Until September 1, 2013 the Kunstfoyer der Versicherungskammer Bayern in Munich is presenting an important Margaret Bourke-White exhibition entitled Moments in History (Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk), featuring some 154 photographs, letters, publications and magazines with her work.
The exhibition focuses on the 1930s and 1940s with her photos of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Nazi Germany, Italy and England. Furthermore, other characteristic, commercial works such as the ones for Eastern Airlines and Chrysler Corporation are presented too.
Margaret Bourke-White (1904-71) was one of the first photojournalists. She was the first woman to take pictures of the steel mills in Pittsburgh, although quite some time after the famous photographs by Lewis Hine.
She was the first female photographer working for both Fortune and Life magazines, which had a nationwide impact. She shot in fact the cover photograph of the very first edition of Life in November 1936.
She was the first female photographer to work for the U.S. Air Force. Therefore, the first uniform for a female war correspondent was designed for her.
She was the only foreign photographer present in Moscow when Nazi Germany dropped its first bombs on the capital of the Soviet Union on July 19, 1941.
She was the first woman on a 1943 bombing mission, at a time, when women were not allowed in combat zones.
And the list goes on. So who was this remarkable woman who became one of the leading photo journalists of the 20th century, present at many historical events of importance?
Biography of Margaret Bourke-White: early life
The photographer Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx on June 14, 1904. Her father, Joseph White, was a Jewish engineer of Polish origin who believed in the egalitarian education of men and women. Her mother, Minnie Bourke, a woman of Irish Catholic descent, instilled in her the value of continual self-improvement.
Margaret Bourke-White was the second of three children. After early years at public schools in New Jersey, she studied herpetology at Columbia University. After a few years, she enrolled in art and photography classes. Her teacher Clarence H. White instilled in her an interest for photography, which would become the guiding light for her professional career.
In 1924, she married the engineer Everett Chapman, whom she had met at the University of Michigan, where she had transferred to study zoology. She divorced two years later and added her mother’s surname, Borke, to her last name, with a hyphen separating it from White.
In 1927, Margaret Bourke-White obtained a B.A. degree from Cornell University. More importantly, with the Ica Reflex camera that her mother had given her, she took photographs of life on campus and sold the photographs to fellow students.
Steel mills in Pittsburgh
Margaret Bourke-White moved from Ithaca (New York) to Cleveland (Ohio) and, from 1927 to 1929, cultivated an interest in architectural photography by documenting the city’s steel mills. Thanks to her connection with the owner of the Otis Steel factory, who gave her access to the facility, she began to explore the field of industrial photography. Her picture Romance of Steel won the annual art contest held by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
As a result of her work for Otis Steel, the editor of Time magazine, Henry Luce, hired her as a photographer for the launch of his economic magazine Fortune. For one year, she was the only photographer to work for the Fortune.
The Soviet Union
In 1930, as a result of her attraction to the industrial world, Margaret Bourke-White made her first trip to the Soviet Union. At the time, the country was immersed in its first Five-Year Plan with the explicit goal to industrialize the Soviet Union, bringing the country from a medieval, agrarian past to an industrialized future. In 1931 and 1932, she returned to the country. As a result, she published the book Eyes on Russia. As a result of her work, The New York Times published a series of reports about the Soviet Union, of which she had documented every aspect of life: factories, works of civil engineering, the youth, the working men and women, the countryside with its peasants, the schools, the children, the clothing designers, etc.
After a series of unsuccessful attempts, Margaret Bourke-White was one of the rare foreign journalists to be allowed to travel around the Soviet Union, thanks to her outstanding portfolio of industrial photography, which persuaded the functionaries to grant her a visa.
The great drought in the Midwest
In 1934, while on assignment for Fortune, she took a series of photos documenting the great drought that devastated the American Midwest. She felt the need to learn more about the United States and abandoned advertising photography in order to focus on publishing a book of text and images about what had been happening in her country.
In 1936, Life magazine hired her as a photojournalist. Her photograph of the construction of Fort Peck Dam made it on the cover of the first issue of the magazine in November. The same year, she met the novelist Erskine Caldwell and they began working on a book of essays about living condition in the South of the United States during the Great Depression. In 1937, the fruit of their collaboration was published: You Have Seen Their Faces. The book, which expressed social criticism, enjoyed great success.
Czechoslovakia
In the spring of 1938, Margaret Bourke-White headed to Europe on assignment for Life. Together with Erskine Caldwell, she traveled though Czechoslovakia by train for five months. As a result of their work, the published the book North of Danube in 1939, which focused on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. The couple married that year.
1938 was the year of the Sudeten Crisis. The Sudeten German Party under the leadership of Konrad Henlein demanded complete autonomy for the mainly German-speaking Sudetenland.
Back in the Soviet Union
In 1940, Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared on the cover of Life. The following year, she returned to the Soviet Union. She was the only foreign photographer in the country to document the German invasion and the firestorm the Nazis brought to Moscow. Coming from Asia, she entered the Soviet Union by way of Alma Ata in May.
At the same time, she published a book about life in the United States just before the outbreak of the Second World War: Say, Is This the U.S.A?
In 1942, she published Shooting the Russian War, based on her war-time experience in the Soviet Union. The same year, she separated from Erskine Caldwell.
At the end of 1942, she experienced war at first hand again when a torpedo hit the North Africa-bound flagship she was traveling on, forcing passengers to evacuate via lifeboats. Therefore, in 1943, she published Women in Lifeboats. The same year, Life also published her portrait of Stalin on the cover of the March 29 issue.
Margaret Bourke-White accompanied the U.S. Air Force on a bombing mission in North Africa; a first for a woman on such a mission.
In 1944, she published They Called It “Purple Heart Valley”, a book with photographs taken on the battlefields during the Italian campaign, including images of doctors and nurses working in extreme conditions.
The liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp
In 1945, Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Germany, where she witnessed the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11 by the 3rd U.S. Army under General George S. Patton. Together with Eric Schwab, she was one of the photographers to document the horrors of the Nazi terror with her KZ photos. In addition, she published three reports for Life: “Forgotten Front: Italy”, “Suicides” and “The Krupp Family”.
In 1946, she published Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, an account of her experiences during the last days of the war. The U.S. Treasury used the book as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials.
India and Pakistan
In 1946-47, Margaret Bourke-White became interested in the nonviolence campaign led by Gandhi in India. She documented key moments in the struggle for independence. She photographed Gandhi shortly before his assassination.
In 1949, she published Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India, which recounted her meeting with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All-India Muslim League and founder of Pakistan as well as the country’s independence from India.
In 1950, she published Interview with India, based on her travels through the country. In addition, she traveled to South Africa, where she documented the cruelty of the apartheid system as well as the extreme conditions under which people had to work in the gold and diamond mines in Johannesburg and the Orange Free State.
In 1952, Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Korea to photograph the war, the guerillas and the hardships of the civil population in the war zone. In addition, she took aerial photographs of the zones of conflict for the South Korean military.
Parkinson’s disease 1951-1971
In 1953, Margaret Bourke-White suffered the first symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. In 1956, she published A Report on the American Jesuits, with a text by John La Farge, S.J.
In 1957, due to her illness, she was no longer able to accept assignments from Life. In 1959-61, she underwent successful surgery on the right side of her brain. After a second operation on the left side of her brain in 1961, she suffered serious after effects, including the loss of speech and difficulty moving.
Autobiography and Stalin
In 1963, Margaret Bourke-White published her autobiography Portrait of Myself (1963), which spent three weeks on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. She had begun writing the book in the mid-1950s at her home’s poolside in Darien, Connecticut.
In her 1963-autobiography, she described her encounters with personalities such as Stalin and Churchill. Stalin was stiff until she spilled peanuts all over the floor. Scrambling after them together with the Kremlin interpreter, she made Stalin smile enough for her to make two exposures. “… and then, as though a veil had been drawn over his features, again he turned to stone. I went thinking he was the most determined, the most ruthless personality I had ever encountered in my life.”
Margaret Bourke-White died on August 27, 1967 in Stamford, Connecticut, at the age of 67. She has been portrayed by Candice Bergen in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, starring Ben Kingsley (1982), as well as by Farrah Fawcett in the television movie Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White (1989).
This article / biography is based on the exhibition catalogue Margaret Bourke-White: Moments in History by Olivia María Rubio and Sean Quimby. English edition, La Fabrica, Madrid, 2013, 192 pages and some 150 photographs. Order it from (Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk).
The exhibition Moments in History can/ could be seen in the following museums:
– Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin from January 18, 2013 until April 14, 2013 (already finished)
– Kunstfoyer Der Versicherungskammer Bayern, Munich from May 16 until September 1, 2013.
– Preus Museum, Horten, Norway from September 22, 2013 until January 4, 2014.
– Fotomuseum Den Haag from April 11, 2014 until June 29, 2014.
– Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY from September 2014 to January 2015
