable to its discriminatory practices. She also photographed the Great Migration of refugees forced to leave their homes after the partitioning off of Pakistan had created new borders. Bourke-White photographed Gandhi just hours before he was assassinated and said of that incident, "Nothing in all my life has affected me more deeply and the memory will never leave me." Her picture of Gandhi, clothed simply and observing a day of silence by his spinning wheel has become an iconic image.

In the same year she photographed Pakistan's founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Bourke-White's work had taken her into the seat of some of the worst violence that part of the world has witnessed. Riots in Calcutta had left rotting corpses in the street. As a way to digest the horror she witnessed Bourke-White again produced a book, this one called, Halfway to Freedom. Biographers and art critics have said that some of her most beautiful and dramatic work is from that period.

South Africa

In 1949 she went to South Africa to photograph the difficult working situation of black miners in Johannesburg. (Bourke-White herself became ill when descending the mine and had to be brought back up.) She also photographed the children of shantytowns and compiled a photo-essay called, South Africa and Its Problem. The picture of two black African gold miners on the cover, known only by their numbers (like prisoners they were not allowed to use their names) became one of Bourke-White's favorites.

South Korea

In 1952 Bourke-White went to the Korea as a war correspondent to cover the fighting between the South Korean Nationalists and the North Korean Communists. It was there that she took a picture of Nim, Churl Jin, a South Korean defecting from the communist guerillas he had once had allegiance to as a runaway teenager. His tearful reunion with his mother also brought tears to Bourke-White who considered this picture one of the most important of her career. It was while in Korea that Bourke-White began feeling the symptoms of her yet undiagnosed illness.

David, I can't believe Korea is not on EP? E

End of Life

"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.'"

"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: 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.[4]

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." .

She died in Connecticut, age 67.

Legacy

Her photographs are in the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as in the collection of the Library of Congress. In the 2006 re-edition of Kushwant Singh's 1956 novel about the Indian-Pakistan partition violence, Train to Pakistan sixty-six of Bourke-White's photographs were included.

Filmology

Bourke-White was portrayed by Farrah Fawcett in the television movie, Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White and by Candice Bergen in the 1982 film Gandhi.

Author's Works

• You Have Seen Their Faces (1937; with Erskine Caldwell) ISBN 0-8203-1692-X
• North of the Danube (1939; with Erskine Caldwell) ISBN 0-306-70877-9
• Shooting the Russian War (1942)
• They Called it "Purple Heart Valley" (1944)
• Halfway to Freedom; a report on the new India (1949)
• Portrait of Myself (1963) ISBN 0-671-59434-6
• Dear Fatherland, rest quietly (1946)
• The Taste of War (selections from her writings edited by Jonathon Silverman) ISBN 0-7126-1030-8
• Say, Is This the USA? (Republished 1977) ISBN 0-306-77434-8
• The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White ISBN 0-517-16603-8

Biographies and Collections of Margaret Bourke-White Photographs

• Margaret Bourke White ISBN 0-8109-4381-6
• Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer ISBN 0-8212-2490-5
• Margaret Bourke-White: Adventurous Photographer ISBN 0-531-12405-3
• Power and Paper, Margaret Bourke-White: Modernity and the Documentary Mode ISBN 1-881450-09-0
• Margaret Bourke White: A Biography by Vickie Goldberg (Harper & Row: 1986) ISBN 0-06-015513-2

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Goldberg, Vickie, Margaret Bourke White: A Biography, Harper & Row (1986) ISBN 0-06-015513-2
• Phillips, Stephen Bennett,Margaret Bourke-White: Photography of Design, 1927-1936 (2003)ISBN 0-8478-2505-1
• Rubin, Susan Goldman, Margaret Bourke-White: Her Pictures Were Her Life, Harry N. Abrams (1999) ISBN 0-8109-4381-6
• "Margaret Bourke-White," Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 9:1971-1975 Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
• The New Encyclopedia Britannica, "Bourke-White Margaret." Volume 2, 2002.

External links

• "Margaret Bourke-White", Women in History, Retrieved March 30, 2007.
• "Margaret Bourke-White", Distinguished Women of Past and Present, Retrieved March 30, 2007.
• "Margaret Bourke-White Photographs",Gallery M, Retrieved March 30, 2007.
• "Margaret Bourke-White", Masters of Photography, Retrieved March 30, 2007.

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