Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist. 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 the Soviet Union. 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 at Fortune magazine in the 1930s. She took the photograph of the construction of Fort Peck Dam that became the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.
The second half of her career represents her transition from corporate photography to photojournalism, beginning with her work during the Great Depression documenting the people of the Dust Bowl. Her collaboration with novelist Erskine Caldwell in You Have Seen Their Faces 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 the Southern United States. She was the first American female war photojournalist, photographed the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, and was with Patton's Third Army in the spring of 1945 when she famously documented the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1949, she was one of the first Americans to bring attention to the injustices of the South African apartheid regime with her unique photographs, and covered the Korean War for Life magazine in the early 1950s.
Early life
Margaret Bourke-White, born Margaret White in the Bronx, New York, was the daughter of Joseph White, a non-practicing Jew whose father came from Poland, and Minnie Bourke, who was of Irish Catholic descent. She partially grew up in the Joseph and Minnie White House in Middlesex, New Jersey, and graduated from Plainfield High School in Union County. 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." 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 the American Bar Association in Chicago, Ill. 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 " 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 studying herpetology at Columbia University, only to have her interest in photography strengthened after studying under Clarence White. She left after one semester, following the death of her father.
She transferred colleges several times, attending the University of Michigan, Purdue University in Indiana, and Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Bourke-White ultimately graduated from Cornell 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. A year later, she moved from Ithaca, New York, to Cleveland, Ohio, where she started a commercial photography studio and began concentrating on architectural and industrial photography.
Career
Architectural and commercial 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 in Portrait 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, so she could see the beauty, but the photographs were coming out all black.
My singing stopped when I saw the films. I could scarcely
recognize anything on them. Nothing but a half-dollar-sized disk
marking the spot where the molten metal had churned up in the
ladle. The glory had withered.
I couldn't understand it. "We're woefully underexposed," said
Mr. Bemis. "Very woefully underexposed. That red light from
the molten metal looks as though it's illuminating the whole
place. But it's all heat and no light. No actinic value."
She solved this problem by bringing along a new style of magnesium flare, 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"
In 1930, Bourke-White was hired to photograph the construction of what would become one of New York City's most elegant skyscrapers, the Chrysler 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 and Lexington Avenue below. When I learned these were to be gargoyles à la Notre 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 from Fortune magazine, her principal employer at the time, and opened her studio shortly thereafter. She hired John 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.
Photojournalism
In the summer of 1929 Bourke-White accepted a job as associate editor and staff photographer for the new business-themed magazine Henry 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.
When Luce began his third magazine, the oversized, photograph-centered Life magazine, in 1936, he hired her as its first female photojournalist. Her photographs of the construction of the Fort Peck Dam featured in Lifes first issue, dated November 23, 1936, including the cover. 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 a United States Army Corps of Engineers webpage. This cover photograph became such a favorite that it was the 1930s' representative in the United States Postal Service's Celebrate the Century series of commemorative postage stamps.
She held the title of staff photographer at LIFE until 1940, but returned from 1941 to 1942, and again in 1945, after which she stayed through her semi-retirement in 1957 and her full retirement in 1969.
In 1934, Bourke-White, like Dorothea Lange, photographed drought victims of the Dust Bowl for Fortune. She captured a famous photograph of black Louisville, Kentucky, residents displaced by the Ohio River flood of 1937 for the February 15, 1937, issue of Life magazine. Called At 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 of Curtis Mayfield's 1975 album, There's No Place Like America Today.
Marriage and photojournalism in the South and Nazi Europe
Bourke-White met the bestselling novelist Erskine 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 book You Have Seen Their Faces.They collaborated on two more books North of the Danube a travelogue about Czechoslovakia under the specter of Nazi occupation and Say, Is This the U.S.A. about industrialization in the United States.
She lived with Caldwell for several years before they married in 1939.
They traveled to Europe to record how Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were faring under Nazism.
Soviet Union
Bourke-White was "the first Western professional photographer permitted into the Soviet Union". She travelled there in consecutive summers from 1930 to 1932 to document the first Five-Year Plan. While in the USSR, she photographed Joseph Stalin, as well as making portraits of Stalin's mother and great-aunt when visiting Georgia. She also took portraits of other famous people in the Soviet Union, such as Karl Radek, Sergei Eisenstein, and Hugh 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 in Fortune magazine in 1931 under the title Eyes on Russia, and then as a book with the same name by Simon and Schuster. These photos additionally became "a six-part series in The New York Times, a deluxe photo portfolio, and a set of photomurals for the Soviet consulate in New York. Still other photographs circulated in exhibitions, books, and periodicals around the globe, especially in Soviet magazines and postcards of the early 1930s."Bourke-White returned to the Soviet Union in 1941 during the Second World War. With five cameras, 22 lenses, four developing tanks and 3,000 flashbulbs, her luggage weighed in total 600 pounds. The resulting body of work was published in a book titled Shooting the Russian War in 1942.