Photojournalism

Editor's Note: In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re sharing profiles of influential women in journalism. Margaret Bourke-White is arguably one of the most influential photojournalists of the 20th century. Over a four-decade career, she photographed factories and skyscrapers, world wars, poverty in the American South and political violence across the globe. She famously photographed Mahatma Ghandi hours before he was assassinated, and captured a rare smiling image of Joseph Stalin. Along the way, she blazed trails for women in the media, becoming the first female photographer for LIFE Magazine, the first Western photographer allowed in the Soviet Union and one of the first journalists to document the Nazi concentration camps in 1945. Born in 1904 in New York City, Bourke-White studied at several universities, including Cornell, where she began serious experiments with photography. She discovered that the camera could translate her fascination with machines, structures, and patterns into striking visual images (many of which are now owned by the Museum of Modern Art). In the late 1920s, Bourke-White opened a studio in Cleveland, Ohio, and began specializing in industrial subjects, such as the Otis Steel mill. Undaunted by the difficulties of photographing in physically challenging conditions, where molten heat could literally melt her film, she documented steel production and American factories. She quickly attracted national attention and corporate clients. The publisher Henry Luce hired Bourke-White in 1929 as the first staff photographer for his new business magazine Fortune. There, Bourke-White produced ambitious photographic essays on American industry, architecture and economic life. While her work demonstrated the immense power of American industry, Bourke-White also chose to expose the human cost of technical advancement – particularly in the American South. Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936. (Credit: The Museum of Modern Art) In the mid-1930s, she worked with novelist Erskine Caldwell (whom she would later marry and divorce) to document the lives of poor sharecroppers and rural families in the Dust Bowl. The resulting photos became the book, You Have Seen Their Faces, which was published in 1937. Portraits of stoic subjects, and landscapes of desolate farms and makeshift homes, drew attention to the profound inequalities of the era. Historians note that her use of the photographic essay—sequenced images that built a narrative—became a hallmark of her style and a model for later documentary work in film and journalism. By 1936, Luce was getting ready to launch his next venture, LIFE Magazine, which would be centered around visual storytelling. Bourke-White became the magazine’s first female photojournalist, and her image of Fort Peck Dam in Montana graced LIFE’s inaugural cover. Bourke-White worked for LIFE until the late 1950s, becoming one of the magazine's defining visual voices. Early on at LIFE, Bourke-White was assigned to photograph industrialization in the Soviet Union, a project that would see her make a number of trips behind the Iron Curtain at a time when access to Russia was extremely guarded. Bourke-White somehow managed to obtain official permission to travel through the country’s factories and construction sites, producing images of steel mills, the construction of the Dnieper Dam, but also snapshots of everyday life, like peasant women eating Borscht. Her most notable visit came in 1941 at the beginning of World War II, when Moscow came under Nazi attack – Bourke-White was there covering the invasion. It was during this visit to the Soviet Union that she photographed Stalin himself. According to The New York Times, Bourke-White wrote of that meeting, “I made up my mind that I wouldn't leave without getting a picture of Stalin smiling…I went virtually berserk trying to make that great stone face come alive…I got down on my hands and knees on the floor and tried out all kinds of crazy postures searching for a good camera angle. Stalin looked down at the way I was squirming and writhing and for the space of a lightning flash he smiled—and I got my picture. Probably, he had never seen a girl photographer before and my weird contortions amused him.” Margaret Bourke with the U.S. 8th Air Force in 1943. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) During World War II, Bourke-White’s career entered a new, perilous phase, as she became the first American female war photojournalist. She covered the siege of Moscow, flew on bombing missions over North Africa, and later accompanied General George Patton’s Third Army into Germany. She survived torpedo attacks at sea, enemy fire, and a helicopter crash, earning the nickname “Maggie the Indestructible” from her colleagues at LIFE. Her photographs of the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp—gaunt survivors, piles of corpses, the stark infrastructure of genocide—were among the first images to confront the American public with the full horror of Nazi atrocities. In the late 1940s, Bourke-White’s attention turned toward the upheavals of decolonization and racial injustice. She covered the 1947 Partition of British India into the new nations of India and Pakistan, producing graphic images of mass migration and communal violence. She also photographed Gandhi by his spinning wheel only hours before his assassination in 1948. Shortly afterward, she reported from South Africa, documenting the early years of apartheid. She later covered the Korean War for LIFE. In the 1950s, Bourke-White’s output slowed as she began to suffer from Parkinson’s disease. Even as her health declined, her work continued to circulate widely in books, exhibitions, and magazine retrospectives, cementing her reputation. She died in 1971 at the age of 67. Today, historians credit Bourke-White with helping invent the modern photographic essay. Her photos are not just works of art, but important artifacts in their own right. By capturing war, conflict and modernization from the front lines, Bourke-White created some of the most valuable visual documentation of the 20th century. ◾

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