As an accredited photojournalist, she captured images of the Partition of India and Gandhi at his spinning wheel.  During her storied career, she was stranded on an Arctic island, her boat was torpedoed, and her helicopter caught fire.  When the germans bombed Moscow, she was there too. Yet, she survived it all, earning her the nickname ‘Indestructible Maggie’ from her Life colleagues.

The Early Years

Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx on her parent’s wedding anniversary on June 14, 1904. Her father, Joseph, was an inventor and printing engineer from a Jewish Orthodox family. Her mother, Minnie, a Protestant, was the daughter of an Irish ship’s carpenter and an English cook. The family moved to Bound Book, N. J., when Bourke-White was very young, and she was homeschooled.

Her mother stressed the value of courage, determination, and fear of nothing. Bourke-White took it to heart and constantly challenged herself. Her father, Joseph, was an avid photographer and naturalist who took her with him when photographing. His work improved the four-colour printing process that is used for books and magazines. Bourke-White helped her father develop his images in the family bathtub. However, she didn’t take up photography until after her father’s death in 1922.

University Studies

Bourke-White entered Columbia University in 1921 before transferring to the University of Michigan. There she met Everett Chapman, an electrical engineering graduate. They married on June 13, 1924. Next, the pair transferred to Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, before transferring to Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Unfortunately, the marriage broke down after two years. Newly separated, Bourke-White moved to Ithaca, N.Y., to attend Cornell University for her senior year.

Photography

While at Cornell, Bourke-White began by selling pictures of the school buildings and grounds to the Cornell Alumni News and fellow students. After several architects praised her photographs, she travelled to New York City. She walked unannounced into an architect’s office to get an unbiased opinion of her portfolio. Impressed, the architect assured her she could find work with any architectural firm in the country.

“Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.”

~Margaret Bourke-White~

In 1927 she graduated from Cornell and finalised her divorce. Bourke-White then legally reverted to her maiden name and added her mother’s maiden name with a hyphen. She then took a boat to Cleveland, wanting to photograph the steel mills and set up her studio.

In 1928 she opened a proper studio in Cleveland’s landmark TerminalNearfar from the tower, stretching to Lake Erie’s edge, was an industrial wasteland known as The Flats. To her, it was “a photographic paradise.”

“I did my processing in the kitchenette, the rinsing in the bathtub, and the living room served as reception room when the in-a-door bed was pushed out of the way.”

~Margaret Bourke-White~

The Steel Mills

The steel mills were off-limits to women. Undaunted, she worked hard to convince the company’s head Elroy Klaus to allow her access to the sites. Bourke-White received many objections from the night supervisor, who complained she was distracting the workers because she was “crawling all over the place […] and the men are stumbling around gawking up at her. Someone is going to get hurt, and besides, they’re not getting any work done”. However, she persevered and captured the gritty reality of what the steel mill was like creating beautiful images of the industrial machinery.

After months of experimenting and discovering a new printing paper, she produced impressive pictures of the steel-making process. Her photographs of the mills and those she took of the construction of the Fort Peck Dam brought her to the attention of Henry Luce from Life magazine. Luce consequently hired her as a photojournalist, making her the first woman photojournalist hired by the magazine. Her image of the Peck Dam also graced the first ever cover of Life magazine.

The Chrysler Building

In the winter of 1929-30, Bourke-White was given the job of photographing every phase in the construction process. The Chrysler building was reputed to be the tallest in the world. However, sceptics alleged the steel tower at its top was nothing more than an ornament designed to give it to record height. Bourke-White’s photographs proved that the tower was “integral to the architecture”.

Working in freezing winds, she had to position herself on a swaying tower, eight hundred feet above street level, to get the desired shots. Bourke-White rose to the challenge.

“with three men holding the tripod so the camera would not fly into the street and endanger pedestrians … my camera cloth whipping and stinging my eyes as I focused … I tried to get the feel of the tower’s sway in my body so I could make exposures during that fleeting instant … when … the tower was at the quietest part of its sway”

~Margaret Bourke-White~

Louisville Floods

In 1937 the Ohio River flooded Louisville, Kentucky, in one of the United States’ greatest natural disasters. Today, it remains the greatest flood to hit Louisville, exceeding even Katrina. Seventy percent of Lousiville was submerged, forcing 170,000 residents to flee their homes. Life magazine despatched Bourke-White as a staff photographer, her plane landing minutes before the airport runways flooded. She then waded through the city and floated on rafts to get the shots she wanted.

The result was her now famous photograph of African-American flood victims waiting for rations and relief. Ironically they were queued up under a billboard that said: ‘World’s Highest Standard Of Living / There’s No Way Like The American Way. Her image highlighting the inequality of the time became famous. Bourke-White told stories in pictures, one shot at a time, with each image forming part of the bigger story. This technique became known as the photographic essay.

The Depression Years

During the mid-1930s, like Dorothea Lange, she photographed the drought victims of the dust bowl. While working at Life, Bourke-White began collaborating with Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell, the author of Tobacco Road. Together they worked on a book documenting the impact of the -Great Depression on the South. At the height of the Great Depression, Bourke-White and Caldwell travelled the back roads of the Deep South. They drove through Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee, documenting sharecroppers’ living conditions. In their book: Have You See Their Faces, Caldwell wrote the text, and Bourke-White photographed the lives and living conditions of the country’s poorest citizens. Published in November 1937, the book achieved critical acclaim and tremendous success. However, it also attracted criticism for reinforcing stereotypes.

The PRE War Years

In 1938 Life magazine sent Bourke-White and Caldwell to Czechoslovakia and Hungary to document the rise of Hitler and Nazism. Bourke-White and Caldwell spent about six months on various assignments, collecting material for the book later published as North of the Danube.

Bourke-White and Caldwell married in Silver City, Nevada, on February 27, 1939. Life sent Bourke-White to England to photograph the country’s preparations for war. She was then sent to Romania, Turkey, and the Middle East. Returning to the States, she and Caldwell embarked on a cross-country reunion trip, working together to document American life. They followed this up with a trip around the world. Bourke-White packed five cameras, twenty-two lenses, four portable developing tanks, and three thousand peanut flashbulbs. Her luggage weighed 600 pounds.

Moscow Bombing

They stopped in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. When Germany attacked Moscow, bombing the Kremlin, Bourke-White was the only Western photographer in the city. Initially, she photographed the bombing of Moscow from the roof of the American embassy because the blackout wardens forced everyone underground during the raids. When the embassy was hit, she moved to the balcony of her hotel room.

As the balcony of her hotel room faced the Kremlin and Red Square, she set up multiple cameras on the balcony when the raids began, then rushed to the underground shelters. After the all-clear was given, she returned to close the shutters and develop the film in the bathroom. For twenty-two nights, Bourke-White risked her life while photographing the raids and scooping every other publication. During that time, she also photographed Josef Stalin.

The War Years

Back in the United States, in 1941, the U.S. entered the war.  Shortly after their return, Life sent Bourke-White back to England to photograph the American B-17 bombers headed for war. Caldwell asked for a divorce, which became final in 1942.

Bourke-White became the first female war correspondent accredited by the military. In 1942 LIFE Magazine negotiated with the Pentagon, which gave the magazine and the Air Force rights to any photographs she made. In another first, U.S. Air Force designed the first uniform for a female war correspondent for her. She was the first woman to accompany Air Force crews on bombing missions in 1942.

While crossing the Atlantic to North Africa, her transport ship, the SS Strathallan, was torpedoed and sunk. She escaped with others on a lifeboat, continuing to photograph her ordeal with her Rolleiflex, the one camera she managed to save. Rescued, she covered the Allied infantrymen during the Italian war’s end. While in Italy, she repeatedly came under fire. She then covered the siege of Moscow, and towards the war’s end, she crossed the Rhine River with General Patton’s Third Army.

Buchenwald

Bourke-White photographed some of the most appalling scenes of the war. From Nazi officials and their families dead by suicide to a small Nazi work camp where the Jewish prisoners had been set on fire. She was with the army for the liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp two hours after the Nazi guards fled. Her photographs of the skeletal survivors and stacks of human bodies gave the world one of the first horrible views of what would come to be called the Holocaust. She distanced herself from the horrors she saw by concentrating on her photographs. Only later, developing her prints, did she acknowledge the horror she had observed. Her father was Jewish, a secret she kept from all but three or four close friends. After Germany’s surrender, she published Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report Ovariousse Of Hitler’s Thousand Years. in 1946.

The Dear Fatherland book saturated with her anger, her hatred of Germany, her commitment to democratic ideas, and her despair over American indifference to the moral implications of the war”.

Vicky Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White Biographer

India and Post War

In 1946, after World War II, she travelled to India. She became well known for her photographs of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, father of the modern Buddhist Movement, and India’s leader, Mahatma Gandhi, at the spinning wheel. Bourke-White also chronicled the violence that erupted at the partition of India and Pakistan. That division of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan resulted in a mass migration10 million people fleeing for their lives. Sixty-six of Bourke-White’s photographs of the partition violence were included in a 2006 reissue of Singh’s 1956 novel about the disruption, Train to Pakistan. On Margaret’s last day in India, she met with Gandhi. Just a few hours later, on his way to evening prayer, he was assassinated.

Korean War

After two years in India, she went to Korea to photograph the American troops on the frontline. This would be one of her last major assignments for Life magazine. Bourke-White spent nine months in South Korea, travelling through the wilderness, surviving typhoons, gunfire, and ambushes, and photographing guerilla warfare. Finally, she returned home in January of 1953 with the powerful story of a Korean family she reunited with the son they had presumed dead for two years.

Later Life

While reporting the Korean War, she noticed a dull ache in her left leg and arm. When she returned to the U.S, she consulted a neurologist. A diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease followed in 1954. By 1957, despite physical therapy, she was unable to continue working. Nevertheless, she kept her illness a secret for fear of not being given any more Life assignments. She fought Parkinson’s for almost 20 years, enduring arduous rehabilitation therapy and two risky brain operations to halt the disease’s progress. Finally, in the summer of 1971, she fell and was taken to hospital.

Bourke-White lost her battle against Parkinson’s disease on August 27, 1971, aged 67. Over her life, she published 11 books and pioneered quality photojournalism and photo essay. The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum inducted her in 1990, followed by the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame in 2015.

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