Bourke‐White, Margaret

Bourke‐White, Margaret (1904–1971), photographer.One of America's most flamboyant, ambitious, and successful photojournalists, Margaret Bourke‐White remains a controversial figure. Born in New York City to a bluestocking mother and an engineering‐inventor father, Bourke‐White married in her teens, divorced, took up photography while attending several different colleges, and decided on a career in commercial photography even before she graduated from Cornell in 1927. First as an architectural photographer and then as a photographer of industrial subjects in the Middle West, Bourke‐White drew upon the technical expertise of others to make dazzling photographs of previously impossible subjects—steel mill interiors alight with molten metal, crane‐and‐derrick aerial views of architectural interiors, and the like. These pictures endeared her to clients and to Henry R. Luce, who after 1929 made her the principal photographic force at Fortune magazine, his paean to capitalism.

During the 1930s, Bourke‐White published a photodocumentary on the Soviet Union, Eyes on Russia (1931); documented Dust Bowl conditions (Fortune, October 1934); collaborated with the novelist Erskine Caldwell (whom she later briefly married) on a documentary‐like study of rural southern poverty, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937); and saw her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam project in Montana on the cover of the first issue of Luce's Life magazine (23 November 1936), while simultaneously inventing Life's trademark genre, the picture‐essay. Bourke‐White aggressively and courageously covered World War II in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, North Africa, and Germany; afterward, she returned to the Luce publishing empire, photographing such plum subjects as Japanese life, the Korean War, and the peaceful revolution—and tragic assassination—of Mahatma Gandhi. From the mid‐1950s on, Parkinson's disease curtailed her career. Bourke‐White's technically masterful, dramatically composed photojournalism chronicled not just the events but the attitudes of an American era.

Bibliography

Margaret Bourke‐White , Portrait of Myself, 1963.
Vicki Goldberg , Margaret Bourke‐White: A Biography, 1986.
Sean Gallahan , Margaret Bourke‐White: Photographer, 1998.

Peter Bacon Hales