Margaret Bourke-White

COM 241

Photography I

Margaret Bourke-White1904-1971

• Began career as commercial, architectural photographer

• Worked first for Fortune magazine, then later for Life– Photo of Fort Peck Dam appeared on first cover of

Life magazine (1936)

Bourke-White took Self-Portrait with Camera (an 8X10 view camera) in 1933 when she was 29 years old.

Known for her fearlessness…

• hung out of bombers to take pictures,• climbed out on a gargoyle high atop the Chrysler

Building to take pictures• first Western photographer to go to the Soviet

Union

When Bourke-White went into Cleveland's steel mills in the 1920s, she would get so close to the pouring metal that her face would turn sunburn-red and her

camera finish would blister.

DC-4 Flying Over NYC1939

Life, March, 1942. First woman to accompany U.S. Air Force on combat mission during WWII.

The Face of Liberty, New York, 1952. One of the most exciting aircraft developments to come out of the Korean War was the helicopter. Bourke White was one of the first to see it as a photographic tool.

Shooting the New York skyline, 1934. Bourke-White atop a steel gargoyle protruding from the 61st story of the Chrysler Building, photographing the New York City skyline. This photograph was taken by Margaret Bourke-White's unsung partner, Oscar Graubner, her darkroom technician.

John Loengard recounted that Annie Leibovitz stood on one of eight gargoyles that extend from the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building in New York City. It’s the spot where Margaret Bourke-White was photographed camera-in-hand in 1934. David Parsons, a dancer, posed for Leibovitz on the next gargoyle, while a dare-devil assistant handed her fresh film.

…as well as social conscience

• Covered WWII– With troops when liberated Buchenwald

Concentration Camp in 1945

• Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence in India

• African mine workers and apartheid in South Africa

South African Miners 1950.When a new conservative government in South Africa imposed harsh restrictions on the native population, LIFE assigned Bourke-White to the story. Visiting a mine workers' compound on a Sunday, she happened upon their weekly dance exhibition where two especially spirited and photogenic dancerscaught her eye. The next day, she asked the mine superintendent if she could photograph them at work, which happened to be in a mine two miles underground.

Niagara Falls Power Company1928

Semionova, Premiere Ballerina, Great Theater, Moscow, 1931

Hats in the Garment DistrictNew York 1930

Oxford Paper, Runford, Maine, 1932. An inspector fans sheets of finished stock checking for flaws.

The Bremen at Bremerhaven, 1930. The North Berman LlodeLine cruise ship in the refitting at her home port.

Plow Blades, Oliver Chilled Plow Co.1930

Chrysler BuildingNew York City 1931

WOR transmitting tower, 1935.

Amerian Woolen Col, Lawrence, Mass. 1935.

Workers peel onions for Campbell’s Soup. The story appeared in Fortune in 1935.

Log Rafts, International Paper, 1937. Logs, gathered together like giant lily pads, lie on the surface of a lake in Canada, waiting to be milled.

Coiled Rods1939

Protective Pattern Walsh, Colorado, 1954.

You Have Seen Their Faces -- Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White

East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana.

“Blackie ain’t good for nothing, he’s just an old hound dog.”

Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia.

“Every month the relief office gives them four cans of beef, a can of dried peas, and five dollars, and the old lady generally spends a dollar and a half of it for snuff.”

Lansdale, Arkansas, 1936.

“There comes a time when there’s nothing to do except just sit.”

Hood’s Chapel, Georgia, 1936.

“The gang goes out in the morning and the gang comes back at night, and in the meanwhile a lot of sweat is shed.”

Hood’s Chapel, Georgia, 1936.

“They can whip my hide and shackle my bones, but they can’t touch what I think in my head.”

Hamilton, Alabama. “We manage to get along.”

Statesboro, Georgia. “The aution-boss talks so fast a colored man can’t hardly ever tell how much his tobacco crop sells for.”

First LIFE magazine cover, dated Nov. 23, 1936, with logo and picture of Fort Peck Dam by Margaret Bourke-White

In the winter of 1937 flooding throughout the Ohio River Valley claimed 400 lives and left thousands homeless. This photo is of refugees lining up for supplies at an emergency relief station in the black quarter of Louisville.

Reason to shoot more than one angle:

Women in Defense IndustryGary, Indiana 1943

The image appeared in LIFE magazine on August 9, 1943 and again in 1985 for a special issue LIFE on World War II. The 6 women are welding seams on the deck of an aircraft

carrier.

Bombing of Moscow, Summer, 1941. The Kremlin stands silhouetted against the light of parachute flares dropped by the Germans.

Winston Churchill, cover of Life, April, 1940.

Doctors operate on a wounded soldier in an evacuation hospital in Italy, 1944.

Nazi Storm Troopers' training class1938

Nazi Suicides, 1945. Dr. Kurt Lisso, Leipzig’s city treasurer, and his wife and daughter took poison just as the American tanks rolled into the city. As a high ranking official he would have been tried and punished. In the closing moments of the war Nazi propagandists told the German people to expect savage treatment from the Americans, prompting hundreds of suicides like these.

Margaret Bourke-WhiteNuremberg1945

Buchenwald, 1945. When General Patton saw Buchenwald, he ordered his MPs to bring 1,000 civilians from nearby Weimar and make them see the horrors that Nazi leaders had perpetuated. The MPs brought back 2,000. Many people refused to look and the cry, “We didn’t know, we didn’t know,” echoed throughout Germany.

The Living Dead of Buchenwald, April, 1945. Dachau concentration camp prisoners taken by Margaret Bourke-White after the liberation of Europe.

The Emigrant Train, Pakistan, 1947. Crude wooden carts dragged by bullocks clatter across the dry Punjab plains. This procession of uprooted Sikhs was 45,000 refugees long.

The Great Migration, Pakistan, 1947. A spindly but determined old Sikh, his ailing wife on his shoulders, leads his family to the new India border and hoped-for security.

Death’s Tentative Mark, 1946. During the famine this woman lived on cattle fodder. When that ran out she existed for two months on a diet of boiled leaves.

The Moneylender’s House, 1946. Surrounded in gaudy luxury achieved by milking the peasantry, Bhanwar Rampuria entertains his brothers, who want to be moneylenders too.

The Maharajah of Bikaner, India, 1946. The Raj stands proudly before his red sandstone palace. Behind the latticework above him are the sequestered cells of his many concubines.

Mohandas Gandhi at his spinning wheel, Poona, India, 1946. The simple spinning wheel was symbolic of Gandhi's resistance to British rule. He insisted Bourke-White learn how to operate it before allowing her to photograph him.