Margaret Bourke-White
COM 241
Photography I
Margaret Bourke-White
1904-1971
• 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 SelfPortrait 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 NYC
1939
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. BourkeWhite 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 BourkeWhite to the story. Visiting a
mine workers' compound on
a Sunday, she happened
upon their weekly dance
exhibition where two
especially spirited and
photogenic dancers
caught 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 Company
1928
Semionova, Premiere Ballerina, Great Theater,
Moscow, 1931
Hats in the Garment District
New 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
Building
New 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 Rods
1939
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 BourkeWhite
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 Industry
Gary, 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
class
1938
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-White
Nuremberg
1945
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.