Margaret Bourke-White

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By air strikes the USAAF destroyed oil industry in the third port of Hamburg-Harburg , Fall 1945

Margaret Bourke-White (born June 14, 1904 in New York , † August 27, 1971 in Stamford , Connecticut ) was an American photo reporter . As Lieutenant Colonel, she was the first female war correspondent for the US armed forces and a photographer for the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) towards the end of World War II . One of her pictures, The Living Dead of Buchenwald (incorrectly translated into German: Die Leben Toten von Buchenwald ), is one of the most famous of the 20th century.

Life

youth

Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx , New York , to the Roman Catholic Minnie Bourke and the non-practicing Jew Joseph White . She had an older sister, Ruth White, and a younger brother, Roger White. Bourke-White received a college education that was not yet common for girls at the time . She married Everett Chapman at the age of 20 and divorced two years later.

Architecture and industrial photography

After graduating in 1927, she opened her first photography studio in Cleveland , Ohio and began her career as an architecture and industrial photographer . Her spectacular shots of industrial plants represented a new and much-noticed photographic approach to the rapid economic development of the United States.

Photojournalism

She quickly received orders from renowned magazines. The bridges and steel factories she photographed illustrated the cover story of the first edition of Fortune in 1930 , of which she was co-editor. In 1931 she opened her photo studio in New York's Chrysler Building .

In 1930 she traveled to the Soviet Union for the first time , which is currently in the process of promoting industrialization. Pictures were created that capture gigantic construction projects (factories and power stations), but also do not leave out simple, exploited workers. During the 1930s she made photo reports about IG Farben and the Hamburg shipyards, as well as about the large construction site in the Soviet industrial city of Magnitogorsk in western Siberia .

In the first issue of Life magazine from November 1936, of which Bourke-White was a founding member, she provided the cover picture and the cover story about the construction of the dam on Fort Peck Lake in the USA. Alongside Walker Evans and W. Eugene Smith , Bourke-White is one of the pioneers of the photo essay. When the first issue of Fortune magazine appeared in 1930 , it provided the images for the cover story.

But through her extravagant lifestyle and energetic demeanor, she too became an object of the media and a type model for the modern, emancipated woman.

In 1937, she published an illustrated book together with the writer Erskine Caldwell about the living conditions of field workers in the southern United States ( Dust Bowl ), whose existence was endangered by an extreme drought during this period. You Have Seen Their Faces is considered one of her most important works. In 1939 she married Erskine, from whom she divorced in 1942. In 1938 she set off on a trip to Europe and worked on a photo report on the Sudeten crisis in Czechoslovakia .

Second World War

In 1941 she went to Moscow for Life . During the German attack on the Soviet Union , she was the only western photo reporter in the city and documented above all the German air raids on the Soviet capital . She became the first female war correspondent in the US Army, including in England, North Africa and Italy. As a photographer for the United States Army Air Forces, she traveled through Germany with General George S. Patton and was present at the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp and the Leipzig-Thekla forced labor camp . Her picture Die Leben Toten von Buchenwald from 1945 is one of the most famous and impressive photographs of the 20th century.

She has also portrayed many celebrities such as Franklin D. Roosevelt , Josef Stalin , Winston Churchill and Marlon Brando .

Post-war years

In autumn 1945 she was commissioned by the USAAF to document the destruction of German cities with aerial photographs. In 1946 she photographed one of her most famous pictures for Life : Mahatma Gandhi at the spinning wheel. In the following years Margaret Bourke-White documented the partition of India , and later the Korean War . She also toured South Africa during apartheid .

Late years

In the mid-1950s, Bourke-White contracted Parkinson's disease and had to limit her work more and more. Her life was so full of extraordinary events that her autobiography, published in 1963, was on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks . In 1971 she died of complications from Parkinson's disease.

Works (selection)

Reports

  • The Story of Steel 1928
  • Eyes on Russia 1931
  • You Have Seen Their Faces 1937
  • North of the Danube 1939
  • Say, Is This the USA 1941
  • Shooting the Russian War 1942
  • They Called It "Purple Heart Valley" 1944
  • "Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly" 1946
  • Half Way to Freedom: A Report on the New India 1949
  • Interview with India, 1950
  • A Report on the American Jesuits 1956
  • Portrait of Myself 1963

Exhibitions

  • Russian Photographs, American Russian Institute, New York 1931
  • Little Carnegie Playhouse, New York 1932
  • Art Institute of Chicago 1956
  • Bourke-White's People, Syracuse University, New York 1966
  • Witkin Gallery, New York. Carl Seinbab Gallery, Boston 1971
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 1972
  • University of California, Santa Clara 1974
  • Allen Frumkin Gallery, New York. Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York 1975
  • The Early Years, Washington Public Library, New York 1975
  • Syracuse University, New York. Witkin Gallery, New York 1978
  • "The Humanitarian Vision", Joe and Emily Lowe Gallery, Syracuse University, New York 1983
  • "The Humanitarian Vision", European tour through 20 European cities 1984–1985
  • "The Humanitarian Vision", Kunsthaus Zürich 1985
  • "Margaret Bourke-White. Moments in History. Photographs 1930–1945", Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and art foyer of the Bavarian Insurance Chamber, Munich 2013

Collections

Margaret Bourke-White's works are now an important part of the following collections

Your estate is administered by Syracuse University , New York.

Awards

  • Honorary Doctorate: Rutgers University , 1948
  • Honorary Doctorate from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), 1951
  • Achievement Award: Travel and Leisure, 1963
  • Honor Roll Award: American Society of Media Photographers, 1964

She was also recognized by the National Women's History Project .

literature

  • Susan Goldman Rubin: Margaret Bourke White. Her Pictures Were Her Life. Harry N. Abrams, New York 1999, ISBN 0-8109-4381-6 .
  • John Stomber: Power and Paper. Margaret Bourke-White, Modernity, and the Documentary Mode . Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, Mass. 1998 (catalog of the exhibition of the same name, March 6 to April 12, 1998).
  • Margaret Bourke-White: Germany - April 1945 ( Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly. A report on the collapse of Hitler's "Thousand Years" , 1946). Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-921375-34-7 (EA 1979).
  • Margaret Bourke-White: Light and Shadow. My life and my pictures ( Portrait of myself , 1964). Droemer / Knaur, Munich 1964.
  • Elisabeth Bronfen, Daniel Kampa (ed.): An American in Hitler's bathtub. Three women report on the war: Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Miller and Martha Gellhorn. With an afterword by Elisabeth Bronfen. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-455-50365-4 .

Others

In the film Gandhi (1982) Candice Bergen appeared as Margaret Bourke (-) White.

In 1989 Bourke-White was portrayed in the television film Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White (German title: ... and her dream comes true ) by Farrah Fawcett .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Peter Geimer: At dizzying heights, before a gruesome abyss. In: faz.net. January 22, 2013, accessed December 11, 2014 .
  2. ↑ a b eye of their time . In: Der Spiegel . No. 3 , 2013 ( online ).
  3. ↑ Florian Christner: Moments of History - VKB-Kunstfoyer in Munich shows pictures by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In: Bayernkurier. June 8, 2013.
  4. ↑ Florian Christner: Moments of History - VKB-Kunstfoyer in Munich shows pictures by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In: Bayernkurier. June 8, 2013.
  5. ^ Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White. Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 .

Web links

Commons : Margaret Bourke-White  -Collection of Images
personal data
SURNAME Bourke-White, Margaret
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bourke-White, Maggy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photo reporter
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH August 27, 1971
Place of death Stamford , Connecticut