Vera Jackson 1912–

Photojournalist, educator

At a Glance…

Sources

The African-American-owned newspapers that flourished in the United States throughout much of the twentieth century were notable not only for their news content but also for their distinct look: they presented images made by black photographers for black readers, avoiding the stereotypes encountered in many white-oriented publications. One of the photojournalists who shaped this distinct look during the World War II era was Vera Jackson, who was a staff photographer at the California Eagle from 1945 to 1950 and was also active as a freelance photographer for a number of years. Jackson, a pioneer among both female and African-American photographers, captured on film both the glamour of black celebrities and the stirrings of the civil rights movement after World War II.

Jackson was born Vera Ruth on July 21, 1912, in Wichita, Kansas. When she was a child, she was fascinated by a local black newspaper, listening as her father read stories aloud and joining a pen pal club that brought her letters from as far away as Africa. Her mother, Della, died when Vera was five, and she and her father, Otis Ruth, moved to a farm in Corona, California, outside of Los Angeles, in the 1920s. The new environment played a part in opening up the Midwestern girl’s horizons. “Los Angeles was very, very exciting,” she was quoted as saying during a Public Broadcasting System (PBS) program which focused on the black press. “So many people I had never seen before, like the Indians or the Chinese.” Her father, who also collected books, enjoyed photographing family events, and passed his enthusiasm for the camera along to his daughter. She graduated from Corona High School in 1930 and married Vernon Jackson the following year. Soon the couple had two young sons.

During the Depression Jackson took a job as a “Number Please Girl”—a record-store employee who would load songs into a jukebox-like device in response to customer requests. But soon she began to hunger for something more and took a community-education photography class. Inspired, she enrolled in the Frank Wiggins vocational high school’s photography program in the late 1930s. She began to think of photography as a career after her teacher sent one of her pictures to the Los Angeles School Journal and it was printed on the cover. “I didn’t stop after that,” she told the PBS interviewer. “I began to take pictures of everything—babies, children, flowers, anything I could.”

Jackson landed a job as an assistant to photographer Maceo Sheffield and soon began landing freelance work herself. Her work began to appear in the pages of the California Eagle, where she had contacts through a distant cousin who was married to the paper’s charismatic editor, Charlotta Bass. Bass was a famous crusading journalist who became recognized as a leader in the civil rights struggle in the Los Angeles area. But at first Jackson worked more closely with the paper’s society editor, Jesse Mae Brown. “She was about my age and we really hit it off fine and we went to all kinds of things like … fashion shows [and] museums,” Jackson was quoted as saying in the PBS interview.

Hired by the Eagle as a staff photographer in 1945, Jackson attended parties and met many of the famous

At a Glance…

Born Vera Ruth on July 21, 1912, in Wichita, KS; daughter of Otis (a farmer and amateur photographer) and Della Ruth; married Vernon Jackson, 1931; two children. Education: Wiggins vocational high school, photography studies, 1930s; University of California at Los Angeles, BA, education, 1952, MA, 1954; University of Southern California, coursework toward PhD, 1956; Riverside Community College, art courses, 1980s.

Career: Freelance photographer and photographer’s apprentice, Los Angeles, early 1940s; California Eagle, staff photographer, 1945-51; photographs exhibited in museums and galleries, 1948–; Los Angeles public schools, teacher, 1951-76; Historical Enterprises, lnc., co-editor, photographer, educator, 1980–.

Selected memberships: Los Angeles County Art Museum; Urban League; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Women in Photography; Friends of Photography.

Address: Office —Historical Enterprises Photo Images of the 40s, 1004 Railroad St., Corona, CA 91720.

African Americans of the day—opera singer Marian Anderson, jazz vocalist Billie Holiday, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and civil rights activist Ralph Bunche, among others. Two celebrities with whom she developed a special rapport were groundbreaking baseball player Jackie Robinson, whom she photographed with his wife on the occasion of the birth of their first child, and film star Dorothy Dandridge. Several Jackson images of Dandridge portray the actress as a high-fashion beauty. “In order to forget [the] bad times and to look forward to the promise of prosperity and jobs and other opportunities, there was a showiness on the part of most of us,” Jackson was quoted as saying in the book Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers.”

Jackson’s job also brought her up against the harder side of African-American life. In addition to her society beat she also sometimes had to cover hard news and murder scenes. Her work at the Eagle gave her a new appreciation for the activism of Bass, who in the late 1940s was working to dismantle the restrictive covenants—charters that excluded blacks and other minorities from home ownership—that were in force in many Los Angeles neighborhoods. Jackson accompanied Bass to photograph protests at Los Angeles City Hall and at neighborhood sites, and she photographed strikes and other protests. Jackson became a frequent Los Angeles Times letter writer on civil rights matters.

In 1950, at the urging of her husband (to whom she had taught the craft of photography), Jackson left her job at the Eagle and began a new career as a schoolteacher. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1952, by which time she had already landed a job teaching art at a Los Angeles elementary school. Jackson remained with the Los Angeles school district until 1976, never really pausing in her search for further education. She earned a master’s degree from UCLA in 1954 and did course work toward a doctorate at the University of Southern California. Later in life she traveled to Africa four times and to other countries around the world, and in the 1980s she took art courses at Riverside Community College.

Even after giving up full-time photojournalism, Jackson continued to contribute photographs to various magazines, including Black Angelenos, Travel and Art, and Design. Although Jackson maintained that the purely artistic aspect of her work was secondary to its function of giving the viewer an understanding of the subjects she photographed, her work was often featured in gallery and museum exhibitions, beginning at New York’s La Cinque gallery in 1948 and, in her later years, at such institutions as the UCLA Gallery, the Riverside Art Museum, and the Black Gallery of Los Angeles.

Vera Ruth Jackson has lived long enough to experience recognition for her historic work. In 1997 she was featured in A History of Women Photographers, a major exhibition that traveled to the New York Public Library and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. As curators and interviewers talked to her about her life, Jackson stressed her own enthusiasm for photography rather than a desire to break new ground. “Personally, photography has enriched my life in so many ways,” she told Viewfinders author Jeann Moutoussamy-Ashe. “It is my way of telling the world how I feel about the beautiful experience of living and learning.”

Sources

Books

Heller, Jules, and Nancy G. Heller, North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century, Garland, 1995.

Moutoussamy-Ashe, Jeanne, Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers, Writers & Readers Publishing, 1993.

Willis-Thomas, Deborah, An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers, 1940-1988, Garland, 1989.

Who’s Who Among African Americans, 15th ed., Gale, 2002.

On-line

“A Separate World,” PBS Online, www.pbs.org/blackpress.educate_event/separate.html (June 6, 2003).

“Vera Jackson Interview,” PBS Online, www.pbs.org/blackpress/film/transcripts/jackson.html (June 6, 2003).

—James M. Manheim

BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET 1906-1971

Photojournalist

War Journalist

In an era which acclaimed the war journalist, none was more renowned than Margaret Bourke-White. Her photographs for Life magazine brought World War II home with clarity and sensitivity for millions of Americans; her courage on the battlefront became legendary. Bourke-White set many firsts for women during the war—the first woman to fly on bombing missions, for instance—and her work was superior to that of most U.S. photographers, male or female. When U.S. troops liberated the Nazi death camps, Bourke-White was there, documenting the tragedy of the camps and relaying unforgettable images of the atrocities to the public.

Background

Daughter of an engineer-inventor and a strong-willed, independent housewife, Bourke-White was raised in a household that embraced female equality and ambition. Her father, holding several machine patents, instilled in Bourke-White a fascination and awe for machines that would later advance her career considerably. He was also an amateur photographer, although Bourke-White claimed she did not begin photographing until after his death in 1922. When she enrolled at Columbia University in 1921, it was with the intention of becoming a biologist. (She ultimately received a B.A. in biology from Cornell.) A series of art photography classes with Clarence H. White, associated with the innovative Photo-Secession school of Alfred Stieglitz, cinched photography as a vocation, but Bourke-White had a difficult time getting started. She switched universities several times due to money problems and suffered through a brief, failed marriage. By 1927 she had steeled her resolve to make a living as an independent photographer, and she relocated to Cleveland to make her mark.

Photojournalist

Cleveland was in the midst of the industrial boom of the 1920s, and Bourke-White established her reputation in the new field of industrial photography. She was drawn to the symmetry and power of big industry, and her photos, with their overtones of art, made an impression—not only among Cleveland's industrialists, busy hiring her to photograph steel furnaces and assembly lines, but among magazine publishers such as Henry R. Luce, owner of Time. Luce had planned a new magazine, Fortune, to cater to American business, and Bourke-White's photographs fit his format well. She contributed the photographs for the lead article in the first issue, and thereafter the magazine was to a great extent dependent upon her bold, iconographic photographs. She took what she termed "symbolic" photographs: single images that would come to represent entire ideas and concepts. She pioneered photojournalism in Fortune, which built entire articles around her images. By the early 1930s she was the most famous photojournalist in the United States.

Icons and Politics

Bourke-White's skill with the camera was such that she had her choice of assignments. In the early 1930s she traveled to the Soviet Union, before the United States had established diplomatic relations with that nation. Her photographs of Soviet industry became some of the first images of the Soviet Union seen by Americans, and she became an in-demand lecturer on the Soviet Union. In 1935 she was called upon to photograph President Franklin D. Roosevelt and began documenting New Deal public-works projects. In 1936 one such photograph, of the Fort Peck dam in Montana, became the cover of the first issue of Luce's new photo magazine, Life. Life became an important forum for Bourke-White's work, especially for photographs of the dust bowl or the Depression, such as the 1937 picture of Louisville flood victims lined up for assistance before a billboard proclaiming that the United States maintained the world's highest standard of living. She dropped her earlier awe of machines and became fascinated by human drama. She joined progressive political organizations, such as the American Artists' Congress, dedicated to using art to publicize the plight of the disadvantaged, and stopped taking photographs for major advertisers. She even, for a time, broke with Luce to work in a more liberal journal, PM, but ultimately returned to Life. In 1937 she published You Have Seen Their Faces, a photoessay on sharecropping, with text by the man who would become her second husband, Erskine Caldwell. It was a popular success and paved the way for subsequent protest photo-essays, such as James Agee and Walter Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) or those of Robert Frank. In 1938 Bourke-White and Caldwell decided to apply a similar formula to a book on Europe. They arrived in time for the Munich crisis.

War and Liberation

As the political crisis in Europe disintegrated into war, Bourke-White was there, capturing the drama of the experience. She traveled from London to Libya and from Syria to Siberia during the conflict. The first woman accredited as a war correspondent, she survived the sinking of the SS Strath-Allan off North Africa and flew on B-17 bombing runs over Tunis. Trusted by the Soviets for her previous work on the Soviet Union, Bourke-White scooped her fellow photo-journalists by being the only American at work in the U.S.S.R. when the Germans invaded. She also accompanied U.S. troops during the invasion of Italy, developing an almost mythological reputation for her willingness to hazard enemy fire to get dangerous aerial shots. In 1945 she was with Gen. George Patton's forces as they liberated Buchenwald and took classic photographs that highlighted the spectral gazes of the prisoners of the concentration camp; she reached the Erla work camp and took appalling photos of the massacre hours after SS troops incinerated over three hundred inmates. Following the war, Bourke-White published many photographs of Europe in ruins, bringing the cost of war home to many Americans via the pages of Life. She also traveled to India, becoming one of the first American photographers to cover the burgeoning nationalist movements of the third world. She shot photos of Mohandas K. Gandhi at his spinning wheel, the slaughter in the Punjab, and Pakistani refugees, and she published the photographs in a well-received book, Halfway to Freedom (1949).

Last Battle

By the 1950s Bourke-White had traveled to thirty-six countries and taken hundreds of thousands of photographs. In 1952 she returned to war, this time in Korea. Rather than photograph the battles, she published a photo-essay in Life that focused on the trauma of civil war for one Korean family. It was to be her last major assignment. In the early 1950s she was diagnosed as having Parkinson's disease. Bourke-White's worldwide adventurism ground to a halt, and her work ended as she devoted her attention to fighting the illness. She publicized her struggle through a 1960 television dramatization of her life and through the publication of her autobiography, Portrait of Myself in 1963. After twenty years of fighting Parkinson's, Bourke-White died on 27 August 1971.

Sources:

Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1986);

Robert E. Hood, Twelve at War: Great Photographers Under Fire (New York: Putnam, 1967).