Margaret Bourke-White
June 14, 1904 — August 27, 1971 — New York City / Darien, Connecticut
Margaret Bourke-White was one of the most consequential photographers of the twentieth century — one of the four original staff photographers at Life magazine, the first female war correspondent accredited by the U.S. military in World War II, and the author of photographs that defined how Americans visualized the Great Depression, the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, the Korean War, and the death of Mahatma Gandhi.
Early Career and Industrial Photography
Born on June 14, 1904, in New York City, Margaret Bourke-White studied at a series of universities — including Columbia, the University of Michigan, and Cornell — before settling in Cleveland in the late 1920s to build a career in industrial photography. She forged a reputation for dramatic large-format images of steel mills, machines, and factories that made the structures of American industry look grand and even beautiful. Her access to the Otis Steel Company in Cleveland produced images that attracted national attention and led to her being hired as one of the founding photographers of Fortune magazine in 1929. Her willingness to photograph in physically demanding and dangerous conditions became a distinctive feature of her working style throughout her career.
Life Magazine and the Great Depression
Henry Luce selected Bourke-White as one of Life magazine's four original staff photographers when the publication launched in November 1936. Her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana ran on the cover of the first issue. She spent much of the late 1930s photographing the American South and the Midwest during the Great Depression, including a sustained collaboration with writer Erskine Caldwell. Their book of photographs and text, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), was a landmark document of sharecropper poverty in the Deep South. The two later married, though the marriage was short-lived. Bourke-White's photography in this period helped establish the visual language of documentary social reporting that remained a dominant mode of photojournalism for decades.
Did You Know?
Margaret Bourke-White was in India in January 1948 and photographed Mahatma Gandhi on the day before his assassination — a portrait session in which she learned to operate a spinning wheel in order to document Gandhi using his. She heard the gunshots that killed him the following day and immediately photographed his body and the scene at Birla House in New Delhi. The photograph of Gandhi at his spinning wheel was the last portrait taken of him, and Bourke-White's work that day stands as one of the most remarkable coincidences of documentary photography. She had, across her career, a consistent pattern of being in the right place at the most difficult moments — the liberation of Buchenwald, the partition of India, and the siege of Moscow.
World War II and Later Life
During World War II, Bourke-White became the first female photographer accredited with the U.S. Army Air Forces, flew on bombing raids over North Africa, photographed General George S. Patton, and was present when American forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. Her images of Buchenwald were among the first widely published photographs that brought home to American audiences the full horror of the Nazi death system. In the 1950s she photographed the Korean War with the same physical recklessness that had defined earlier assignments. She was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1952 and spent nearly two decades battling its progression. She died on August 27, 1971 in Darien, Connecticut. She was sixty-seven years old and had been fighting the disease — publicly and with characteristic directness — for nearly twenty years.
Legacy
Margaret Bourke-White's career stands as one of the defining achievements of twentieth-century photojournalism. She demonstrated that a woman could operate in war zones with the same effectiveness and distinction as any male correspondent — not by arguing for the point but by simply doing the work. Her images of Fort Peck Dam, of Buchenwald, of Gandhi, and of the American South during the Depression remain staples of visual history. The style of dramatic, engaged, emotionally committed documentary photography that she helped invent at Life magazine shaped the way a generation of photographers approached their work.