What was margaret bourke-white style of photography

Margaret Bourke-White

American photographer and documentary photographer.(–)

For other people named Margaret White, see Margaret White.

Margaret Bourke-White (; June 14, – August 27, ) was an American photographer and documentary photographer.[1] She was the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviets' first five-year plan,[2] was the first American female war photojournalist, and took the photograph (of the construction of Fort Peck Dam) that became the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.[3][4][5]

Early life

Margaret Bourke-White,[6] born Margaret White[7] in the Bronx, New York,[8] was the daughter of Joseph White, a non-practicing Jew whose father came from Poland, and Minnie Bourke, who was of Irish Catholic descent.[9] She grew up in Middlesex, New Jersey (the Joseph and Minnie White House in Middlesex), and graduated from Plainfield High School in Union County.[8][10] From her naturalist father, an engineer and inventor, she claimed to have learned perfectionism; from her "resourceful homemaker" mother, she claimed to have developed “an unapologetic desire for self-improvement."[11] Her younger brother, Roger Bourke White, became a prominent Cleveland businessman and high-tech industry founder, and her older sister, Ruth White, became well known for her work at the American Bar Association in Chicago, Ill.[9] Roger Bourke White described their parents as "Free thinkers who were intensely interested in advancing themselves and humanity through personal achievement", attributing the success of their children in part to this quality.

He was not surprised at his sister Margaret's success, saying "[she] was not unfriendly or aloof".

Educational systems in philippines She had decided to focus less on machines and more on the people working the machines. Mature Period. In Margaret Bourke-White traveled to South Africa for five months to photograph apartheid and mine workers. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

Margaret's interest in photography began as a hobby in her youth, supported by her father's enthusiasm for cameras. Despite her interest, in , she began studying herpetology at Columbia University, only to have her interest in photography strengthened after studying under Clarence White (no relation).[8] She left after one semester, following the death of her father.[7]

She transferred colleges several times, attending the University of Michigan (where she was a photographer at the Michiganensian and became a member of Alpha Omicron Pi sorority),[12][13]Purdue University in Indiana, and Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.[7] Bourke-White ultimately graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in , leaving behind a photographic study of the rural campus for the school's newspaper, including photographs of her famed dormitory, Risley Hall.[7][8][14] A year later, she moved from Ithaca, New York, to Cleveland, Ohio, where she started a commercial photography studio and began concentrating on architectural and industrial photography.

Career

Architectural and commercial photography

One of Bourke-White's clients was Otis Steel Company. Her success was due to her skills with both people and her technique. Her experience at Otis is a good example. As she explains in Portrait of Myself, the Otis security people were reluctant to let her shoot for many reasons.

Firstly, steel making was a defense industry, so they wanted to be sure national security was not endangered. Second, she was a woman, and in those days, people wondered if a woman and her delicate cameras could stand up to the intense heat, hazard, and generally dirty and gritty conditions inside a steel mill. When she finally got permission, technical problems began.

Black-and-white film in that era was sensitive to blue light, not the reds and oranges of hot steel (In the words of her collaborator, the ambient red-orange light had no "actinic value"), so she could see the beauty, but the photographs were coming out all black.

My singing stopped when I saw the films. I could scarcely recognize anything on them.

Nothing but a half-dollar-sized disk marking the spot where the molten metal had churned up in the ladle. The glory had withered.

I couldn't understand it. "We're woefully underexposed," said Mr. Bemis. "Very woefully underexposed. That red light from the molten metal looks as though it's illuminating the whole place.

But it's all heat and no light. No actinic value."

She solved this problem by bringing along a new style of magnesiumflare, which produces white light, and having assistants hold the flares to light her scenes. Her abilities resulted in some of the best steel-factory photographs of that era, which earned her national attention.

"To me industrial forms were all the more beautiful because they were never designed to be beautiful.

Education Pakistan: The Class of 1947 - All Things Pakistan: The last two decades of Bourke-White's life were profoundly impacted by her diagnosis in with Parkinson's disease. Mikulski Donna E. List of Partners vendors. Retrieved April 22,

They had a simplicity of line that came from their direct application of purpose. Industry had evolved an unconscious beauty – often a hidden beauty that was waiting to be discovered"[15]

In , Bourke-White was hired to photograph the construction of what would become one of New York City's most elegant skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building.

She was deeply inspired by the new structure and especially smitten by the massive eagle's-head figures projecting off the building. In her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White wrote, ‘On the sixty-first floor, the workmen started building some curious structures which overhung 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue below.

When I learned these were to be gargoyles à la Notre Dame, but made of stainless steel as more suitable for the twentieth century, I decided that here would be my new studio. There was no place in the world that I would accept as a substitute.’

When the building's management initially refused to rent to a woman, Bourke-White secured a recommendation from Fortune magazine, her principal employer at the time, and opened her studio shortly thereafter.

She hired John Vassos to design the deluxe interior, whose clean modern lines echoed the building's bold and graceful exterior. The Chrysler Building itself became the subject matter for Bourke-White, with the gargoyles a focal point (see).[16]

Photojournalism

In the summer of Bourke-White accepted a job as associate editor and staff photographer for the new business-themed magazine Henry Luce was starting in the fall, Fortune magazine - a position she held until

In she became the first Western photographer allowed to enter the Soviet Union.[7]

When Luce began his third magazine, the oversized, photograph-centered Life magazine, in , he hired her as its first female photojournalist.[7] Her photographs of the construction of the Fort Peck Dam featured in Life's first issue, dated November 23, , including the cover.[17] Though Bourke-White titled the photo, New Deal, Montana: Fort Peck Dam, "it is actually a photo of the spillway located three miles east of the dam", according to a United States Army Corps of Engineers webpage.[18] This cover photograph became such a favorite that it was the s' representative in the United States Postal Service's Celebrate the Century series of commemorative postage stamps.

  • Education Pakistan: The Class of 1947 - All Things Pakistan
  • Photos That Gave Americans Their First Glimpse of Apartheid ...

    • She held the title of staff photographer at LIFE until , but returned from to ,[7] and again in , after which she stayed through her semi-retirement in (which ended her photography for the magazine)[5] and her full retirement in [7]

    During the mids, Bourke-White, like Dorothea Lange, photographed drought victims of the Dust Bowl.

    In the February 15, , issue of Life magazine, her famous photograph of black flood-victims standing in front of a sign that declared, "World's Highest Standard of Living", showing a white family, was published. The photograph later would become the basis for the artwork of Curtis Mayfield's album, There's No Place Like America Today.

    Marriage and photojournalism in the South and Nazi Europe

    Bourke-White met the bestselling novelist Erskine Caldwell in the mid-thirties. Caldwell specialized in writing about poor communities in the rural south, and he invited her to collaborate on a photojournalist expedition through the south, which produced the book You Have Seen Their Faces ().

    They collaborated on two more books North of the Danube () a travelogue about Czechoslovakia under the specter of Nazi occupation and Say, Is This the U.S.A. () about industrialization in the United States.[19] She lived with Caldwell for several years before they married in

    They traveled to Europe to record how Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were faring under Nazism.

    Soviet Union

    Bourke-White was "the first Western professional photographer permitted into the Soviet Union".[20] She travelled there in consecutive summers from to to document the first Five-Year Plan. While in the USSR, she photographed Joseph Stalin, as well as making portraits of Stalin's mother and great-aunt when visiting Georgia.

    She also took portraits of other famous people in the Soviet Union, such as Karl Radek, Sergei Eisenstein, and Hugh Cooper. She noted that the trips and work there required a lot of patience, and generally had mixed, yet positive impressions of the USSR. Her photographs were first published in Fortune magazine in under the title Eyes on Russia,[21] and then as a book with the same name by Simon and Schuster.[22] These photos additionally became "a six-part series in The New York Times (), a deluxe photo portfolio (), and a set of photomurals for the Soviet consulate in New York ().

    Still other photographs circulated in exhibitions, books, and periodicals around the globe, especially in Soviet magazines and postcards of the early s."[23]

    Bourke-White returned to the Soviet Union in during the Second World War.[23] With five cameras, 22 lenses, four developing tanks and 3, flashbulbs, her luggage weighed in total pounds.[24] The resulting body of work was published in a book titled Shooting the Russian War in [25]

    World War II

    Bourke-White was the first known female war correspondent,[7] as well as the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II.

    In she traveled to the Soviet Union just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggression. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. Taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy, she then captured the ensuing firestorms on camera.

    As the war progressed, she was attached to the U.S. Army Air Force in North Africa, then to the U.S.

    Army in Italy and later in Germany. She repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting. On January 22, , Major Rudolph Emil Flack piloted the lead aircraft with Margaret Bourke-White (the first female photographer/writer to fly on a combat mission) aboard his th Bombardment Squadron BF and bombed the El Aouina Airdrome in Tunis, Tunisia.[26]

    "The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life staff as 'Maggie the Indestructible.'"[5] The incident in the Mediterranean refers to the sinking of the England-Africa bound British troopship SS Strathallan that she recorded in an article, "Women in Lifeboats", in Life, February 22, Though disliked by General Dwight D Eisenhower, she became friendly with his chauffeur/secretary, Irishwoman Kay Summersby, with whom she shared the lifeboat.[citation needed]

    In the spring of she traveled throughout a collapsing Germany with S.

    Patton. She arrived at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp, and later said, "Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me." After the war she produced a book entitled Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.[citation needed]

    The editor of a collection of Bourke-White's photographs wrote: "To many who got in the way of a Bourke-White photograph—and that included not just bureaucrats and functionaries but professional colleagues like assistants, reporters, and other photographers—she was regarded as imperious, calculating, and insensitive."[5]

    Recording the India–Pakistan partition violence

    Bourke-White is known equally well in both India and Pakistan for her photographs of Dr.

    Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar at his home Rajgriha, Dadar in Mumbai on the occasion of a third impression of his book which was published in December as Thoughts on Pakistan (the book was republished in under the title India's Political What's What: Pakistan or Partition of India). These photographs were published on the Life magazine cover.

    She also photographed M. K. Gandhi (at his spinning wheel) and Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah (upright in a chair).[27][28]

    She was "one of the most effective chroniclers" of the violence that erupted at the independence and partition of India and Pakistan, according to Somini Sengupta, who calls her photographs of the episode "gut-wrenching, and staring at them, you glimpse the photographer's undaunted desire to stare down horror".

    She recorded streets littered with corpses, dead victims with open eyes, and refugees with vacant eyes. "Bourke-White's photographs seem to scream on the page", Sengupta wrote.[27]

    Sixty-six of Bourke-White's photographs of the partition violence featured in a reissue of Khushwant Singh's novel about the disruption, Train to Pakistan.

    In connection with the reissue, many of the photographs in the book were displayed at "the posh shopping center Khan Market" in Delhi, India. "More astonishing than the images blown up large as life was the number of shoppers who seemed not to register them", Sengupta wrote. No memorial to the partition victims exists in India, according to Pramod Kapoor, head of Roli, the Indian publishing house coming out with the new book.[27]

    She had a knack for being at the right place at the right time: she interviewed and photographed Mohandas K.

    Gandhi just a few hours before his assassination in [29]Alfred Eisenstaedt, her friend and colleague, said one of her strengths was that there was no assignment and no picture that was unimportant to her. She also started the first photography laboratory at Life magazine.[11]

    Korean War

    She served as a photographer for Life during Korean War of –[30]

    Awards

    Later years

    In , Bourke-White developed her first symptoms of Parkinson's disease.[7] She was forced to slow her career to fight encroaching paralysis.[5] In and she underwent several operations to treat her condition,[7] which effectively ended her tremors but affected her speech.[5] Bourke-White wrote an autobiography, Portrait of Myself, which was published in and became a bestseller, but she grew increasingly infirm and isolated in her home in Darien, Connecticut.

    A pension plan set up in the s, "though generous for that time", no longer covered her health-care costs. She also suffered financially from her personal generosity and from "less-than-responsible attendant care".[5]

    Personal life

    In , during her studies, she married Everett Chapman, but the couple divorced two years later.[11] Margaret White added her mother's surname, "Bourke", to her name in and hyphenated it.

    Bourke-White and novelist Erskine Caldwell were married from to their divorce in [7]

    Death

    In she died at Stamford Hospital in Stamford, Connecticut, aged 67, from Parkinson's disease.[6][7][31]

    Publications

    Works

    • Eyes on Russia ()
    • You Have Seen Their Faces (; with Erskine Caldwell), ISBN&#;X
    • North of the Danube (; with Erskine Caldwell), ISBN&#;
    • Shooting the Russian War ()
    • They Called it "Purple Heart Valley" ()
    • Halfway to Freedom; a report on the new India ()
    • Interview with India,()
    • Portrait of Myself.

      Simon Schuster (), ISBN&#;

    • Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly ()
    • The Taste of War (selections from her writings edited by Jonathan Silverman), ISBN&#;
    • Say, Is This the USA? (republished ), ISBN&#;
    • The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, ISBN&#;

    Biographies and collections

    • Margaret Bourke-White: Photography of Design, –, ISBN&#;
    • Margaret Bourke-White, ISBN&#;
    • Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer, ISBN&#;
    • Margaret Bourke-White: Adventurous Photographer, ISBN&#;
    • Power and Paper, Margaret Bourke-White: Modernity and the Documentary Mode, ISBN&#;
    • Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography by Vickie Goldberg (Harper & Row, ), ISBN&#;
    • Bourke-White: A Retrospective, Collected and Circulated by the International Center of Photography, New York. Exhibition catalog United Technologies Corporation,
    • Margaret Bourke-White: Twenty Parachutes, Nazraeli Press, , ISBN&#;
    • Margaret Bourke-White: The Early Work, –.

      Selected, with an essay by Ronald E. Ostman and Harry Littel (David E Godine, ), ISBN&#;

    • For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White by Jonathan Silverman, ISBN&#;X
    • Down North: John Buchan and Margaret Bourke-White on the Mackenzie by John Brinckman, ISBN&#;
    • Witness to Life and Freedom: Margaret Bourke-White in India & Pakistan by Pramod Kapoor (Roli & Janssen, ), ISBN&#;

    Legacy

    Photographs by Bourke-White are in the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art[32] and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as in the collection of the Library of Congress.[11] A foot-long photomural she created for NBC in , for the Rotunda in the broadcaster's Rockefeller Center headquarters, was destroyed in the s.

    In , when the Rotunda and Grand Staircase leading up to it were rebuilt, the photomural was faithfully recreated in digital form on the degree LED screens on the Rotunda's walls. It forms one of the stops on the NBC Studio Tour.

    Many of her manuscripts, memorabilia, photographs, and negatives are housed in Syracuse University's Bird Library Special Collections section.

    Exhibitions

    Group

    • John Becker Gallery, New York: (Photographs by Three Americans, with Ralph Steiner and Walker Evans)
    • Museum of Modern Art, New York (Six Women Photographers, (Memorable Life Photographs))[33]

    Solo

    Public collections

    Art Market

    In April , Phillips NY auctioned Gargoyle, Chrysler Building, New York City (c) for an above-high estimate $,[16]

    Posthumous accolades

    Media portrayals

    References

    1. ^Hudson, Berkley ().

      Sterling, Christopher H. (ed.).

    2. Margaret bourke-white interesting facts
    3. How did margaret bourke-white die
    4. Who influenced margaret bourke-white
    5. Margaret bourke-white most famous photo

      6. Encyclopedia of Journalism. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. pp.&#;– ISBN&#;.

    6. ^Whisenhunt, William Benton; Saul, Norman E. (). New Perspectives on Russian-American Relations. New York City: Routledge.

      Educational systems fcu credit union Measure advertising performance. World War II [ edit ]. Sterling, Christopher H. Early life [ edit ].

      p.&#; ISBN&#;. OCLC&#;

    7. ^"Margaret Bourke-White, Photo-Journalist, Is Dead; Margaret Bourke-White, Photo-Journalist, Dead at 67". The New York Times. Retrieved October 4,
    8. ^"Bourke-White's Soft Focus". Washington Post.

      Margaret bourke-white educational systems Indeed, her featured photo-essay, "South Africa and its Problems", was most Americans' first introduction to the flagrant racial injustices facing Black South Africans. Media portrayals [ edit ]. During her time there, she came into contact with a twenty-nine-year-old man who had been forced to work as a guerilla for two years but had recently surrendered giving him immunity from prosecution. Childhood and Education.

      Retrieved October 4,

    9. ^ abcdefgCallahan, Sean. "The Last Days of a Legend". Scout Productions. Bullfinch Press. Archived from the original on December 13, Retrieved March 7,
    10. ^ ab"ULAN Full Record Display – Bourke-White, Margaret".

      Union List of Artist Names – Getty Research. The J. Paul Getty Trust. Retrieved June 4,

    11. ^ abcdefghijklmnopqGaze, Delia, ed.

      (). Dictionary of Artists, Volume 1. Taylor & Francis. p.&#; ISBN&#;.

    12. ^ abcd"The Industrial Revelations of Margaret Bourke-White". USA Today, the Society for the Advancement of Education.

      April Retrieved June 5,

    13. ^ abBourke White, Roger. "Roger White's Autobiography: The Early Days". .

      Education systems Nim Churl Jin and his mother, Korea She took many photographs of the Civil-Disobedience pioneer, Mohandas Gandhi, often with his family or in worship and even on his death bed. Over five weeks, she took thousands of photos of projects and workers, documenting the Soviet Union's first Five Year Plan for industrialization. She photographed women and children amid the dirt and decay of urban shantytowns.

      Retrieved June 2,

    14. ^"Margaret Bourke-White". Temple University. Archived from the original on September 12, Retrieved June 21,
    15. ^ abcd"Margaret Bourke-White". Gallery M.

      Retrieved July 2,

    16. ^Clarke, Kim. "'Our Linked Lives'". University of Michigan Heritage Project. Retrieved June 30,
    17. ^"Greek Life NPC Alpha Omicron Pi". Student Affairs. East Carolina University. Archived from the original on January 7, Retrieved June 5,
    18. ^Bourke-White, Margaret; Ostman, Ronald Elroy & Littell, Harry ().

      Margaret Bourke-White: The Early Work, –. David R. Godine Publisher. p.&#; ISBN&#;.

    19. ^Bourke-White, Margaret (). Portrait of Myself. New York City: Simon & Schuster. p.&#;
    20. ^ ab"Margaret Bourke-White - Photographs New York Tuesday, April 4, ".

      Phillips. April 4, Retrieved April 22,

    21. ^Cosgrove, Ben. "LIFE's First Cover Story: Building the Fort Peck Dam, ". LIFE. Retrieved April 30,
    22. ^"Did You Know: A Famous Female Photographer's Shot of a Corps Project was LIFE's First Cover?". U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Office of History.

      Archived from the original on April 9, Retrieved July 2,

    23. ^"Erskine Caldwell, Margaret Bourke-White, and the Popular Front".
    24. ^"Women Photojournalists: Margaret Bourke-White () - Introduction & Biographical Essay". Library of Congress. August 28, Retrieved April 13,
    25. ^Wolfe, Ross (December 16, ).

      "Margaret Bourke-White in the USSR, ". The Charnel-House. Retrieved April 13,

    26. ^Bourke-White, Margaret (). Eyes on Russia. New York: Simon and Schuster.
    27. ^ abJohnson, Josie (Fall ). "A "Russianesque Camera Artist": Margaret Bourke-White's American-Soviet Photography".

      Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. 6 (2). Retrieved April 14,

    28. ^ ab"Margaret Bourke-White". International Photography Hall of Fame. Retrieved July 22,
    29. ^"Shooting the Russian War".

      Yale University Art Gallery. Retrieved April 14,

    30. ^Refer to the March 1, Life article titled Bourke-White Goes Bombing.
    31. ^ abcSengupta, Somini (September 21, ). "Author Bears Steady Witness To Partition's Wounds". The New York Times.

      pp.&#;E1 & E7.

    32. ^Kapoor, Pramod (). Witness to Life and Freedom&#;: Margaret Bourke-White in India & Pakistan. New Delhi: Lustre Press, Roli Books. ISBN&#;.
    33. ^Bourke-White, Margaret (). Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India in the Words and Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White.

      New York: Simon and Schuster. pp.&#;–

    34. ^Cosgrove, Ben (March 18, ). "LIFE in Korea: Rare and Classic Photos From the 'Forgotten War'". LIFE. Archived from the original on June 1,
    35. ^Whitman, Alden (August 28, ). "Margaret Bourke-White, Photo-Journalist, Dead at 67". The New York Times.

      Retrieved March 21,

    36. ^"Margaret Bourke-White". New Mexico Museum of Art. Retrieved September 20,
    37. ^ ab"Bourke-White, Margaret". Dictionary of Women Artists. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.
    38. ^"Margaret Bourke-White".

      Art Institute of Chicago.

    39. ^"Margaret Bourke-White". .
    40. ^"Bourke-White, Margaret". National Women's Hall of Fame.
    41. ^"Honorees: National Women's History Month". Women's History Month. National Women's History Project. Archived from the original on June 3, Retrieved June 14,
    42. ^"'장사리' 메간 폭스 출연에 숨겨진 사연은?" [What is the story behind Megan Fox's appearance in 'Jangsari'?].

      Naver (in Korean). September 21,

    External links