Margaret Bourke-White

File:Margaret Bourke-White.jpg

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971)

File:Stamp-ctc-life-magazine.jpg

USPS stamp depicting LIFE magazine cover bearing Fort Peck Dam photograph

Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American photographer and photojournalist.

Early life

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, her mother, Minnie Bourke, a "resourceful homemaker." She learned from her father perfection; from her mother, the unabashed desire for self-improvement."

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 a year 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 became an industrial photographer at the Otis Steel Company.

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.

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 (see [9]) 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.

World War II and after

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.'"

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.

Recording the India-Pakistan partition violence

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 Kushwant 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.

Later years

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.

Museums and movie houses

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.

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.

Some Books by Margaret Bourke-White

• 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: Photography of Design, 1927-1936 ISBN 0-8478-2505-1
• 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

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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