Photographer of the
Week: Margaret Bourke-White
1. Margaret Bourke-White was born on June
14th, 1904 in The Bronx, New York. She grew up in Bound Brook, New
Jersey. She began her college career at Columbia University studying
Herpetology, the study of amphibians and reptiles. Her interests soon turned to
photography and after attending quite a few colleges she eventually graduated
from Cornell University with a Bachelors of Arts degree in 1927. She was
married and divorced twice.
2. She started her own photography
business in 1928. One of her first photography jobs was at the Otis Steel
Company, a steel mill, a place where women were typically not allowed. She
began working for Fortune magazine in 1929 and a year later became the first
American photographer allowed to take photographs of Soviet industry. In 1936
she landed a job with Life Magazine where she would work off and on until she
retired in 1969.
3. Her famous “American Way” photo seems
to capture the period of the Great Depression. However, the picture was taken
after the Great Ohio River Flood of 1937.
4.
During
World War II she was the first female war correspondent and the first woman
allowed to work in a combat zone.
5.
She
was in Germany at the Buchenwald concentration camp when the prisoners were
liberated. She said, "Using a camera was almost a relief. It
interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me."
After the war ended she wrote a book titled Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly.
6.
One
of her most famous photos is of Mohandas Gandhi sitting at his spinning wheel
in 1946. She interviewed and photographed him again in 1948, just hours before
his assassination.
7.
In
1956 she took a series of photos on segregation in South Carolina. While she
had a reputation for sympathizing with the oppressed, after Life magazine
edited her photos and added captions, it appeared that she supported segregation.
