Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White – Quick success as photographer of architecture and industry

Margaret Bourke-White was born in New York on 14 June 1904. She was the second of three children in a Jewish-Catholic family and in contrast to most other young women of her time, was allowed to attend college and receive a comprehensive education. She married at the age of 20, but when the marriage broke down just two years later, Margaret Bourke-White fled her family troubles to the private Cornell University. After graduating in 1927, she opened her first photo studio in Cleveland, Ohio and quickly attracted attention as an architecture and industry photographer. Even on her arrival in Cleveland, the young artist noticed the enormous cranes from the ferry deck and sensed that she had found her sought-after motif. The influential publisher Henry Luce noticed Bourke-White’s work, arranged commissions for his business magazine Fortune, and made her a founding member of his new magazine project Life, for the first issue of which she contributed the cover picture and a photo essay.

Bourke-White created sensational photo reportages

Margaret Bourke-White was one of the first foreign female photographers permitted to travel to the Soviet Union and document the progressing industrialism there. Although the artist fulfilled her contract and produced striking pictures of huge construction projects, she did not avoid the plight of the exploited workers, capturing there precarious living conditions in her pictures. In Germany, she produced photographic series about the Hamburg shipyards and I.G. Farben in Frankfurt, whilst in 1938, she reported on the Sudeten crisis in former Czechoslovakia. The year previous, 1937, Bourke-White and the writer Erskine Caldwell designed an illustrated book about the misery of the field workers in the southern USA during a drought that threatened their existence; she married Caldwell in 1939, but the marriage only held a few years. Due to her capricious lifestyle and dazzling appearance, the photographer herself became the subject of vigorous public interest, triggering numerous legends and lively speculation. In 1941, she travelled to Moscow on behalf of Life magazine and was the only female Western photojournalist to witness the German airs raid there. 

Photographic witness to the great history of the world

As the first female war correspondent for the US army, Margaret Bourke-White travelled to various scenes of World War II. She followed the US Air Force and General George S Patton to the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp, creating one of her most striking and famous pictures, the photograph ‘The Living Dead of Buchenwald’. Commissioned by the USAAF, she documented the extent of the destruction of German cities from the air. She also witnessed the partition of India, apartheid in South Africa and portrayed numerous important personalities, including Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Marlon Brando. The last years of her life were overshadowed by advancing Parkinson’s which made it increasingly impossible to carry on working. In 1963, Margaret Bourke-White’s biography was published which immediately became a best-seller.

Margaret Bourke-White died in Stamford, Connecticut on 27 August 1971.