Margaret Bourke-White

Photographer

  • Born: June 14, 1904
  • Birthplace: Bronx, New York
  • Died: August 27, 1971
  • Place of death: Stamford, Connecticut

American photographer and journalist

Bourke-White was a pioneering news photographer who helped develop and define the field of photojournalism. A witness to some of the most significant events of the twentieth century, Bourke-White captured memorable photographs of the Depression, World War II, and the struggle for Indian independence.

Areas of achievement Photography, journalism

Early Life

Margaret Bourke-White (behrk-wit) was the second of three children born to Joseph White, an engineer and inventor, and Minnie (née Bourke) White, who was trained as a stenographer. The White children were reared in a strict but loving household. Joseph and Minnie White encouraged their children’s curiosity about the natural world and strove to instill in them the values of determination and hard work. Margaret later remembered that her mother taught her to “never take the easy path.”

When Margaret was a small child, her family moved to Bound Brook, New Jersey, where she attended public schools. She later attended Plainfield High School, where she served as yearbook editor and, as a sophomore, won a school literary competition activities that highlighted her talent for writing. On graduation from high school in 1921, she attended Columbia University for one semester, during which she took a photography course. She left school after her father died in 1922 but returned to college the next year after winning a scholarship to study at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

At the University of Michigan, Margaret met Everett Chapman, a doctoral candidate in engineering. They were married in the spring of 1924, and she accompanied her husband when he obtained a teaching position at Purdue University, where she also attended classes. When her marriage to Chapman failed in 1926, she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, to study natural sciences at Western Reserve University. She completed a bachelor’s degree in biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1927. While at Cornell, she was unable to find suitable employment to support herself, and instead earned money by selling prints of her dramatic, artistic photographs of campus buildings. Her photographs were very popular with students and alumni and sold briskly. After the failure of her marriage, she was determined to make something of herself, and although she had never before considered photography as a profession, her success at Cornell convinced her to pursue a career in photography.

Life’s Work

Soon after her graduation from college, Bourke-White returned to Cleveland, where she opened the Bourke-White Studio in 1927. (She began using her mother’s family name together with her given name after her marriage to Chapman ended.) She continued to pursue architectural photography but was especially fascinated by machines and industry. She saw endless artistic possibilities in photographing the skyscrapers, smokestacks, oil derricks, and titanic machinery of industrial Cleveland. She made a name for herself after producing a stunning series of photographs of the steelmaking process for Otis Steel Mills. On the strength of those photographs, she received numerous other industrial commissions.

Her work caught the attention of Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time magazine. Luce was also interested in telling the story of American industry in immediate, visual terms, and in 1930 launched Fortune magazine to do just that. An associate showed Luce some of the remarkable steelmaking photographs taken by a “girl photographer” in Cleveland, and Luce was so impressed that he brought Bourke-White to New York and offered her a position as Fortune’s first staff photographer.

Bourke-White was happy to accept. She moved her studio to the newly opened Chrysler Building in Manhattan and split her time between assignments for Fortune and more traditional commercial and advertising photography. She traveled around the country for Fortune, producing a visual record of American industry from steel and aluminum plants, to coal mines and quarries, to the slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants of the Midwest. Her eye for composition and her sense of drama made the dirt and smoke of heavy industry appear strangely beautiful in her photographs. Throughout this early period in her career, her work emphasized the gigantic scale of the machinery, construction, and output of American business. Fortune also sent her to photograph the rapid industrialization of the new Soviet Union under Stalin’s 1928 Five-Year Plan. Bourke-White shot the first photographs of that country since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. She returned to the Soviet Union twice in the 1930’s and produced a book, Eyes on Russia (1930), and a series of articles for The New York Times about her experiences there.

The focus of Bourke-White’s work, however, started to shift away from machines and industry as a more compelling subject presented itself the Great Depression. In 1934, she photographed the tragedy of the Dust Bowl in the midwestern United States, concentrating on the human aspect of that disaster. Around this time, she met Pulitzer Prize-winning author Erskine Caldwell and agreed to collaborate with him on a project documenting the effects of the Depression in the South. The two embarked on an automobile tour of the region, interviewing and photographing the rural poor, who were among those hardest hit by the devastating effects of the economic crash. Their interviews and photographs were published in the book You Have Seen Their Faces (1937).

In 1936, Luce made Bourke-White one of the first four staff photographers for his Life magazine. By 1937, she had given up her studio work to photograph full time for Life. Her assignments took her across the United States, and her photograph of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam appeared on the cover of the magazine’s first issue.

Always adventurous and willing to take considerable risks to get a shot, she was eager to travel to Europe to cover the growing political crises that would eventually lead to World War II. She traveled to Czechoslovakia and Hungary with Caldwell to cover the conflict in the Sudetenland. In addition to producing photo-essays for Life, Bourke-White and Caldwell collaborated on North of the Danube (1939). Bourke-White and Caldwell were married in 1939, and in 1940 they published an account of their travels around the United States entitled Say, Is This the U.S.A.? (1940). Although their creative partnership was successful, the couple’s personal relationship was stormy, and they were divorced after two years of marriage.

Bourke-White continued to travel to the world’s hot spots for Life. She photographed London as it prepared for war and was the only American photographer in the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Nazis violated their nonaggression pact and bombarded Moscow. She immediately set down those experiences in her next book, Shooting the Russian War (1942). In 1942, she also became the first female war correspondent to be accredited to fly combat missions with the U.S. Army Air Force. She shipped out for Europe, arriving in England. En route to an assignment, her convoy was torpedoed off North Africa; the several days she spent afloat waiting to be rescued are said to have inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime film Lifeboat (1944).

In 1943, Bourke-White was assigned to Italy, where she covered the war near Naples. While there, she shared the lot of the U.S. infantry and photographed and reported on one of the most intensive bombing campaigns of World War II at Monte Cassino. While her journalistic reports and photographs went to Life magazine, her personal experiences of the Italian campaign were recorded in They Called It Purple Heart Valley (1944). Bourke-White accompanied General George S. Patton’s Third Army as it rolled across Germany in the spring of 1945. She and Time correspondent Bill Walton reached the Erla concentration camp near Leipzig even before the American troops, and her photographs of newly liberated inmates at the Buchenwald death camp are among the most enduring images of the war and the Holocaust.

After the war, Life sent Bourke-White to India in 1946 to cover that country’s growing struggle for independence from the British Empire. Although careful to present a balanced view of the complex conflict, she was sympathetic to Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party. She befriended the great Indian leader, frequently traveling with him. In 1948, she was the last journalist to interview Gandhi, completing her work only hours before he was assassinated. Other assignments for Life in the 1950’s took Bourke-White to South Africa, where she covered the inequities of apartheid and the exploitation of black diamond miners and laborers. She also covered guerrilla warfare during the Korean conflict.

Bourke-White first began to notice severe pain in her legs in 1953 after returning from Korea. The problem was diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease, and its onset forced her to retire to her home in Darien, Connecticut, where she fought the ailment. For several years, she worked on her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, which appeared in 1963. Her last photographic contribution to Life magazine appeared in 1957, but she continued to write for the magazine. Although she had two brain surgeries and underwent extensive therapy, Bourke-White eventually lost her battle with Parkinson’s disease on August 27, 1971.

Significance

Bourke-White was a pioneer industrial photographer who differed from others in the field in her ability to see the genre’s artistic possibilities. She was among the first women to work as a photojournalist, and her pioneering pieces for Fortune and Life magazines helped to develop and define the photo-essay. She witnessed some of the most significant events of the twentieth century, capturing memorable photographs of the Depression, World War II, and the struggle for Indian independence.

A superbly talented photographer and a skilled writer, Bourke-White competed on equal terms with her male colleagues. Although she was one of the very few women working in her field, she subjected herself to the same hazardous conditions and dangerous assignments as her male counterparts. She was willing to take great personal risks to get a photograph and was known for her adventurous spirit and fearlessness.

Bibliography

Bourke-White, Margaret. The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White. Edited by Sean Callahan. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1972. This large-format collection of Bourke-White’s work spans the photographer’s career, from her earliest architectural and industrial work to her later photos of India, Korea, and South Africa. It includes a lengthy biographical introduction by Theodore M. Baron and a foreword by Bourke-White’s friend and colleague, the noted photojournalist Carl Mydans.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Portrait of Myself. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Bourke-White’s autobiography, which appeared eight years before her death, focuses on her adventurous career and includes a discussion of the author’s battle with Parkinson’s disease. The lively text is illustrated with a large selection of photographs, enabling readers to appreciate Bourke-White’s talents as both photographer and writer.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Taste of War. Edited and introduced by Jonathan Silverman. London: Century, 1985. This volume brings together selections from Bourke-White’s writings about World War II: Shooting the Russian War, They Called It Purple Heart Valley, and “Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly” (1946). More than simply reporting on the war, the selections are also vivid personal accounts of her experiences in wartime Russia, Italy, and Germany.

Brown, Theodore M. Margaret Bourke-White: Photojournalist. Ithaca, N.Y.: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1972. This catalog of a Bourke-White retrospective exhibition includes a short biography and lengthy critical comment that places Bourke-White’s photography in the context of the technological, historical, and social developments of the times in which she lived and worked.

Fletcher, Carol. “Power and Vitality.” American History 41, no. 6 (February, 2007): 46-57. An updated examination of Bourke-White’s life and career.

Goldberg, Vicki. Bourke-White. Hartford, Conn.: United Technologies Corporation, 1988. This collection of Bourke-White photography includes an informative critical/biographical essay by Bourke-White biographer Vicki Goldberg. The selection of photographs is notable for its inclusion of several rarely seen examples of Bourke-White’s work in color photography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Perhaps the definitive narrative biography of Bourke-White, Goldberg’s volume is thoroughly researched, documented, and expertly written. In preparing this biography, Goldberg had access to the photographer’s journals and diaries resources that allowed her to provide readers special insight into Bourke-White’s work and personality.

Phillips, Stephen Bennett. Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936. New York: Phillips Collection and Rizzoli, 2003. Published in connection with an exhibition of her work, this book focuses on Bourke-White’s early career, when she took abstract photographs of American industrial architecture.

Silverman, Jonathan. For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White. New York: Viking Press, 1983. Silverman compiled and edited a large selection of Bourke-White’s photographs for this visually oriented biography. He also added a comprehensive biographical narrative that draws liberally from Bourke-White’s writings.

1901-1940: February 17, 1902: Stieglitz Organizes the Photo-Secession; February, 1930: Luce Founds Fortune Magazine; 1934-1939: Dust Bowl Devastates the Great Plains; November 23, 1936: Luce Launches Life Magazine.