BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET

Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904–August 27, 1971) was born in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Joseph White and Minnie Bourke, and grew up in New Jersey. She acquired a fascination for photography from her father and from a teacher, Clarence H. White, a member of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession movement. After briefly attending two colleges, and getting married and divorced, she enrolled in Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and supported herself by selling photographs of the campus to students and alumni. She graduated in 1927 with a degree in biology. Bourke-White then opened a photography studio in Cleveland, where her dramatic industrial photographs of foundries gained the attention of Henry Luce in 1929. Luce brought her to New York to become a photographer for his new magazine, Fortune. Bourke-White's assignment to take pictures of industrialization in the Soviet Union in 1930 led to her first book, Eyes on Russia (1931). After completing celebrated picture essays on the meatpacking plants of Chicago, glass blowing in upstate New York, and Indiana stone quarries, Bourke-White's emphasis changed from industry to the human condition while she photographed the Dust Bowl conditions of the Plains states in 1934. She collaborated with writer Erskine Caldwell, whom she would later marry and divorce, on a photo-documentary of the life of poor southern sharecroppers, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). In 1936 she signed on as one of four photographers for Luce's new pictorial magazine, Life. Her photographs of the construction of Fort Peck Dam in Montana were chosen for the first cover illustration and lead article of Luce's new venture.

As a Life correspondent during World War II, she was the only foreign photojournalist to be in the Soviet Union when the Germans invaded, the only woman to be accredited by the U. S. armed forces as a war photographer, the first female to accompany and record an Army Air Force bombing mission, and the first to document the horrors of the German concentration camp at Buchenwald. After the war, she covered the Korean War, the miners of South Africa, and the independence of, and strife between, India and Pakistan. Discovering that she had Parkinson's disease in 1956, Bourke-White gradually turned from photography to writing, producing an autobiography, Portrait of Myself (1963). She died in 1971 at the age of sixty-seven. A pioneer in photojournalism who thrived on adventure and craved a crisis, tirelessly and ruthlessly doing whatever it took to get the photograph she wanted, Bourke-White was widely hailed as a woman doing a man's job in a man's world.

BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET

BIBLIOGRAPHY