Margaret Bourke-White | |
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 Bourke-White in 1955 | |
| Born | Margaret White June 14, 1904 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | August 27, 1971(1971-08-27) (aged 67) Stamford, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Columbia University University of Michigan Purdue University Western Reserve University Cornell University |
| Occupations | Photographer,photojournalist |
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Margaret Bourke-White (/ˈbɜːrk/; June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an Americandocumentary photographer andphotojournalist.[1] She was known as an architectural and commercial photographer for the first half of her career, representing corporate clients and highlighting the success of industrial capitalism with black and white images of steel factories and skyscrapers. In 1930, she became the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of theSoviet Union.[2] In 1933, NBC commissioned her to create a monumental photo mural about radio for its rotunda at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, then considered the largest photo mural in the world. The success of her corporate commissions led her to work atFortune magazine in the 1930s. She took the photograph of the construction ofFort Peck Dam that became the cover of the first issue ofLife magazine.[3][4][5]
The second half of her career represents her transition from corporate photography to photojournalism, beginning with her work during theGreat Depression documenting the people of theDust Bowl. Her collaboration with novelistErskine Caldwell inYou Have Seen Their Faces (1937) resulted in seventy-five photos depicting the lives of poor, rural sharecroppers, and was both a commercial success and one of several major documentary works at the time to bring attention to the needs of theSouthern United States. She was the first American female war photojournalist,[citation needed] photographed the Nazioccupation of Czechoslovakia, and was with Patton's Third Army in the spring of 1945 when she famously documented the liberation of theBuchenwald concentration camp. In 1949, she was one of the first Americans to bring attention to the injustices of the South Africanapartheid regime with her unique photographs, and covered theKorean War forLife magazine in the early 1950s.
Margaret Bourke-White,[6] bornMargaret White[7] inthe Bronx, New York,[8] was the daughter of Joseph White, a non-practicingJew whose father came fromPoland, and Minnie Bourke, who was of IrishCatholic descent.[9] She partially grew up in theJoseph and Minnie White House inMiddlesex, New Jersey, and graduated fromPlainfield High School inUnion County.[8][10] From her naturalist father, an engineer and inventor, she claimed to have learned perfectionism; from her "resourceful homemaker" mother, she claimed to have developed “an unapologetic desire for self-improvement."[11] Her younger brother,Roger Bourke White, became a prominent Cleveland businessman and high-tech industry founder, and her older sister, Ruth White, became well known for her work at theAmerican Bar Association in Chicago,Ill.[9] Roger Bourke White described their parents as "Free thinkers who were intensely interested in advancing themselves and humanity through personal achievement", attributing the success of their children in part to this quality. He was not surprised at his sister Margaret's success, saying "[she] was not unfriendly or aloof".
Margaret's interest in photography began as a hobby in her youth, supported by her father's enthusiasm for cameras. Despite her interest, in 1922, she began studyingherpetology atColumbia University, only to have her interest in photography strengthened after studying underClarence White (no relation).[8] She left after one semester, following the death of her father.[7]
She transferred colleges several times, attending theUniversity of Michigan (where she was a photographer at theMichiganensian and became a member ofAlpha Omicron Pi sorority),[12][13]Purdue University inIndiana, andWestern Reserve University inCleveland, Ohio.[7] Bourke-White ultimately graduated fromCornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1927, leaving behind a photographic study of the rural campus for the school's newspaper, including photographs of her famed dormitory,Risley Hall.[7][8][14] A year later, she moved fromIthaca, New York, toCleveland, Ohio, where she started a commercial photography studio and began concentrating on architectural and industrial photography.
One of Bourke-White's clients was Otis Steel Company. Her success was due to her skills with both people and her technique. Her experience at Otis is a good example. As she explains inPortrait of Myself, the Otis security people were reluctant to let her shoot for many reasons. Firstly, steel making was a defense industry, so they wanted to be sure national security was not endangered. 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 finally got permission, technical problems began.Black-and-white film in that era was sensitive to blue light, not the reds and oranges of hot steel (In the words of her collaborator, the ambient red-orange light had no"actinic value"), so she could see the beauty, but the photographs were coming out all black.
My singing stopped when I saw the films. I could scarcelyrecognize anything on them. Nothing but a half-dollar-sized diskmarking the spot where the molten metal had churned up in theladle. The glory had withered.
I couldn't understand it. "We're woefully underexposed," saidMr. Bemis. "Very woefully underexposed. That red light fromthe molten metal looks as though it's illuminating the wholeplace. But it's all heat and no light. No actinic value."
She solved this problem by bringing along a new style ofmagnesiumflare, which produces white light, and having assistants hold the flares to light her scenes. Her abilities resulted in some of the best steel-factory photographs of that era, which earned her national attention.
"To me... industrial forms were all the more beautiful because they were never designed to be beautiful. They had a simplicity of line that came from their direct application of purpose. Industry... had evolved an unconscious beauty – often a hidden beauty that was waiting to be discovered"[15]
In 1930, Bourke-White was hired to photograph the construction of what would become one of New York City's most elegant skyscrapers, theChrysler Building. She was deeply inspired by the new structure and especially smitten by the massive eagle's-head figures projecting off the building. In her autobiography,Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White wrote, ‘On the sixty-first floor, the workmen started building some curious structures which overhung 42nd Street andLexington Avenue below. When I learned these were to be gargoyles à laNotre Dame, but made of stainless steel as more suitable for the twentieth century, I decided that here would be my new studio. There was no place in the world that I would accept as a substitute.’
When the building's management initially refused to rent to a woman Bourke-White secured a recommendation fromFortune magazine, her principal employer at the time, and opened her studio shortly thereafter. She hiredJohn Vassos to design the deluxe interior, whose clean modern lines echoed the building's bold and graceful exterior. The Chrysler Building itself became the subject matter for Bourke-White, with the gargoyles a focal point (see).[16]
In the summer of 1929 Bourke-White accepted a job as associate editor and staff photographer for the new business-themed magazineHenry Luce was starting in the fall,Fortune magazine - a position she held until 1935.
In 1930 she became the first Western photographer allowed to enter the Soviet Union.[7]
When Luce began his third magazine, the oversized, photograph-centeredLife magazine, in 1936, he hired her as its first female photojournalist.[7] Her photographs of the construction of theFort Peck Dam featured inLife's first issue, dated November 23, 1936, including the cover.[17] Though 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 aUnited States Army Corps of Engineers webpage.[18] This cover photograph became such a favorite that it was the 1930s' representative in theUnited States Postal Service'sCelebrate the Century series of commemorative postage stamps.
She held the title of staff photographer atLIFE until 1940, but returned from 1941 to 1942,[7] and again in 1945, after which she stayed through her semi-retirement in 1957 (which ended her photography for the magazine)[5] and her full retirement in 1969.[7]
In 1934, Bourke-White, likeDorothea Lange, photographed drought victims of theDust Bowl forFortune. She captured a famous photograph of black Louisville, Kentucky, residents displaced by theOhio River flood of 1937 for the February 15, 1937, issue ofLife magazine. CalledAt the Time of the Louisville Flood, the photograph shows black refugees waiting in line for disaster relief in front of a large billboard that declares, "World's Highest Standard of Living" featuring a white family driving a car. The photograph later would become the basis for the artwork ofCurtis Mayfield's 1975 album,There's No Place Like America Today.[19]
Bourke-White met the bestselling novelistErskine Caldwell in the mid-thirties. Caldwell specialized in writing about poor communities in the rural south, and he invited her to collaborate on a photojournalist expedition through the south, which produced the bookYou Have Seen Their Faces (1937).
They collaborated on two more booksNorth of the Danube (1939) a travelogue aboutCzechoslovakia under the specter of Nazi occupation andSay, Is This the U.S.A. (1941) about industrialization in the United States.[20]She lived with Caldwell for several years before they married in 1939.
They traveled to Europe to record how Germany,Austria, andCzechoslovakia were faring under Nazism.
Bourke-White was "the first Western professional photographer permitted into the Soviet Union".[21] She travelled there in consecutive summers from 1930 to 1932 to document the firstFive-Year Plan. While in the USSR, she photographedJoseph Stalin, as well as making portraits of Stalin's mother and great-aunt when visitingGeorgia. She also took portraits of other famous people in the Soviet Union, such asKarl Radek,Sergei Eisenstein, andHugh Cooper. She noted that the trips and work there required a lot of patience, and generally had mixed, yet positive impressions of the USSR. Her photographs were first published inFortune magazine in 1931 under the titleEyes on Russia,[22] and then as a book with the same name bySimon and Schuster.[23] These photos additionally became "a six-part series inThe New York Times (1932), a deluxe photo portfolio (1934), and a set of photomurals for the Soviet consulate in New York (1934). Still other photographs circulated in exhibitions, books, and periodicals around the globe, especially in Soviet magazines and postcards of the early 1930s."[24]
Bourke-White returned to the Soviet Union in 1941 during the Second World War.[24] With five cameras, 22 lenses, four developing tanks and 3,000 flashbulbs, her luggage weighed in total 600 pounds.[25] The resulting body of work was published in a book titledShooting the Russian War in 1942.[26]
Bourke-White was the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones duringWorld War II. In 1941 she traveled to theSoviet Union just as Germanybroke its pact of non-aggression. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. Taking refuge in theU.S. Embassy, she then captured the ensuing firestorms on camera.
As the war progressed, she was attached to theU.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) in North Africa, then to the U.S. Army in Italy and later in Germany. She repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting. On January 22, 1943, Major Rudolph Emil Flack piloted the lead aircraft with Margaret Bourke-White (the first female photographer/writer to fly on a combat mission) aboard his 414th Bombardment Squadron B-17F and bombed the El Aouina Airdrome in Tunis, Tunisia.[27]
"The woman who had been torpedoed in theMediterranean, strafed by theLuftwaffe, stranded on anArctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of theChesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to theLife staff as 'Maggie the Indestructible.'"[5] The incident in the Mediterranean refers to the sinking of the England-Africa bound British troopship SSStrathallan that she recorded in an article, "Women in Lifeboats", inLife, February 22, 1943. Though disliked by GeneralDwight D Eisenhower, she became friendly with his chauffeur/secretary, IrishwomanKay Summersby, with whom she shared the lifeboat.[citation needed]
In the spring of 1945 she traveled throughout a collapsing Germany withGen.George S. Patton. She arrived atBuchenwald, the notoriousconcentration camp, and later said, "Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me."[28][29]
After the war, she produced a book entitledDear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.[citation needed]
The editor of a collection of Bourke-White's photographs wrote: "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."[5]
Bourke-White is known equally well in bothIndia andPakistan for her photographs ofDr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar at his home Rajgriha, Dadar in Mumbai on the occasion of a third impression of his book which was published in December 1940 asThoughts on Pakistan (the book was republished in 1946 under the titleIndia's Political What's What: Pakistan or Partition of India). These photographs were published on theLife magazine cover. She also photographedM. K. Gandhi (at his spinning wheel) and Pakistan's founder,Mohammed Ali Jinnah (upright in a chair).[30][31]
She was "one of the most effective chroniclers" of the violence that erupted at the 1947 independence andpartition of India and Pakistan, according toSomini Sengupta, who calls her photographs of the episode "gut-wrenching, and staring at them, you glimpse the photographer's undaunted desire to stare down horror". She recorded streets littered with corpses, dead victims with open eyes, and refugees with vacant eyes. "Bourke-White's photographs seem to scream on the page", Sengupta wrote.[30]
Sixty-six of Bourke-White's photographs of the partition violence featured in a 2006 reissue ofKhushwant 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 centerKhan Market" inDelhi, 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.[30]
She had a knack for being at the right place at the right time: she interviewed and photographedMohandas K. Gandhi just a few hours before his assassination in 1948.[32]Alfred 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 photography laboratory atLife magazine.[11]
Bourke-White served as a photographer forLife duringKorean War of 1950–1953.[33]
In 1953, Bourke-White developed her first symptoms ofParkinson's disease.[7] She was forced to slow her career to fight encroaching paralysis.[5] In 1959 and 1961 she underwent several operations to treat her condition,[7] which effectively ended her tremors but affected her speech.[5] Bourke-White wrote an autobiography,Portrait of Myself, which was published in 1963 and became a bestseller, but she grew increasingly infirm and isolated in her home inDarien, Connecticut. 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 from "less-than-responsible attendant care".[5]
In 1924, during her studies, she married Everett Chapman, but the couple divorced two years later.[11] Margaret White added her mother's surname, "Bourke", to her name in 1927 and hyphenated it. Bourke-White and novelistErskine Caldwell were married from 1939 to their divorce in 1942.[7]
The FBI, underJ. Edgar Hoover's direction, closely monitored Bourke-White for years, considering her a suspicious individual. Agents read her mail, accessed her personnel files at work, searched her luggage during travel, and relied on informants to keep an active file on her. Despite these efforts, customs officials reported finding "no incriminating evidence", and no intelligence indicated she was ever "active on behalf of the Communist Party". Nevertheless, Hoover labeled Bourke-White and her husband at the time, Erskine Caldwell, as dangerous and placed them in a category for potential internment and incarceration in case any future national emergency arose.[34] In her 1986 biography of Bourke-White, American art historianVicki Goldberg revealed that in her private notes, Bourke-White never identified as a communist: "I don't belong toStandard Brands. I'm not a reformed C'st. I don't stand so high, being I never was a C'st at all."[35]
Right wing populist journalistWestbrook Pegler beganred-baiting Bourke-White in late 1951, noting that she was frequently cited by theHouse Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for having indirect ties to left-leaning groups associated with the Communist Party. Pegler stopped just short of saying Bourke-White was a communist, but frequently alluded to it in his work. Pegler also used the attacks on Bourke-White to go afterTime, whose publisherHenry Luce was Bourke-White's employer. Bourke-White maintained that Pegler's personal attacks were partly due to theHearst media conglomerate, who were going after Luce sinceTime had run an article noting thatWilliam Randolph Hearst and his mistress had found Pegler "boring and annoying." To respond to Pegler's attacks on her character, Bourke-White went on a lecture tour. HUAC never requested her input but she voluntarily wrote and submitted a statement to the committee anyway, explaining her sincere "belief in democracy and her opposition to dictatorship of the left or of the right."[35]
In 1971, Bourke-White died atStamford Hospital inStamford, Connecticut, aged 67, from Parkinson's disease.[6][7][36]
Photographs by Bourke-White are in theBrooklyn Museum, theCleveland Museum of Art, theNew Mexico Museum of Art[37] and theMuseum of Modern Art in New York, as well as in the collection of theLibrary of Congress.[11] A 160-foot-long photomural she created forNBC in 1933, for the Rotunda in the broadcaster'sRockefeller Center headquarters, was destroyed in the 1950s. In 2014, when the Rotunda and Grand Staircase leading up to it were rebuilt, the photomural was faithfully recreated in digital form on the 360-degree LED screens on the Rotunda's walls. It forms one of the stops on theNBC Studio Tour.
Many of her manuscripts, memorabilia, photographs, and negatives are housed inSyracuse University's Bird Library Special Collections section.
Group
Solo
In April 2023,Phillips NY auctionedGargoyle, Chrysler Building, New York City (c1930) for an above-high estimate $127,000.[16]
This was the first time a professional photographer from abroad had been allowed to take pictures of the "Piatiletl" (Five-year plan).
A native of the Bronx, NY, Margaret Bourke-White (1904–71) first gained recognition as an industrial photographer based in Cleveland
She grew up in Bound Brook, NJ, and graduated from Plainfield High School.
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