Margaret Bourke-White 6.14.13 Thought of the Day

[Image courtesy: http://lichnosti.net%5D

She was one of three children born to Joseph and Minnie. The family lived in Bound Brook, New Jersey.  Margaret, her brother, Roger, and sister, Ruth, went to school locally. Margaret was the editor of the high school year book. After attending several universities (Columbia, Michigan, Western Reserve University, Cornell, Purdue) she received her degree from  Cornell in 1927.

She took up photography as a hobby  but after graduating and moving to New York City she began to work in the field as a professional freelance photographer.

 She combined her own last name with her mother’s maiden name (Bourke) to create her hyphenated professional name. Beginning her career in 1927 as an industrial and architectural photographer, she soon gained a reputation for originality, and in 1929 the publisher Henry Luce hired her for his new Fortune magazine. [Britannica.com]

She went  to German on assignment for Fortune to shoot the Krupp Iron Works in 1930. That done she continued her journey (on her own) to the Soviet Union where she was “the first photographer to seriously document its rapid industrial development. She published her work in the book Eyes on Russia (1931).” [Notablebiographies.com] In 1936 she became a staff photographer for a new magazine called LIFE.

1936 LIFE First Cover (Photo credit: Chuck_893) Featuring Bourke-White’s photograph.

As America sank into the economic Depression of the 1930 Bourke-White turned her camera toward those suffering in the Dust Bowl or waiting in bread lines.

These projects also introduced people and social issues as subject matter into her oeuvre, and she developed a compassionate, humanitarian approach to such photos. In 1935 Bourke-White met the Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell, to whom she was married from 1939 to 1942. The couple collaborated on three illustrated books: You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), about Southern sharecroppers; North of the Danube (1939), about life inCzechoslovakia before the Nazi takeover; and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941), about the industrialization of the United States. [Britannica.com]

 

[Image courtesy: http://jewpics.blogspot.com/%5D Check this blog out for some more of Bourke-White’s intense photography.

An iconic photograph of Gandhi at a spinning wheel, taken by Margaret Bourke-White in 1946 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After the War she covered  the independence and partition of India and Pakistan. In 1949 and 1950 she covered apartheid in South Africa. In 1952 she went to Korea, again  working as a war correspondent.

Shortly after her return from Korea she noticed signs of Parkinson’s disease, the nerve disorder which she battled for the remainder of her life. …White died at her home in Darien, Connecticut. She left behind a legacy as a determined woman, an innovative visual artist, and a compassionate human observer. [Notablebiographies.com]

 

Here’s a mini documentary on her life….

http://youtu.be/iAkBu63H8H0