Margret Bourke-White in her element as an industrial photographer in 1935.
Sean
Callahan, an awe struck admirer and author
of the book Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer noted, “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.” But the pioneering photographer and war
correspondent turned out to be not quite so indestructible. In 1953 at the height of her creative powers and fame she began to notice alarming symptoms which turned out to be Parkinson’s Disease, then untreatable. She endured a slow deterioration which forced her into semi-retirement by 1957 and ended all of her work by 1968. She endured with the disease for 18 years
before dying of it in near poverty on
August 27, 1971 in Stamford,
Connecticut.
Margret
White was born in New York City on June 14, 1904.
Her father, Joseph White,
an immigrant secularized Polish Jew who
was a naturalist, engineer,
and inventor. Her mother was Minnie Bourke, an American-born
Irish Catholic. Both parents,
however, eschewed their birth faiths and were ardent free thinkers. The family,
including young Maggie and sister and brother, were comfortably
middle class, and soon left the city for the leafy
small town of Bound Brook,
New Jersey, a historic burb on the Raritan River in the north central part of the state.
Maggie, like her brother and older
sister, worshiped her brilliant father, a perfectionist
with high expectations of his offspring.
Her artistic mother was also a feminist
who imbued her with the notion not to allow herself to be limited by customary gender roles. All the children were inoculated with a mission
to serve humanity, even save
the world through relentless self-improvement and achievement.
While a student at Plainfield High School,
Margaret picked up a passion for photography
from her father who was fascinated by cameras
and interested in nature photography. After graduation from high school, she was
interested in becoming a professional photographer—a business with few
successful women practitioners—but followed her father’s advice to pursue
science.
In 1922 White enrolled at Columbia University in New York to
study herpetology—the study of snakes and reptiles. But
while at Columbia she took photography classes with Clarence Hudson White, founder of the Photo-Secession movement with Alfred
Stieglitz which re-invigorated her interest in the medium. Her time at
Columbia, however, was cut short by the sudden and devastating death of
her father after one semester.
White never returned to
Columbia. She restlessly moved from
school to school driven by her often impossibly high expectations of the institutions,
her own perfectionism, and a bristling refusal to bow to any restrictions
placed on her as a woman. Romance and its failure may also have played a part. White married fellow student Everett Chapman in 1924 and divorced
him just two years later. She studied successively at the University of Michigan, Perdue, and Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio, before finally settling in
comfortably at Cornell, in Ithaca, New York. Perhaps it helped that Ithaca reminded
her of her New Jersey home. When she
graduated she left a remarkable portfolio
of campus photos for the student
newspaper which concentrate on buildings and architectural detail.
Bourke-White as a young photographer.
Despite the odds against her, White
was determined to pursue a career as
a photographer. A year after graduating
from Cornell in 1927 she established her own commercial photography studio in Cleveland, Ohio where she specialized in
architectural and industrial work. Symbolically, she abandoned her married name
and the adopted the hyphenated name Bourke-White
to preserve her independence and honor her mother equally with her
father.
In her early days Bourke-White
struggled to get commissions. Her breakthrough
came when she got a job from the Otis
Steel Company to document their production
process. Even though she had been
hired by the company, their security
agents tried to block her access in the shaky grounds that
steel was a defense industry and
photos of production could risk the national
security and plant superintendents and
foremen worried that a mere woman
could not stand the intense heat and
danger of being close to blast furnaces and molten metal. She
got her way around these objections with flirtatious
eyelash batting, and when that didn’t work, terrifying bullying.
Bourke-White endangered assistants and herself to capture the drama of molten steel at the the Otis Steel mill in Cleveland.
Once in the plants Bourke-White
quickly discovered technical challenges. She set up what she thought were brilliant,
dramatic shots of steel being poured
then discovered in the dark room that
the black and white film she was using was not sensitive to
the glowing red and orange of hot steel—the molten metal
came out nearly black in prints.
She solved the problem by lighting her shots by having assistants hold magnesium flares which produced a brilliant white light. The aids sometimes had to be positioned dangerously
close to the flowing steel and showering sparks, but she was heedless of their—and her own—safety. The results were stunning. No photographer
had ever before captured the dazzling drama of hot steel. When the shots were published, Bourke-White
was recognized as a master of her medium.
That 1928 shoot led directly to a
prestigious new job as associate editor
and staff photographer for Fortune magazine in 1929. In 1930 the magazine sent her to the Soviet Union where she became one of
the first western photojournalists
to document Russian industry under communism. That trip would help make her welcome a
decade later when she was posted to Moscow
as a foreign correspondent.
In 1936 Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Fortune bought the failing old humor
magazine Life just for its
name. He wanted to launch a new weekly newsmagazine that would rely
mostly on photography to tell its stories—a newsreel on slick paper
as he envisioned it. Bourke-White,
already working for him at Fortune
and who had the strong support of Luce’s feminist wife Clair Boothe Luce,
was his first hire for the new project. Not only was she a photographer, but she set
up the sophisticated photo lab that
would be required to process and print the hundreds, often thousands of images
that would pour into magazine every week from around the world. When the new magazine hit the newsstands on November 23, 1936,
Bourke-White’s photo of the Fort Peck
Dam was on the cover. The new magazine was an immediate success
and almost instantly a national institution.
This photo of the Fort Peck Dam was featured on the inaugural issue of Henry Luce's Life Magazine.
Luce was an arch conservative and rabid
anti-New Dealer, which was reflected in the editorial content of the magazine.
Hardly anyone, however, read Luce’s ranting editorials. They turned to the magazine for the dramatic
coverage of the world around them, including the stark poverty of the Depression years. Luce never seemed to learn that the
pictures that he printed worked against all his politics. Pictures by Bourke-White and others evoked sympathy
for the plight of workers, and celebrated he triumphs of things
like CCC camps and WPA public works projects and actually rallied
public support for the New Deal.
Luce never learned this lesson and in later years coverage of his
photographers of the Civil Rights
Movement, the emerging counterculture
of the ‘60’s, and the experience of grunts
on the ground in Vietnam all
worked against his personal political agenda.
Bourke-White, who had made her
reputation photographing industry, turned more and more to human subjects in
her coverage of the Great Depression. In
1937 she toured the South dramatically documenting conditions
there. The results were iconic photos like the one published on
February 15, 1937 of displaced Black
flood victims lined up for food in
front of a huge billboard of a smiling white family in an automobile with the tag line “World’s Highest Standard of
Living—There’s No Way Like the American Way.”
Seldom was there a more deeply subversive
photo ever published.
This Bourke-White photo is still used as a dramatic illustration the American class divide.
Besides shooting for Time,
Bourke-White took her own photos on her swing through the South then collaborated
on a book with Erskine Caldwell, the
Georgia-born Southern gothic novelist
best known for God’s
Little Acre. Caldwell wrote the text and Bourke-White provided the
photo illustrations and both collaborated on the captions. Caleb
Crain described the process in a 2009 New Yorker article:
Bourke-White lay in wait for her subjects with a flash and
wrote with pleasure of having them “imprisoned on a sheet of film before they
knew what had happened.” The resulting portraits are by turns sentimental and
grotesque, and she and Caldwell printed them with contrived first-person
captions.
The resulting book, Have
You Seen Their Faces was published by Viking Press, with a paperback version by Modern Age Books following
quickly. It pre-dated the more celebrated collaboration of James Agee and Walker Evans, Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men published in 1941 by four years.
The work with Caldwell also led to romance. The couple married in 1939 and divorced in
1942 largely due to Bourke-White’s lengthy absences on overseas
assignments.
Those assignments came as tensions in Europe
were on the rise. She was dispatched
to survey what everyday life was like under the Fascists in Italy, Nazis in Germany, and Soviet Communists. Despite being under tight surveillance
and often escorted by handlers meant to make sure that she only
took positive photos, her keen eye was able to pick out many telling
moments. In the Soviet Union, her
earlier visit there led to unprecedented access, including to Joseph Stalin himself
in an informal an un-posed session which even caught the usually stern
dictator laughing.
When War broke out in 1939, Bourke-White applied for credentials
as a war correspondent to various governments. She even gave up her full time job at Time,
which did not want to send her in harm’s way, in 1940 to become a freelance
correspondent sending photos and articles to several American
newspapers. She did continue to sell
pictures to Time and was eventually rehired by them to be a war
correspondent.
In fact, Bourke-White became the first accredited
American female war correspondent. She was back in Moscow when Germany broke the
Hitler-Stalin Pact and attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In fact, she was the only western
photographer in the Capital as the city came under Luftwaffe bombardment which set of firestorms. She photographed the burning city from
the roof of the American Embassy.
Ready to fly with the boys of the Army Air Force in 1942.
When the United States entered the
war, Bourke-White became the first woman correspondent. She was first attached to the Army Air Force in North Africa and became the first woman to fly on Combat bombing
missions. At
desert air bases she had to dive for cover from strafing,
and dive bombing Stukas. Later she was assigned to Army infantry and artillery in Italy where
the Army was bogged down in a
grueling mountain campaigning. She won the respect of the troops for her
courage under frequent fire.
In between, Bourke-White was on board
the British troop ship SS Strathallan
bound to North Africa from England
when it was torpedoed and sunk. She turned to the experience into the photo essay Women in Lifeboats which appeared in Life
on February 22, 1943.
Buchenwald survivors. Bourke's photo were some of the first images of Nazi horrors that Americans got to see. Buchenwald survivors.
Toward the end of the war
Bourke-White toured recently captured
and occupied German territory with General George Patton. She was with him at Buchenwald short days after the Death Camp was liberated. The experience shook her to the core:
Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight
barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.The photos she took, and which were
published in Time were among the
first and most detailed images of the horror
that Americans got to see. After the
war she assembled and wrote Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report On The Collapse Of Hitler’s
Thousand Years. It was an eyewitness
account of devastated Germany after the war in which she displayed scant
sympathy for the German civilians she held responsible
for the rise of Hitler and still, in the face of overwhelming mounting evidence
of atrocities, remained in denial about national guilt and their own responsibility for the wretched conditions to which they had
been lowered. It was a tough book—and a highly
controversial one.
Among Bourke-Whites most important post-war assignments was the independence of the Indian sub-continent and the bloody partition of India and Pakistan. She photographed all the key players. Her photograph of Mohandas Gandhi emaciated from fasting
and sitting at his spinning wheel became
one of the most recognizable images of him.
There was a stern photo of Pakistani founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah sitting upright in a chair. But it was the photos of the devastating
partition violence that stood out. Somini Sengupta, a noted Indian
journalist working for the New York Times called Bourke-White’s
photographs “gut-wrenching, and staring at them, you glimpse the photographer’s
undaunted desire to stare down horror…Bourke-White’s photographs seem to scream
from the page.” In 1948 she was back in India and again photographed and
interviewed Gandhi hours before his assassination.
Bourke-White's iconic photo of Gandhi and his spinning wheel.
These pictures were taken just two
years after her experience at Buchenwald.
Bourke-White had seen more than her share of the horrors that humanity
was capable of.
She continued to do fine work for Life until her Parkinson’s forced her retirement. Even then she kept up a limited amount of
freelance work. But the tremors
of the disease made it increasingly difficult to hold a camera steady or to do
the dark room work that she
relished. Experimental surgeries
to her nervous system in 1959 and 1961 reduced the tremors, but
drastically affected her speech. And the
procedures could not halt the slow march of her body toward paralysis.
Unable to do much with her camera,
Bourke-White penned a bestselling memoir,
Portrait of Myself
published in 1963.
She spent
the rest of the decade in failing health
and increasing isolation in her Darien, Connecticut home. A generous Time-Life pension and royalties
from her books and photographs could not keep up with the rapidly mounting
cost of her medical expenses and
the need for 24 hour a day nursing care.
By the time she finally slipped away, she was broke.
Burke-White’s
photos are on display and in the collections of several museums
including the Brooklyn Museum,
the Cleveland Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as in the collection of
the Library of Congress.
The rise of academic women’s studies almost on
the heels of her death helped revive interest in Bourke-White and
elevated her to new status as an inspirational role model.
Candice Bergen played her in the Academy Award winning film Gandhi
in 1982 and Farrah Fawcett portrayed
her in a made-for-TV bio pic,
Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White in 1989.
