Margaret Bourke-White Essay, Research Paper
Margaret Bourke-White was born on June 14th, 1904, in the Bronx, New York. Her
father, Joseph White, was an inventor and engineer, and her mother, Minnie Bourke, was
forward thinking woman, especially for the early 1900’s. When Margaret was very young, the
family moved to a rural suburb in New Jersey, so that Joseph could be closer to his job.
Margaret, along with her sister Ruth, were taught from an early age by their mother. Her
mother was strict in monitoring their outside influences, limiting everything from fried
foods to funny papers. When Margaret was eight, her father took her inside a foundry to
watch the manufacture of printing presses. While in the foundry, she saw some molten iron
poured. This event filled Margaret with joy, and this memory would be burned in her mind for
years to come. Joseph White’s chief recreation activity suited his scientific mind; her was
an amateur photographer. The White’s home was filled with his photographs. If something
interested Margaret’s father, it also interested her. She pretended as a girl to take
photographs with an empty cigar box. Although she claimed that she never took a photograph
until after her father’s death. Her cousin Florence remembers her helping her father to
develop prints in his bathtub. In 1917, her father suffered a stroke. By 1919, he had
recovered enough for the family to take a trip to Niagara Falls and Canada. While there, she
began to make notes on his photographs, and helped him set up shots on several occasions.
In 1921, she began college at Rutgers, then moved to the University of Michigan, then
to
Cornell University, from which she graduated in 1927. As a freshman at Michigan, she began
taking pictures for the yearbook, and within a year was offered the seat of photography
editor. Instead of taking the position, she married a engineering graduate student, Everett
Chapman, and abandoned photography to pursue married life. When the marriage fell apart two
years later, she moved to Cornell, where she again took up photography. After she graduated
in 1927, she moved to Cleveland, where her family was living, to start her career with a
portfolio full of architecture pictures she had taken while at Cornell. She called upon
several architects who were Cornell alumni for jobs. After the success of her first job, she
founded the Bourke-White studio in her one room apartment. Then, money she made from
shooting elegant home and gardens by day was spent on photographing steel mills at night and
on the weekends. The circulation of her portfolio brought her to the attention of
Cleveland’s biggest industrial tycoons. After a few failures, she was successful at
capturing the Otis Steel mill. From this, she made enough money to move her studio to the
Terminal Tower skyscraper. In the spring of 1929, she received a telegram from Henry R.
Luce, a publisher who was planning a new weekly magazine called Time. Luce invited her to
come to New York so they could meet, and so Bourke-White could see what Time was to
accomplish. She was unimpressed, but Luce and his editor Parker Lloyd- Smith were also
planning a new business magazine that would make use of dramatic industrial photographs.
This was perfect for Bourke-White. She accepted their offer as a staff photographer. In July
1929, the decision was made to publish the magazine, called Fortune. Bourke-White began
working on stories for the premier issue, eight months away. The first lead story was to
feature Swift & Co., a hog processing plant. She worked with Lloyd-Smith until he became too
sick from the stench to continue. After Bourke-White was finished photographing the hogs,
she left most of her camera equipment to be burned. Her documentation of this was a step in
the development of the photo essay, and Bourke-White’s style.
In 1930, Russia was in the midst of an industrial and cultural revolution. It’s doors
were
all but closed to westerners, especially photographers. Bourke-White was attracted to
Russia, but her editors at Fortune doubted that she would gain access. They instead sent her
to Germany to photograph the emerging industry there. She decided that she would go on her
own, and after six weeks of waiting, her visa cleared the Soviet bureaucracy. She loaded up
her cameras along with trunks of food, and set off on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Russia was
full of red tape for Bourke-White. Fortunately for her, an official was so impressed with
her portfolio that he granted her a permit requiring all Soviet citizens to aid and assist
Bourke-White whenever she needed it. Over the next five weeks, she traveled all over Russia,
capturing dams, factories, farms, and their workers. She had taken nearly three thousand
negatives of Russia, the first complete documentary of the newly emerging Soviet Russia. In
the summer of 1931, she was invited back to Russia by the government. This time through
Russia, she concentrated not on machinery, but on people. The New York Times Sunday Magazine
published six article that she had written about the trip, along with her photographs. In
the summer of 1932, Bourke-White went back to Russia, this time to film. This trip, however,
was mainly a failure, since Bourke- White was not technically adept and hadn’t learned the
skill of seeing in motion. As a result, he
photographs had. She tried to sell the footage to a Hollywood studio, but they would not buy
it because of their fear that it would be seen as propaganda.
In 1936, Bourke-white toured the south with the writer Erskine Caldwell to supply the
pictures for the book You Have Seen Their Faces. The book was a photo documentary of the
poor, rural people of the south. Later in 1936, Henry Luce decided to launch a picture
magazine, spurred on by the success of European picture tabloids. In this magazine, pictures
wouldn’t be subservient to the text; the pictures would tell the story. The magazine was
called Life and Bourke-White was one of the four original photographers hired. She covered
everything from the New Deal towns springing up in the Midwest to the growing conflict in
Europe. In early 1941, tensions were running high in Europe, and Life asked her to return to
Russia, to make a comparison between the current Russia and the one that she saw ten years
before. Bourke-White and Caldwell entered Russia though China. On July 22nd, the first bombs
fell on Moscow and Bourke-White was the only foreign photographer present. The resulting
pictures were a major scoop for Bourke-White and Life. She spent the next four years
covering the European theater of war, it’s leaders, and the aftermath of the Nazi death
camps. She also flew in American bombers on their bombing raids, taking pictures of the
destruction.
After the war, in 1946, she was sent by Life to cover the emerging countries of
Pakistan
and India. She photographed Mahatma Gandhi many times, taking her last picture of him hours
before he was assassinated. From 1950 to 1956, Bourke-White returned to Life and covered
everything from the Korean War to South African gold mines to the Connecticut River Valley.
In 1956, Bourke-White discovered she had Parkinson’s Disease. After doing research on
the disease, she believed that it manifested itself while she was in Korea, racing against a
deadline. Gradually. the disease shut down Bourke-White’s body, and she had to learn to walk
again. In 1958, a experimental procedure for easing the effects of Parkinson’s was preformed
on Bourke-White. The operation was successful, and Bourke-White resumed working for Life,
but as a writer. Her friend and colleague Alfred Eisenstaedt was the photographer. Together
they covered the same type of surgery Bourke-White had undergone. Bourke-White then asked
the editors to put her story into Life , but they were apprehensive. they eventually
yeilded, and the story was hugely popular. However, in 1961, Parkinson’s once again reached
her right side, and another operation was preformed. this time it was successful, but it
made speech laborious. She began writing, finishing her autobiography, Portrait of Myself.
In 1969, she entered the hospital to begin further treatment for Parkinson’s. By this time
the disease had taken over her body, and she did not respond well to treatment. In the early
summer of 1971, Bourke-White fell and injured herself badly. This accident was one of the
great dangers of Parkinson’s. Bourke-White was confined to a hospital bed. This immobility
brought on complications, and Bourke-White died on August 21st, 1971, at the age of sixty
seven.
Margaret Bourke-White contributed many things to the world of photography. She was a
woman, doing a man’s job, in a man’s world, from the foundries of Cleveland to the
battlefields in World War II. She was hailed for accomplishing as much as she did under
these circumstances. She met little resistance from the world due to her sex, since she was
known as a famous and skilled photographer. Her work on Fortune magazine was a step in the
development of the photo essay. She continued this idea of pictures telling a story with her
work with Erskine Caldwell on the books You Have Seen Their Faces and Say, This is the
U.S.A. In these books, Bourke-White supplied the pictures, and Caldwell wrote the text of
the books. She also was the first western photographer to be allowed to document Russia’s
five year plan.
Margaret Bourke-White was one of the pioneering photojournalists of the 20th century.
She achieved extraordinary things for a photographer. Because of the times she worked in,
they are made even more extraordinary because she was a woman. She was one of the first
photographers to work on photo essays. She was the first western photographer to be allowed
in Russia. Later, she was the only western photographer present during the bombing of
Moscow. She was an original staff photographer for two of the most prominent magazines of
her day, Fortune and Life. She led a life full of adventure, pioneering a new art form:
photojournalism. Margaret Bourke-White was, and still is, one of the most important
photographers of the twentieth century.
Bibliography
Bourke-White, Margaret and Caldwell, Erskine. Say, Is This The U.S.A.? Da Capo Press. New
York. 1977.
Callahan, Sean, editor. The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White. New York Graphic
Society. 1972.
Goldberg, Vicki. In Hot Pursuit-The Life and Times of Margaret Bourke-White. American
Photographer. June 1986.
Goldberg, Vicki. Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company,
Inc. Reading, Mass. 1987.