Margaret Bourke-White was a preeminent American photojournalist. She was born in the Bronx on June 14, 1904, to Joseph White and Minne Bourke. Both parents were progressive and brought their children up with the ideas of the Ethical Culture movement, a humanist belief that ethics are necessary to create a just and humane society. Minnie home schooled the children. Joseph was an inventor and designer of printing equipment. Margaret was intrigued with the machinery of the printing press, and her father often took her to see machinery in factories. She followed him everywhere pretending to take photographs with a cigar box, and she helped him develop his photographs in their bathtub. Photography would become her medium of choice, her greatest challenge, and her life’s work: “Utter truth is essential and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera.” Oddly enough, Bourke-White never used a camera until her father’s death in 1922.
After attending several colleges, getting married and divorced, she finally finished her degree at Cornell University in 1926. She writes that she went to Cornell “because I read there were waterfalls on the campus.” She was the photo editor of her yearbook and earned money selling photographs of the campus to alumni and fellow students. Following her graduation she moved to Cleveland and set up a photo studio in her apartment. She had difficulty with lighting at first but discovered magnesium flares, used in cinema, to solve the lighting issues. Always fascinated by industrial images, she began shooting at the Otis Steel Mill in Cleveland. These photos brought her to the attention of Henry Luce, editor of TIME magazine, who hired her for six months to travel the United States and to photograph the nation’s industries.
“Bourke-White on the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building, NY “(1934) (photographer Oscar Graubner), was part of a commission by the Chrysler Company in 1930 to chronicle the construction of the building. After the building was completed, Bourke-White was so admired the building she managed to acquire a suite on the 61st floor, across from the gargoyles. The suite was her studio from 1930-1933. Although the photograph depicts Bourke-White photographing while sitting on top of a Gargoyle, she continued to photograph New York from the 61st floor of the seventy-seven story building. To say that she was adventurous is an understatement, but this was only the beginning. She named the gargoyles Min and Bill and kept two pet alligators on the balconies outside her studio.
From 1929 onward, after her reputation was established, she took her mother’s maiden name Bourke and thereafter would be known as Margaret Bourke-White. In 1930, Bourke-White went on assignment to Germany to photograph the industry there and managed to finagle her way into Russia. She was the first American to photograph Russian industries, which she did as she traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway. She traveled 5000 miles and took over 800 photographs. Her first book Eye on Russia was published in 1931. Beginning in 1934, she took on other assignments in addition to TIME and FORTUNE for Luce.
For an article, titled “The Drought” in the NATION she photographed the depression from the air in an ancient airplane. This experience was extremely influential in widening her subject matter of her camera. “I was deeply moved by the suffering I saw and touched particularly by the bewilderment of the farmers. I think this was the beginning of my awareness of people in a human, sympathetic sense as subjects for the camera and photographed against a wider canvas than I had perceived before. During the rapturous period when I was discovering the beauty of industrial shapes, people were only incidental to me. And in retrospect I believe I had not much feeling for them in my earlier work. But suddenly it was the people who counted.” She is not the most famous female photographer of the depression and the dust bowl; however, her images were the first shown to the public and had a major impact. Her photograph “World’s Highest Standard of Living – There’s no way like the American Way” (1937), taken after the Louisville flood, is a famous example of her new-found subject matter. In 1937 she began collaborating with Erskine Caldwell, author of God’s Little Acre and Tobacco Road, to taking photographs for his proposed book on southern sharecroppers. The book You Have Seen Their Faces, published November 1937, was a great success.
In 1936, Bourke-White received from Luce a full-time contract as head photographer for his new magazine LIFE. Bourke-White’s photo “Fort Peck, Dam, Montana” (1936) was the cover shot for the first issue of LIFE magazine. The issue sold out in hours, and within four months the initial circulation of 380,000 jumped to over one million.
Bourke-White and by then her husband, Erskine Caldwell, traveled to Moscow in 1941 anticipating the imminent breakdown of the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia. They were there when Germany began the bombardment of Moscow. Bourke-White was the only foreign photographer to witness and to photograph the attack. The full descriptive title, “Overall view of central Moscow with antiaircraft gunner over Red Square, the spires of the Kremlin silhouetted by German Luftwaffe flares, July 26, 1941”, gave Bourke-White another first, the first female war correspondent. She also managed to get an interview with Stalin.
Before and during World War II, Bourke-White was sent on numerous missions with the military. She spent time in England photographing preparations for war. The April 29, 1940, issue of LIFE used her photograph of Winston Churchill, titled “Britain’s Warlord.” In 1941 she was in Tunis, attached to the US Army Air Force in North Africa, and in 1942 she became the official photographer for the Air Force. She went on raids on destroyers; she was torpedoed, sunk, and lost her negatives twice. She went with General Patton’s Third Army and entered Buchenwald with them. She earned the name “Maggie the indestructible.”
Bourke-White spent two years in India and Pakistan photographing the struggle between the Hindu’s and Muslims that often included scenes of massacres and famine. On January 30, 1948, she had a long interview with Mahatma Gandhi. She wrote that she had to learn to spin before she could see him. When she asked him why, he responded, “If you want a picture of a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding is as important for a photographer as the equipment he uses.” The interview with Gandhi was important to Bourke-White. She wanted it to be the last entry in her planned book on the partitioning of India and Pakistan. She observed that Gandhi “had no ambition to re-shape the structure of society; he only wanted to re-shape the individual human heart. “
At the end of the interview she wanted to shake hands, but knew that in India only her husband could touch a woman’s hand. “I folded my hands together. But Gandhi held out his hand to me and shook hands cordially in the Western fashion. We said good-bye and I started off. Then something made me turn back. Perhaps it was because his manner had been so friendly. I stopped, looked over my shoulder and said, ‘Good-bye and good luck’.” A few hours later, as Gandhi walked to the raised lawn platform at Birla House to conduct a daily multi-family prayer meeting, he was assassinated.
Bourke-White’s continued her adventurous life as a photographer. She photographed , among other things, the situation of gold miners in Johannesburg and guerilla warfare in the Korean War. Stricken with Parkinson’s disease in 1953, she continued a limited career with LIFE until 1971. She published her autobiography Portrait of Myself in 1963. “We all find something that is just right for us, and after I found the camera I never really felt a whole person again unless I was planning pictures of taking them.”
NOTE: Bourke-White’s numerous books are still available today.
Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years. Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning. She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.
MJ Veverka says
Beverly, thank you for the article on Margaret Bourke-White…pointing out her many “firsts”. I own copies of both American Way and Ghandi at the Spinning Wheel and they are favorites within my collection!