Artful Sidebar: Photographer Margaret Bourke-White

The photographer at work.

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.

~ Margaret Bourke-White

Few American pioneers of photography or photojournalism can lay claim to the panache or the professional legacy of the dauntless, daring Margaret Bourke-White … particularly few women have a prayer of doing so.

Many artists adventure, yet a scant handful participate in history. Over the wide-ranging course of her career, Margaret was in turn torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on a remote Arctic island, nearly eviscerated along with a German airfield near Tunis, obliged to enter Buchenwald with Patton, thoroughly blitz-bombarded in Moscow, and fished out of the chilly waters of the Chesapeake when her chopper had the cheek to crash.

Hence her iconic status as an intrepid, world famous emblem of swashbuckling photography and reporting. The first female war photojournalist was a pro through and through. 

Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1904, Margaret had an emphatically colorful upbringing. Her father, Joseph White, was an engineer, amateur shutterbug and enthusiastic inventor with avid and eclectic interests in everything from industry to nature … and his spunky daughter avidly shared them — to the tune of deftly employing an empty cigar box as her first camera. White taught her how to plot shots and to develop prints in the family bathtub. Her mother, Minnie Bourke, was quite a forward thinking woman, especially for the early 1900’s, and educated all her children as well as encouraging gender equality.

Margaret Bourke-White, Bread lines, the Louisville Flood

In 1921, Margeret kicked off her college years at Rutgers, then moved west to the University of Michigan, and ultimately finished up at Cornell University in 1927. As a student at Michigan she began taking pictures for the yearbook, and within a year was offered the coveted seat of photography editor.

Yet instead of accepting the position, she married a charming engineering graduate student, Everett Chapman … effectively abandoning photography to pursue married life. It ended less than two years later. She moved from Ithica to Cleveland and roared into her career as a photographer … which quite quickly attracted the esteemed attention of one Mister Henry R. Luce, publisher, who was designing and staffing a new weekly magazine we know as Time.

Luce invited her to come to New York so that they might meet, and so Bourke-White could observe first-hand what Time was to be about. She was spectacularly unimpressed. 

Luce and his editor Parker Lloyd- Smith persevered, however, and were also plotting the birth of a novel kind of business periodical that would feature dramatic industrial shoots — right up Bourke-White’s alley. She accepted a position at the hypothetical magazine, named Fortune. Initially she covered industry, architecture and the devastation of the Great Depression, but then the lure of overseas travel wove it’s sultry, irresistible magic.

Bourke-White, Tiflis 1931 Closeup portrait of Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina Dzhugashvili

The very first Western photographer permitted to document the shiny new brand of Soviet industry after the revolution, Bourke-White witnessed and published a unique perspective on that era, then was later stationed in Moscow just prior to Germany’s blitz bombing of its former ally. She, like thousands of Moscovites, was ordered into the deep city subways for safety … an order she but briefly obeyed.

The following evening, however, she crept to the U.S. embassy, toted her cameras to the roof and photographed the firestorm.

“The spectacle is so strange, so remote, that it has no reality in terms of death or danger,” she wrote in Portrait of Myself.

“But how quickly this feeling of immunity vanishes when one sees people killed!”

The artist prepares to take photos of corpses, Buchenwald, April 16, 1945

As a photojournalist, Bourke-White focused both her considerable energy and her lens on the human side of news. Her coverage of Buchenwald alone is a priceless historical record, but the emotion she injected into that work is truly extraordinary. She had been present in Europe during much of the war, actually traveling with General Patton into Germany, and in addition, her father was of Orthodox Jewish descent.

She did not shy away from the most gruesome of tableaux, nor did she seek to temper the subdued joy of finding survivors in that living hell. And liberating them. It is virtually impossible to wrap one’s mind around what that experience must have done to a person, but she took it in stride.

In 1936, Luce decided to launch a photograph-driven magazine, inspired by the demand for European picture tabloids. In this new effort, the photographs wouldn’t be subservient to the text … the pictures would do the storytelling themselves. That magazine was called Life, and Bourke-White was one of the four original photographers hired to staff and guide it. She shot the inaugural cover, one of her series of the famed Fort Peck Dam.

Margaret married again along the way, this time trying to choose the proper sort of man for her independent, impudent self. The prominent American writer Erskine Caldwell was a handy fit, being as keen on travel and exploration as his new bride and work partner. Alas, the legal union lasted but three years … she was not destined for domesticity, even that primarily conducted on the road. It was her last attempt at wedded bliss, and she bore no children.

Relentless and resourceful in pursuit of a picture, Margaret defied convention on a daily basis. She worked in Korea, India, the Arctic and countless other locales, visiting dozens of exotic lands, peoples and great figures of history. She captured the most common, dirt-encrusted child with the reverence, dignity and care with which she photographed Stalin and Gandhi; the latter whose picture she took hours before his assassination.

Bourke-White, Moscou streets.

Tragically, in 1956 a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease served to set Margaret on a path that would alter both her mobility and her future. In 1958, an experimental procedure for easing the effects of Parkinson’s was performed, deemed successful, and gave her somewhat of a reprieve, but the tremors effectively put paid to her work behind the camera. She returned to Life, but as a writer, her friend and colleague Alfred Eisenstaedt being the photographer.

In1961, Parkinson’s invaded viciously once again, reaching her right side, and another operation was undertaken (quite successfully) — but her speech was failing at a rapid rate. She began writing in earnest, finishing her aforementioned autobiography, Portrait of Myself. She neither indulged in self pity, nor despaired … simply carried on as the daunting broad she was.

In 1971 Bourke-White fell, injuring herself badly, and was reluctantly confined to a hospital bed. This degree of immobility brought on the combination of complications that led to her death on August 21st, 1971, at the age of sixty seven.

She left a world of images and emotion behind. “I feel that utter truth is essential,” Bourke-White said of her work, “and to get that truth may take a lot of searching and long hours”.

Hopefully, Margaret is attaining stellar shots in whatever distant locales she brashly trods into and illuminates now. She would surely be taking shots at and of the Regressive American Right.

Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, Montana, 1936 (First cover of LIFE Magazine). By Margaret Bourke-White

Dedicated to Gliberal Goddess and Feminist Amy Simon of  She’s History!