Margaret Bourke-White

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

Early life

She grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey. 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."^* from a Web page for "Gallery M" Web site, accessed July 2, 2008

In 1922, she began studying herpetology at Columbia University, where she developed an interest in photography after studying under Clarence White. In 1925, she married Everett Chapman, but the couple divorced a year later. After switching colleges several times (University of Michigan, Purdue University in Indiana, and Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio), Margaret graduated from Cornell University 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 for 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 the first issue, dated November 23, 1936, including the cover. This cover photograph became such an iconic (see //www.hq.usace.army.mil/history/vignettes/Vignette_66.htm) 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 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Web page.//www.hq.usace.army.mil/history/vignettes/Vignette_66.htmWeb page for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Office of History, accessed July 2, 2006

During the mid-1930s, Bourke-White, like Dorothea Lange, photographed drought victims of the Dust Bowl. Bourke-White was married to novelist Erskine Caldwell from 1939 to 1942, and together they collaborated on You Have Seen Their Faces (1937).

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 Russia just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggression with the Soviet Union. 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 US army air force in North Africa, then to the US 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 a 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.'"^* "The Last Days of a Legend," by Sean Callahan on a Bullfinch Press Web site publicizing the book Margaret Bourke-White: Photographyer, by Sean Callahan; Web site accessed on July 2, 2006

In the spring of 1945, she traveled through a collapsing Germany with General George 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."^* "The Last Days of a Legend," by Sean Callahan on a Bullfinch Press Web site publicizing the book Margaret Bourke-White: Photographyer, by Sean Callahan; Web site accessed on July 2, 2006

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.^* from a Web page for "Gallery M" Web site, accessed July 2, 2008

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.^* "The Last Days of a Legend," by Sean Callahan on a Bullfinch Press Web site publicizing the book Margaret Bourke-White: Photographyer, by Sean Callahan; Web site accessed on July 2, 2006

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."^* "The Last Days of a Legend," by Sean Callahan on a Bullfinch Press Web site publicizing the book Margaret Bourke-White: Photographyer, by Sean Callahan; Web site accessed on July 2, 2006

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.^* from a Web page for "Gallery M" Web site, accessed July 2, 2008

Bourke-White was portrayed by Farrah Fawcett in a television movie 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 082031692X
North of the Danube (1939; with Erskine Caldwell) ISBN 0306708779
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 0671594346
Dear Fatherland, rest quietly (1946)
The Taste of War (selections from her writings edited by Jonathon Silverman) ISBN 0712610308
Say, Is This the USA? (Republished 1977) ISBN 0306774348
The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White ISBN 0517166038

Biographies and Collections of Margaret Bourke-White Photographs

Margaret Bourke-White: Photography of Design, 1927-1936 ISBN 0847825051
Margaret Bourke White ISBN 0810943816
Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer ISBN 0821224905
Margaret Bourke-White: Adventurous Photographer ISBN 0531124053
Power and Paper, Margaret Bourke-White: Modernity and the Documentary Mode ISBN 1881450090

References

External links

Margaret Bourke-White | Margaret Bourke-White | マーガレット・バーク＝ホワイト | Margaret Bourke-White | Margaret Bourke-White

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