An Eye on the World
Content
car,
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AN EYE CN
THE W€CLE)
AN EYE CN
TEE WCREE
Margaret Bourke-White,
Photographer
BEATRICE SIEGEL
Warne
New York London
Frederick
To
£
Copyright
my
dear
Aunt Naomi
1980 by Beatrice Siegel
Xo part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
means without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief
All rights reserved.
or by any
quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in
a
magazine
or newspaper.
Frederick
New
Warne &
York,
New
Co., Inc.
York
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Siegel, Beatrice.
An
eye on the world.
Bibliography:
p.
Includes index.
SUMMARY: A
biography of
a
woman renowned
for her photographic interpretations
of war, revolution, and poverty and for her personal battle against Parkinsonism.
2.
States
ISBN
A
—
—
Bourke-White, Margaret, 1904-1971 Juvenile literature. 2. Photographers UnitBiography Juvenile literature. [1. Bourke-White, Margaret, 1904-1971.
770\92'4 [B] [92] 79-2432
Photographers] I. Title. TR140.B6S58
1.
ed
—
—
0-7232-6173-3
Selection of the Junior Literary Guild
Printed in the U.S.A. by Maple Press
Book Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
vii
On Cameras by Morris Engel
OF TOADS, SNAKES,
ix
AND BUTTERFLIES
3
THE GIRL WHO TAKES PICTURES 19
"DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN
PEARLS" 31
WITH A CAMERA IN HER HAND 45
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY 61
"NERVOUS AS A CA T" 73
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THA T WOMEN NEVER DO"
"EYES LIKE THE EAGLE"
97
THE TO UGHEST ASSIGNMENT 1 1
Selected Bibliography
Index
119
Photograph Credits
V
US
124
85
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
would
my gratitude
like to express
to
Roger
B.
White
erous help and for permission to use family diaries,
photographs.
I
would
also like to express
my
for his gen-
and
Ralph
letters,
appreciation to
one of Miss Bourke-White's editors and friend, for read-
Ingersoll,
ing the manuscript.
Others
thor,
would
I
who
like to
me
gave
thank
are:
Sean Callahan, editor and au-
the benefit of his personal experiences with
Miss Bourke-White; Theodore M. Brown, Professor of Art History, Cornell University, for a lengthy interview; Carolyn A. Davis,
the helpful guardian of the Bourke-White Collection and
script Librarian,
The
Manu-
George Arents Research Library, Syracuse
University; and Susan Kismaric, Assistant Curator, Department of
Photography,
Thanks
and
my
Museum
also to
husband,
of
Modern
Art,
New
York.
Ann Cooper, a research resource,
who undertook the role of research
photographer
Sam
Siegel,
assistant.
And
finally
I
would
like to
express
my appreciation
to the family
members, schoolmates, and colleagues of Margaret Bourke-White
who kindly drew on their memories of past days for this book.
BEATRICE SIEGEL
vii
r
V-
i
7? r\
«^'^
CN CAMERAS
By Morris Engel
Though
the cameras Margaret Bourke-White used at the beginning of her career are still in use today, they bear little resemblance to the small, easy-to-handle instruments most of us know.
Today, the latest miniature candid cameras are completely automatic, and some even have automatic focus. They use a roll of film
that can give 20 or 36 pictures and permit the recording of any rap-
moving subject. In the 1920s, however, these technical advanwere not available.
Margaret's first cameras were large and their operation required
idly
tages
Margaret had to select and compose the subject. Then, she had to determine the exposure, set the
shutter speed and lens opening, and focus the lens under the dark
covering cloth needed to shut out the light. Finally, she would insert the film holder (each picture was made from a single sheet of
film), remove the slide, and release the shutter. The slow speed of
the camera required the use of a tripod (a three-legged stand)
which held the camera steady.
slow and painstaking
steps. First,
IX
X
Margaret's basic cameras were the
/4 and
4%
a light
Soho Reflex,
Speed
heavy
Graflex, and a 35mm Contax. When on assignment, she added to
these cameras varied focal length lenses which permit differentsized images, wide views, and close-ups. She also needed large
supplies of film and flashbulbs. It made a substantial load of equipment.
In the decade of the 1930s, Margaret added to her arsenal of
equipment newly-developed compact cameras. These small cam3
Graphic, and the Linhof. She also used
x
eras permitted her a greater flexibility of
manding
(film size)
movement
subjects she photographed, especially during
a
in the de-
World War
II.
Margaret was continuously confronted with decisions: which
camera to use, and which lens, whether to use a flash (and if so, a
single or multi-flash), and whether or not to use a tripod. At the
same time she had to decide questions of even greater importance,
such as: who, what, where, when, and why to photograph. These
questions had to be quickly answered.
The camera gear that Margaret carried around created many
supply problems. She was a prolific "shooter" with many cameras
in constant use.
Margaret's work
ample evidence that she solved most of her
problems. It was perhaps good timing that the photographic improvements in cameras, film, lenses, and flash equipment coincided with her
own
is
development.
Margaret Bourke-White understood cameras, both the larger and
Her talent was so great that she made remarkable
photographs with the early, slower cameras. The newer, faster
ones gave her even greater range and freedom.
smaller ones.
XI
well-known photographer and filmmaker. He
and Margaret Bourke-White knew one another at the Photo
League in the late 1930s, and both worked at one of the landmark
newspapers of the 1940s, P.M.
MORRIS ENGEL
is
a
AN EYE CN
THE WORLD
\
V*
cr TOADS,
SNAKES, AND
DDTTCDDLICS
Through
the long night Margaret sat on the
edge of her chair, her eyes fixed on an overturned glass on the windowsill. All
summer
she had collected caterpillars and lined them
up under
glass jars. In
books on insects she
had found out what these caterpillars ate
and had fed each one a diet of its favorite
leaves. She had watched the caterpillars change into the
next stage of growth, enclosed in a firm case called a chrysalis. Earlier that warm September day she had noticed a
slight wriggle in one of the chrysalises. Now, joined by her
family in the all-night
Margaret at
11, holding
vigil,
she waited. Occasionally she
a baby robin while the father robin feeds
3
it
glanced over
at
her parents and her older
sitting patiently
on
sister,
Ruth, also
stiff-backed dining-room chairs.
Only
her two-year-old brother, Roger, seven years younger than
Margaret, was
still
asleep in his upstairs bedroom.
"Look," Margaret shouted when she saw the chrysalis
split open. Then, completely absorbed, she sat through the
long, slow process and saw a wet, curled up, shapeless insect
slowly pull itself out of the chrysalis, stretch and smooth out
its wrinkled wings, and become transformed into a full-
blown beautiful butterfly.
Not only caterpillars interested Margaret. She brought
home
toads,
damp
pieces of tree bark encrusted with strange
with insects. Her favorite pet was a boa
constrictor her father had given her as a gift. She knew it
was a harmless snake. So was the old puff adder that sometimes lay curled up in her mother's lap when she sat reading
newspapers in front of the fireplace. But friends and neighbors who dropped in to visit often shrieked in fright when
they saw so much wildlife scattered over the dining-room
eggs,
and
jars filled
floor.
Even before Margaret learned
to read
and write
in the
neighborhood school, her parents taught her to love everything in nature. She never saw them deliberately crush the
smallest insect. A bee buzzing around the house would be
caught in a glass and carefully freed outdoors.
Her parents had in common a love for nature. And they
both came from poor families that had settled in the United
States in the mid-1800s. In
was very
Her
many
ways, though, their ances-
Joseph White, was of Polish Jewish origin, and her mother, Minnie Bourke, was Irish
try
different.
father,
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
5
At
Protestant.
Her
one,
Margaret looking out at
the
father had been brought
world
up
to believe that
was more fundamental than faith in God and
therefore he never practiced his religion. Every person, he
was taught, was worthy and deserved to be treated with respect and dignity. His parents, Margaret's Grandmother
and Grandfather White, were active in the Ethical Culture
Society in New York City, where such ideas were discussed
and fostered. Her maternal grandparents, the Bourkes, were
more conventional church members. Grandmother Bourke
thought Minnie "was going to the devil" because she did not
faith in people
observe the Sabbath.
Joe White and Minnie Bourke met and started their
courtship in Central Park during the early-morning bird
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
walks.
Then
they rushed off to daytime jobs. At night they
both attended school. Joe White was studying engineering
at Cooper Union and Minnie Bourke was going to Pratt Institute to learn
those days.
On
stenography, a desirable
skill for
women
in
Saturdays or Sundays they would pedal off
spend the day in the countryside. Margaret's father was even then a silent man, his head full of
ideas for new machines. Her mother, lively and outgoing,
filled the silence with enthusiastic talk about everything
around her.
on
their bicycles to
A
two-year-old toddler, stacking blocks; sister Ruth at
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
left
Brother Roger at work in the garden
After their marriage Minnie and Joe White remained in
York, and Margaret was born there in June, 1904. A
New
few years
sey, to
later the family
moved
to
Bound Brook,
New Jer-
be near the printing plant where Mr. White,
now
an
engineer and inventor, worked.
Margaret grew up in a large house surrounded by trees
and open fields. Within walking distance were the woods
and rolling hills of the Watchung Mountains. In that lovely
rural area Margaret found excitement in each season and every change of weather. On cold wintry days, when the snow
glistened on fields and mountains, Margaret and Ruth,
sometimes with brother Roger in their care, would go coasting down the mountain slopes. Or they would ice-skate on a
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
Margaret climbing up
to join Ruth
n
frozen pond. In the spring, Margaret brought
of wild flowers and put out bread
rows. She used a
crumbs
home bunches
song spargood part of her free time to help plant and
for the
the vegetable garden. During summer vacations, her
mother taught her and her friends how to cook and how to
sew. There were always the walks to the library with Ruth
when they challenged each other to a balancing match on
weed
the thin edge of a high
wooden
fence.
But nature walks with their father, when Margaret and
Ruth could coax him out-of-doors, were unforgettable adventures. He could call birds to him by imitating their song.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
Margaret's father, Ruth, and family pet Rover
And
By
he taught the children
how
to pick
up harmless snakes.
dreamed she
the time Margaret was ten years old, she
would become a great authority on snakes, a herpetologist;
she would travel to the jungles of foreign lands for rare species "doing all the things that women never do." Above all,
she knew she had to travel, like her Irish ancestors whose
sons had run away to sea.
While Margaret's father was gentle and smiling on
their nature walks, he was very different at home. Most of
the time, after dinner, he would work at his drawing board.
Or he would sit in a living-room chair sunk into a deep siOF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
10
unaware of the family tiptoeing around him. Even
when Margaret's mother asked him a question, he might remain silent. The question hung in the air like a puff of
smoke. Sometimes, a week later, he would answer it.
"He's a perfectionist," Margaret's mother would explain, trying to help Ruth, Margaret, and Roger understand
the father who sat in their midst but yet was in another
world. "He's trying to solve an engineering problem," Margaret's mother would say. Sometimes on one of those rare
lence,
occasions
would
on the
when
the family ate in a restaurant, Margaret
see her father
push
his food aside
and draw sketches
tablecloth.
Margaret often watched her father. She adored him;
and it pained her to see how hard he worked, to see his face
become grim and stern and to know she could not penetrate
the wall of silence that surrounded him.
Early in the marriage, Minnie Bourke showed the
strain of sharing a home with her withdrawn husband. "If
only he would talk more," Margaret would hear her mother
complain of her father. Her mother had the full responsibility of the large house and three growing children. And if
Margaret's father was a perfectionist, her mother also set
high standards for herself and the children. She firmly believed that time had to be put to constructive use. From
morning to night she was busy in the home and in the community. (Later on she would take college courses, study
braille, and become a devoted teacher of the blind.) Though
the family was well off and could afford many comforts,
Mrs. White had only the occasional help of a gardener,
handyman, and seamstress. She kept a watchful eye on exAN EYE ON THE WORLD
11
Margaret s mother, posed and photographed by Joseph White
penditures and could account for every penny in the same
way
she could account for every hour. With that same vigi-
meet her high ideals.
"Reject the easy path! Do it the hard way!" she
drummed into Margaret with her ABCs. When Margaret
came home from school after an exam, her mother would
say, "I hope, Margaret, if there was a choice of questions,
that you answered the difficult ones and not the easy ones."
"Tell the truth," was another daily lesson. "Margaret,
was it an accident or carelessness that you broke the soup
plate?" her mother would ask when a plate shattered to the
lance, she educated the children to
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
12
She forgave an accident and punished carelessness,
but none the less expected a truthful answer.
Growing up in a large rambling house surrounded by
trees filled Margaret with terrors of the dark and of being
floor.
She clung to Ruth when she thought she heard
strange sounds during the night. To help Margaret face her
childhood fears and overcome them, Margaret's mother took
the situation in hand. She made Margaret comfortable with
a favorite jigsaw puzzle or book and left her alone in the
house, at first for five minutes and then for longer stretches
of time. One day Margaret discovered she had spent four
hours alone in the house and had actually enjoyed the
alone.
solitude.
To
help her handle her fear of the dark, Margaret's
mother devised another game. She made Margaret walk
partway around the outside of the house in one direction as
night fell. When Margaret was about to scream in fright, she
would find her mother coming from the opposite direction
with outstretched hands. Margaret learned that nothing sinister lurked behind the maple trees. In fact, she began to enjoy the outdoors in the dark.
Even Margaret's handwriting received her mother's
For her eleventh birthday, Margaret received
from her mother with a note:
full attention.
a gift
Dear Margaret:
you
will practice writing in this book every day or at
days each week during vacations, and your handwriting shows improvement by September 30th, you may make out
a list of surprises, one of which you would like as a reward.
If
least five
Your loving Mother
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
13
P.S. It
would be
and write
it
a good plan to choose a sentence for each page,
over and over until the page is filled.
.
.
.
Margaret's penmanship did improve and in meticulous
handwriting she started the
first
of
many
diaries the year
Her mother made her understand
no
matter what her experiences and feelings were they were
valuable and worth recording.
Each day Margaret felt challenged to meet her mother's
demands and win her approval. She worried when she
thought her mother might hear false tales about her. "I was
she was eleven.
trying to be as nice as
I
that
could tonight but Grandmother
[Grandmother Bourke was visiting at the time] and Ruth
were cross," she wrote in a note when her mother was out.
When Margaret and Ruth fulfilled their mother's expectations, she rewarded them with a special treat. She took
down from the book shelves a heavy volume they called
"The Family Medical Book." Together they pored over diagrams and charts of muscles, bones, and blood vessels. By
the time she entered high school, Margaret had learned the
mysteries of the human body and how babies were born. In
many ways she was more advanced than her school friends.
She had so many things on her mind that sometimes she
would sit in the classroom and stare out the window. She
could be thinking of the baby robin that had fallen from its
nest and that she had rescued. She had worried about what
to feed it when one day, sitting on the lawn with the tiny
robin in her lap, the father robin hopped over with a worm
in
mouth to feed the chick.
Even if at times her mind wandered, she was
its
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
so bright
Elementary school graduation
class;
Margaret seated on
that she quickly learned every lesson she
celled particularly in writing.
When
grass, left
was given. She
ex-
she was only fourteen,
in her
second year in high school, she entered the writing
competition open to students in the upper classes and won
the coveted prize for "excellence in literary composition."
Her excitement
at
winning the prize
—three books
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
she
se-
15
lected for the cash
an experience
award of
later in the
fifteen dollars
—was dimmed by
week. At the senior class graduat-
ing exercises in the school auditorium, the principal called
Margaret to the stage and handed her the books. Afterward,
when the auditorium was cleared of chairs and converted to
a dance floor, she proudly stood around, confident that her
winning an award would make her popular. She loved to
dance and would waltz around the kitchen at home with a
dish towel draped around her. Her mother, who always
seemed so wise, would say, "If you are a good dancer you
will always get dancing partners." But it did not work out
that way. That evening in the school auditorium, Margaret,
tall, slender, with lovely deep blue eyes and abundant dark
hair, stood alone along a wall of the dance floor, hugging her
heavy books, a bright smile on her face and not one boy
—
asked her to dance.
What was wrong? She straightened her dress and patted
down her hair. She watched the boys line up and wait for
other girls to be free, while she stood along the wall clutching her prize books: the Frog Book, the Moth Book, the Reptile
She continued to smile even though a hot flush of embarrassment was creeping up her cheeks. Finally, an older
girl, a friend of her sister's, whirled her around the dance
floor. She stumbled through the dance, positive everyone
was staring at her. In those days girls did not dance together
Book.
in public.
Though Margaret yearned
to be
popular and to have
dancing partners, she was never an intimate part of a school
group. When classmates gathered together and laughed over
something ridiculous in a comic strip, or at a light movie, or
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
16
even about the latest fad in chewing gum, Margaret would
not know what they were talking about. Her mother would
not allow comic books in the house. Only rarely was she al-
lowed
to
go to
a
movie. She was not permitted to
chew gum,
play cards, use cosmetics, wear frilly clothes, or do anything
her mother considered
and useless. She could not even
visit classmates who had comic books in their homes.
Margaret had a few close friends but, cut off from light
amusements, she struck most students as "different." The
silly
boys considered her too serious-minded to invite to
On
own
a
dance.
Margaret often did appear distant and reserved. Sometimes she
had the air of a superior being looking down on her classmates. "My home is in heaven, I'm here on a visit," was the
comment one classmate made of her. Still, the students respected her and elected her class president one year. She
made the swimming team, went on canoe trips, and played
basketball and hockey. No one could deny her competence
and her bright mind. She had a great store of information
and could easily roll off the names of Greek gods; she knew
classical music as well as classical literature. She put her
knowledge and her marvelous facility with words to use
when she became an editor of the Plainfield High School senior class book, the Oracle. With another editor, John Daniel, she wrote appropriate and witty comments under each
graduate's picture. She told her best friend, Charlotte Luf,
whom she called Tubby, that she and John were writing a
poem for the class book, and in lofty tones Margaret recited
a sample verse:
the other hand, deeply involved with her
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
life,
17
"We're starting on the Road of
Life,
Unconquered lands before us
Where each one hopes
But how we hate
The
lie
to find success;
to say
goodbye!"
highlights of Margaret's growing-up years
were
Sunday visits to the factory with her father.
There she would see the rotary presses he had invented,
which had brought about a radical change in printing, making possible a continuous printing process. On one memorable day her father took her to a foundry where the parts for
one of his machines were being cast. She climbed up to a
sooty balcony with him and looked down into the dark
depths. She would never forget the thrill of seeing the sudden burst of flying sparks and flowing metal that lit up the
pitch blackness. Margaret was beside herself with excitethe occasional
ment.
Not only printing
presses but cameras, lenses, prisms,
and the magic qualities of color engaged her father's inventive mind. Margaret would laughingly pose with the family while her father experimented with different lenses.
Though cameras were lying around the house, Margaret
never took a picture in those days. She would casually pick
one up and examine it, but cameras held no interest for her.
Nevertheless, familiarity with cameras became part of the
legacy from her parents along with hard work habits, perseverance, courage and an enduring love for nature.
—
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
f
*
*
ft
V
;
v......
THE GIRL WHC
TAKES PICTURES
^
When
she graduated from high school, at
age seventeen, Margaret had no great interest in a specific career.
Science was impor-
and teaching was a possibility.
Teaching had become a popular profession
for young women going on to college. But
the arts also absorbed her. At Rutgers College, which was only twenty minutes from where she lived,
she took courses that summer in dancing and swimming. In
the fall she entered Teachers College, Columbia University,
and started the long daily train trip to New York City. Entant to her,
rolled in the Practical Arts division, she took the usual first-
year courses in biology, French, and drawing. But to add to
her knowledge of design and composition, she signed up for
The library tower and
clock,
Cornell University, 1926-27; one of the phototo help meet expenses
graphs Margaret sold for a dollar
19
20
photography with Clarence H. White, a lecturer in
Fine Arts at Teachers College. For the class, her mother
gave her an lea Reflex camera for which she had paid only
twenty dollars because it had a cracked lens.
Clarence H. White was a man of worldwide reputation
whose work hung in museums in both the United States and
Europe. An associate of the great photographers Alfred
Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, he offered his students an
appreciation of photography as a fine art and as a way to exa class in
press beauty, while leaving the practical instruction in
shooting and developing pictures to an assistant. White
worked on
and paper
his
own
prints with various chemical processes
to achieve a "soft focus."
portraits are distant,
His scenic studies and
moody, and shadowy
—they look
as if
they had been shot through a mist.
To
take the class in photography, Margaret traveled the
West 120th Street
up to West 144th Street, where Clarence White ran his
School of Photography. There she also listened to guest lecturers and picked up odd bits of knowledge from other students, many of whom, like Ralph Steiner, were starting distinguished careers of their own. Margaret would say in later
years, "The seed was planted with that course." Dorothea
Lange and Laura Gilpin were also among the outstanding
photographers who took classes with Clarence White in
short distance from Teachers College on
their early years.
At the end of Margaret's
Though
first
semester
at college,
her
Margaret
and her family had to face hard problems. Mr. White, always a dreamer, had made no provisions for their financial
father died.
grief-stricken over their loss,
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
21
care.
Margaret offered to leave college and look for
but her mother
made
it
a job,
clear that she expected the children
with their educations. Somehow they would
manage, she said. Uncle Lazarus White, her father's brother
and also a successful engineer, remained close to the family.
He tried to complete an invention for a new color printing
process Margaret's father was working on at the time of his
to continue
er, to
He was
howevadvise the family about financial matters and help
death, but the details
were too obscure.
able,
with the children's education.
Margaret knew now that she had to earn money, and
that summer she put to use her knowledge of photography.
It
qualified her for a job as a counselor in a children's
camp
She taught children how to take pictures
and how to develop them in the darkroom she had set up.
But she completely enchanted them with her knowledge of
wildlife. One evening when the children were especially
noisy, she jumped up on a table and told them the exciting
story about "the beauty sleep a caterpillar takes and wakes
up more beautiful." On nature walks she would show them
a garter snake, and to their amazement and delight, she
would pick it up and explain the difference between harmless and dangerous reptiles. She made pets of two snakes,
and soon the children were freely handling them. They collected every bug and wild flower and brought them to Margaret as if they were precious gifts.
During a three-day hike to the top of a high mountain,
Margaret took pictures of its rolling slopes. She had already
shot pictures of Lake Bantam, where the camp was located.
When the camp directors saw the scenic beauty Margaret
in Connecticut.
THE GIRL WHO TAKES PICTURES
22
portrayed, they asked her to print two hundred picture
postcards for sale to visiting parents.
After she saw the children off to bed, Margaret rushed
over to the darkroom. Night after night, with the assistance
of another counselor, she printed the cards.
When most
of these were quickly sold, the directors or-
dered another five hundred cards for the following season.
To
earn additional money, Margaret took
town and convinced
them for sale. By the end
cards to
a
several gift shop
sample of the
owners
to of-
summer she had orders
proud of myself. I feel as
if I can make my living anywhere," she wrote in her diary.
To fill the orders, she stayed on in camp after the children had departed. It was a lonely time, and the days
dragged. Her friends among the counselors had also left,
and even though the kitchen staff was helpful, she spent almost all her time alone in the darkroom, doing each card by
hand. When finally she had hung the last print up to dry,
she figured out she had made almost two thousand cards
that summer.
Margaret was glad to leave camp behind her and get
back home to Bound Brook. Her brother, Roger, was away
at boarding school, but she, her mother, and Ruth had a joyous reunion and stayed up half the night talking. Part of
their discussion concerned Margaret's return to college.
They were trying to figure out how, with their limited
funds, they could manage it. But the problem was resolved a
few days later in an unexpected way. A wealthy family in
town, who had set up a fund for worthy students recommended by high school teachers, offered to put Margaret
fer
for over a thousand cards. "I
of the
am
so
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
23
through a year at the University of Michigan. "I'm really
going back to college," an elated Margaret reported to her
mother.
She repacked her belongings and set off for Ann Arbor,
Michigan. There she shared an apartment with three other
young
students.
During
registration, she signed
ence courses, certain she was
and would become
up
for sci-
headed in the right direction
a biologist. Still fascinated
by herpetol-
ogy, she took a special course with the noted authority Dr.
Alexander D. Ruthven.
The days when Margaret had no dancing partners were
long behind her. Tall, lean, her dark hair cut short, and
glowing with energy, she had a deep, warm sense of "belonging" to the university. She moved through her days as
purposefully as an arrow heading for its target. She worked
hard at her courses, went out on weekend dates, snakedanced through the town when Michigan's football team
won
and attended concerts by herself when she
needed solitude. She found time to earn money by taking
pictures of campus clubs and organizations. The editor of
the college yearbook asked her to do some photographs. She
could be seen, camera in hand, scrambling over buildings or
standing on an open balcony. Peg White, as they called her
on campus, was the girl who takes pictures. One friend
called her a "demon photographer" and predicted "future
fame." And though only a sophomore, she was asked to become photo editor of the yearbook. She turned it down because by then her mind was on other matters.
She had been on her way to lunch one day at the campus cafeteria when a young man, on his way out of the
a victory,
THE GIRL
WHO TAKES
PICTURES
24
Everett
Chapman
(Chappie), Margaret's
first hushand, as a student at
University,
Michigan
1924
building, trapped Margaret in the revolving door.
He
kept
it
spinning until she agreed to go out with him. Everett
"Chappie" Chapman, a tall, cheerful, bright young man,
was working for his doctorate in electrical engineering. He
and Peg fell deeply in love. A professor in the College of Engineering offered them his home for the marriage ceremony.
And
Margaret, eager to be dressed in traditional white,
borrowed
his wife's
wedding gown.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
25
In a small cottage located off campus, Margaret set up
housekeeping and started a complex life as wife, student,
and part-time breadwinner. She felt even more confused in
her multiple roles when she followed Chappie to a teaching
job at Purdue University in Indiana. At twenty years of age,
she was the youngest faculty wife on campus. She tried to
assume her responsibilities, but often she was no older than
the students she chaperoned or entertained. In classes,
where she continued her science studies, she was regarded
as a teacher's wife. She had no friends, and when she felt
shaken by marital problems, she did not know where to
turn.
Chappie, she discovered, was as dedicated to electric
welding
as
her father had been to his inventions. She accept-
ed the single-mindedness in his work, but she had to compete for his affections with his mother.
A
manding woman, Mrs. Chapman came
for long visits
beautiful but de-
and
disrupted the household, pushing Margaret and Chappie
The problems became
and Margaret sought
professional advice. But, by the second year, Margaret had
to admit to herself that the marriage could not continue.
When it finally broke up, she wept in anguish, distraught at
the failure and at the loss of someone she loved so deeply.
She stayed on in the Midwest, forcing herself each day to
apart.
her job in the Natural History
severe,
Museum
At night she routinely took courses
at
in Cleveland, Ohio.
Western Reserve Col-
lege.
The time
the pain.
came when Margaret could close away
She knew then that no one would again touch her
finally
THE GIRL WHO TAKES PICTURES
26
She would say later, "I had been through the valley of the shadow. ... It was as though everything had been
packed into those two short years and would never seem so
so deeply.
hard again/'
Requiring only one more year of college credits to get
degree, she looked for a beautiful
campus
far
a
from the
scenes of her failed marriage. She chose Cornell University
New
York and arrived there
September, 1926,
just as the first burst of fall foliage draped the countryside in
vivid colors. She found the large campus rimmed with
in upstate
in
Gothic-style ivy-covered buildings, one of which was the
library with
hour.
From
its
the
tower and clock that rang out the quarter
campus
hilltop she could look
down
over a
and the famous Lake Cayuga.
Beautiful as the campus was, Margaret felt lost among
the thousands of students hurrying to class. Still determined
to become a biologist, she filled her program with science
courses. And, desperately in need of money, she took a job
as a waitress in return for her meals. Later on she had a
clerical job. But from her first days at Cornell, she wandered around the campus with her camera in her hand. She
had already spotted scenes she wanted to record.
Margaret put to use all she had learned about photography over the years. She had a sense of search, almost a mission, to find the scene that appealed to her. She moved
around studying angles for good shots, looking for an effective composition. One day, when a heavy snow made the
valley of well-marked fields
Cornell buildings look especially beautiful, she cut classes to
take pictures. She ran around in the snow, leaving a trail of
footprints to
make
the scene
more dramatic. At other times
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
27
she climbed up to the top of the library tower to survey the
campus from a height. She took photographs of a dormitory
dawn
seen through a mist, of waterfalls, of college buildings framed by tall trees, and of the distant football stadium
with lowering clouds in the foreground.
at
Evenings Margaret hurried down the steeply sloped
streets of Ithaca into the town, where she had located a commercial photographer, Henry R. Head. Impressed with the
eagerness of the young girl, he rented her the use of his
darkroom. There she made sample enlargements, developing her prints in the Clarence H. White tradition, seeking
the misty, blurred effect.
She displayed samples of her work on
a table
in the corridor outside the college dining
she set up
room. Students
and teachers, eager for mementos of their Cornell years,
placed orders for her photographs.
said,
"Why,
It thrilled
her
these don't look like photographs at
number
when
they
all."
up
Encouraged by the
hundreds of pictures and pulled together a group of students to work as salespeople on a commission basis. The
Cornell Co-op agreed to carry the pictures and, to add to her
glory, the Cornell Alumni News printed a few of her photographs and paid five dollars for each picture used on a cover.
Letters came in from Cornell alumni admiring her work
and asking whether she intended to become an architectural
of orders, she printed
photographer.
Margaret saw a dazzling new vista open before her. Arphotography? Was she talented enough? she
asked herself. She liked the feel of a camera in her hand, and
she had begun to experience the heady excitement of "catch-
chitectural
THE GIRL WHO TAKES PICTURES
28
ing the
moment" when
a
scene
hung
together.
Still,
the decisive change from science to photography as a
earn
a living,
make
way to
to
she needed an objective opinion of her work.
During Easter
vacation, Margaret, with a portfolio of
pictures under her arm, boarded a train to
New
York
City,
where she made her way to the offices of a distinguished architectural firm recommended to her. The head of the company, Benjamin Moscowitz, was rushing off to catch a train.
But Margaret pursued him to the elevator, talking and
showing him her photographs. When he saw Margaret's picture of the Cornell library tower, he said, "Let's go back and
look at these."
all
He
assured Margaret that,
had
a
members of the firm. They
based on the work they saw, she
called in other
future in architectural photography.
Encouraged by these words of praise, Margaret took the
train back to Cornell. During the long, slow trip, she had
many hours in which to think about her future. In the offing was the dazzling possibility of a career in photography.
On the other hand, she had received a job offer from the
Museum
of Natural History in
New
York.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
I
.
"DYNAMOS ACE
MCEE BEALTIEUL
THAN PEARLS 9*
Confident about her ability, Margaret chose
photography as her life work. With her
clear,
straightforward
knew
it
way
of thinking, she
involved great responsibility to em-
bark on such an uncertain career, especially
when
she
knew
she had to earn
money
at
once to support herself.
She packed her college degree along with her belongings into her trunk and took a train from Ithaca to Buffalo,
New York. There she boarded a night boat that sailed along
Lake Erie to Cleveland, Ohio, where she had lived briefly
after her marriage ended and where her mother and brother
had settled. Her sister, Ruth, had taken law courses and was
working in Chicago for the American Bar Association.
Margaret's award-winning photograph of a 200-ton ladle used in the making of
steel;
Otis Steel
Company, 1928
31
32
To celebrate
ret
her
new independence,
she became Marga-
Bourke-White, attaching her middle name Bourke
(also
her mother's maiden name) to the family name. In Cleve-
Margaret opened the first Bourke-White Studio in
1927. She turned a one-room apartment into her living-andwork space. Each morning she pushed the in-a-door bed out
of the way and made the living room into a reception room.
She used the kitchen as her darkroom and the breakfast alcove as her printing room. She washed her prints in the
land,
bathtub.
With only one
suit in her
wardrobe, and that
a dull
gray, Margaret brightened her appearance with accessories.
One day
she wore the suit with a red hat and red gloves; the
next day with blue hat and blue gloves. In high-heeled
walked miles of pavement, knocking on the doors
of architectural firms recommended by Cornell alumni. She
won her first commission from a firm of young architects
that, like her, had yet to make its mark. The architects had
difficulty getting acceptable photographs of a school they
had designed. Margaret saw why when she visited the
school and found the building surrounded by muddy
grounds and littered with gravel and unused lumber. She
spent five days viewing the scene in varying light. She arose
at sunrise to look at the school in the morning and returned
in the evening to see it in the setting sun. One morning,
when the sunrise lighted a cloudless sky, she rushed over to
the school only to find the grounds strewn with garbage.
She ran to a florist, bought handfuls of asters, stuck them in
the mud away from the debris, and shot her pictures from a
shoes, she
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
33
low angle, over the top of the flowers, showing the school
framed by flowers and by the sunrise.
Impressed with her ingenuity as well as her skill, the
architects bought several of Margaret's photographs at five
dollars each and succeeded in getting them published in
Architecture magazine.
The first burst of publicity made Margaret a busy
She picked up commissions from banks,
landscape artists, and architects. Her photographs of
stately homes and gardens had a misty, pictorial quality in the
Clarence H. White tradition. Dappled light played over
gardens and lily ponds, or was seen through grillwork and
leaded glass windows. Her compositions were so effective
that House and Garden, as well as other magazines, began to
feature her work.
Though Margaret was busy with these commissions
that paid her expenses, she began to find increasing excitephotographer.
ment in an entirely different
week she drove an old battered
landscape. Several times a
car she had bought over to
downtown
Cleveland,
Only people who worked there
traveled to
the low-lying industrial valley in
called the Flats.
that bleak stretch of land spread out along the
winding
Cuyahoga River. But Margaret saw the drama and beauty of
modern industry in the Flats. The heavy smoke pouring
from the chimneys of the steel mills, the mounds of iron ore,
and the roaring freight and automobile traffic fascinated her
the way rare jewels might fascinate others. She found form
and pattern in smokestacks, in vaulting arches holding up
bridges, in tall electric towers, and in cranes. She studied
DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS'
**t\\> n*
"
vmp^
Prv~*
r.
Cu
\_ w.
touj
3*
n
'
>Jfci
3J
T
±-S?
1 l-~
„
'\,
.
,
„,
,..,
.
».
—•#•—
'**
r .-
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35
them
under varying conditions of light; she climbed up on derricks and scaffolds to see them from different angles. When
she thought she could isolate a scene that would reveal the
power of industry, she set up her tripod and camera, put her
the tangled scenes at different hours of the day to see
head under the cloth, and shot her pictures.
Afterward, in frustration, she threw most of her negatives in the wastepaper basket. She did not know how to
capture on film the energy and vital force of this industrial
backyard. Accidentally, however, she learned an important
lesson.
One
day, while photographing at the Flats, she
saw
camera a small, dilapidated boat appear on the Cuyahoga inlet framed by the steel mill and tall smokestacks. At
each end of the boat stood a man with a pole in his hand,
slowly moving the boat along. She quickly shot pictures.
When the boat moved out of camera range, she ran down to
the banks of the river, explained to the men what she was
doing, and implored them to continue moving the boat back
and forth for another hour.
That evening, when she developed her prints, she
shouted in joy. "That's how my ship came in," she would
say in later years. "Here was contrast. In form. In line. In
bulk and lighting and balance. The old and the new." That
experience taught her the value of contrast for a good photograph or for any work of art. By showing in one frame an
ancient way of handling a boat and complex steel structures,
she highlighted the modern world of industry.
in her
An
early landscape picture
—
the
William H. Albers home; Cincinnati, Ohio,
1929
DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS
36
She carefully placed the pictures in her portfolio and
the next day hastened over to an important business executive who was holding up an advertising catalogue until he
found the right illustrations. He bought four of Margaret's
photographs and paid her more than she had ever earned.
Margaret's fascination with machines and industry
seemed a natural extension of her childhood experiences.
Still, hers was not a lone voice, for many artists of that time
had begun to celebrate American technology.
In the 1920s, artists had a new vision of the United
States as a great industrial power that would expand forever
and remain a creative force. They found surging drama in
steel and electricity, in bridges spanning rivers, in skyscrapers built into the sky. The machines of industry were worshipped as if they were deities. Common, everyday articles
like furniture, pots and pans, and dishes became objects of
novel design and fashion. And a galaxy of new ideas and terminology soon flashed upon the art world: Machine Esthetic, Machine Age, Industrial Design, Modernism. This was
only one aspect of the decade that became known as the
"roaring twenties" with its booming economy, its lavish Art
Deco design, its jazz, and its gay dances the fox trot, the
shimmy, and the Charleston.
Margaret found beauty and excitement not only in the
outward forms of machines but in machines in motion, in
action and change, and in the raw process of production.
She wanted to see the actual workings of a steel mill. During the many hours she had trudged through the slag and
smoke of the Cleveland Flats, she had her eye on the Otis
Steel Company, wondering how she could get inside the
—
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
37
heavy door marked Private. A business acquaintance helped
her gain an interview.
She stood before Elroy J. Kulas, president of the company, pleading for permission to take pictures of the making of
steel. She spoke about the power she saw in industry and
which we live. "Steel mills," she
said in her earnest, sincere manner, "are at the very heart of
industry with the most drama, the most beauty."
Mr. Kulas found Margaret convincing. Still, he hesitated. No one had ever photographed the making of steel. Visitors had been known to pass out from the smoke and heat.
Finally he expressed his worry that Margaret might faint
from the fumes in the mill.
"I am not the fainting kind," she assured Mr. Kulas.
Persuaded by her self-confidence, he called in other
company officials and notified them of Margaret's project.
how
it
reflected the age in
Then he
sailed off for a five-month trip to
Europe.
Margaret would never forget her first view of the inside
of a steel mill. Spread out before her were meaningless
shapes, like scenes from abstract paintings. Only after many
visits could she adjust to the roar and glare of the mill and
put into context the giant hoods and cranes, the huge furnaces, and the sweating workers in heatproof masks and
clothes moving about in the dark depths. When the furnaces
were pulled, Margaret saw flames spew out of the darkness.
Automatic ladles dipped into seething liquid and poured it
into molds. Up on the catwalk surveying the flaming mass
below, Margaret began to shoot pictures. Or she climbed
into an overhead crane and shot down into the molten mass.
Sometimes she took pictures from hanging ladders. When
"DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS"
38
she developed her negatives, she did not recognize anything
she had photographed.
Margaret was in trouble. Without realizing it, she had
undertaken a colossal project. Technically she could not
cope with the problems with the lack of lighting, with the
scorching heat that blistered the varnish off her camera, and
with the extreme contrasts in light and shade. Photography
—
had not yet progressed to the use of flashbulbs, film, and
lenses adequate to meet the needs of her difficult project.
Plant workers and officials, who expected Margaret to
show up for a few days, take her pictures and leave, were
astonished to see her return week after week with her heavy
camera and tripod. They worried that she would
break a leg or fall into the molten metal. But she stalked the
mill, a strange and lonely figure, a woman in a man's workplace, searching for the exact spot and for the light that
would enable her to print on film the burst of flame and
5X7
sparks of the making of
steel.
Completely at a loss, she called on Alfred Bemis, a commercial photographer in Cleveland who had helped her out
before. "Berne" and his assistant, Earl Leiter, joined Margaret at the steel mill. The three of them experimented with
new cameras. They brought in floodlights and laid cables in
an effort to get adequate lighting. They shot off flashpans.
But nothing worked. Margaret would not give up; the steel
mill became the laboratory in which she experimented and
learned the basic lessons on how to light a picture. She
tried every
new
device that
came
into Bemis's store.
day, a photography salesman, on his
show
the film industry
way
new magnesium
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
to
One
Hollywood
flares,
to
dropped into
39
the shop. Persuaded to join Bemis, Leiter, and Margaret at
the steel mill, he
worked out
strategy with
them
as if
they
were attacking an enemy target. While they waited for the
u
molten metal to reach its heat" before the pouring, Margacrawled along the catwalk, preparing angles for her
shots. Finally, she set her camera on the crossrail. Then, just
ret
bubbled in the ladles, the magnesium flares
were fired off in a cloud of smoke, lighting the scene, and
Margaret shot her pictures.
That night, with her friends surrounding her, Margaret
developed her negatives. They saw on film great ladles,
hooks and cranes, and the actual path of sparks. She had
photographed the making of steel.
When Elroy Kulas returned from Europe, Margaret
brought him twelve photographs out of about five hundred
she had shot. Astonished with what he saw, Kulas bought
eight pictures at a hundred dollars each and ordered eight
more. He put them in a book called The Story of Steel, which
he sent to stockholders. The pictures were reproduced in
magazines and newspapers.
With her pictures of steel, Margaret was launched on
her career. "I feel as if the world has been opened up and I
hold all the keys," she wrote to her mother. Other industrialists commissioned her to photograph their plants. She
as the metal
took pictures of ore boats, coal
rigs,
bridge construction, cyl-
and dynamos. She had an extraordinary eye for deshe could isolate a piece of machinery and show not
inders,
sign;
only
its
power but
To meet
its
beauty.
the rush of work, she
moved from her cramped
quarters to a studio high up in the Terminal Tower, Cleve-
"DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS"
i
:
11
r
^
_^
-~~
o'
'"
— railroad
The
Flats
and
Terminal
the
titii
yard
Tower in
background; Cleveland,
Ohio,
1929
land's
tallest
skyscraper.
A
secretary
and
a
technician
helped her turn out her work.
At age twenty-four she had become the
of photography.
The
press
rated
"girl
wonder"
her "a leader
among
camera artists of America." Her signature on a
photograph became a mark of distinction. Not only was she
known as a unique photographer but as a person who disreindustrial
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
41
garded danger in her search for the exact spot for her pictures.
She paid careful attention to her clothes and liked to
look fashionable. In the smart look of the day, she wore her
dark hair with a dip over one eye.
To a newspaper reporter who found it unusual that a
young, attractive woman like Margaret preferred to photograph seamy industrial subjects rather than gardens and ba-
Margaret on location
in Cleveland, Ohio,
photographed by Ralph Steiner, 1928
42
Margaret, a leading
industrial photog-
rapher at 24
43
bies,
.
.
.
she said, "I dislike bothering with obvious prettiness
what makes
my
hunt and hunt for
job as a photographer fascinating
just the
is
to
viewpoint that would make
cranes, smokestacks or drawbridges beautiful." In her pas-
became an ardent exponent
of the Machine Esthetic. "Dynamos are more beautiful than
pearls," she told another interviewer. "The purpose of art,"
she would say, "is to find beauty in the big things of the age.
sion for the industrial scene, she
Today that big thing is industry."
Her reputation spread to the East Coast where Henry
R. Luce, the successful publisher of Time magazine,
was
working on plans for a new periodical. In the spring of 1929,
Luce sent Margaret a telegram: HAVE JUST SEEN YOUR
STEEL PHOTOGRAPHS. CAN YOU COME TO NEW YORK
WITHIN WEEK AT OUR EXPENSE? Unfamiliar with Luce's
name, Margaret decided to take advantage of the invitation
in order to visit New York. But when she met Luce and listened to his plans, she
knew
she could not turn
down
fer.
DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS
his of-
•
>
WITH A CAMERA
IN HER HAND
At twenty-five years of
new showcase
age,
Margaret found
would
make her internationally prominent. She ac-
a
cepted
Henry
for her talents that
Luce's offer of a position as
photographer and assistant editor on
his new magazine. Fortune, as it would be
called, would explore every aspect of the industrial process from the "steam shovel to the Board of Directors." The camera would be put to new use, to interpret
and document the modern world.
Margaret saw at once that Luce's ideas were stretching
the concept of photography to a new dimension and that
photography itself would have to grow to meet the demands
made on it.
staff
Margaret sloshing through
the
mud
45
on location; Russia, 1930
46
Filled with excitement at her
new
position, she
phoned
an old friend, Ralph Steiner, whom she had met years before at the Clarence H. White School of Photography. Over
the years she had seen
him from time
admiring
him as an honest craftsman, she accepted his critical comments. Early on he had directed her away from trying to
make photographs look like paintings, in the Clarence H.
White tradition. When he had passed through Cleveland in
the late 1920s and visited Margaret, he had ridiculed her
fussy need to match the color of her camera cloth to the color of her suit. At that time Margaret had found it fashionto time and,
when she wore a purple suit, a
suit. "What difference does it make
able to use a purple cloth
blue cloth with her blue
what color cloth you focus your pictures with as long as
they are good pictures?" he wanted to know. And now in
New York to see Henry Luce, Margaret looked up Steiner
to show him her latest work. She would never win his admiration, she sorrowfully concluded, and wrote as much in a
letter to her mother in May, 1929. "I spent last evening with
Steiner, going over
my
pictures.
He
is
always very
critical,
you know, and never praises me, but he did say that he
thought I had improved, and that my viewpoint was becoming more direct and mature."
For the
first
couple of years that Margaret worked for
Fortune magazine, she maintained her studio in Cleveland
and traveled from there
permission to use her
She gave Luce
promotional ma-
to her assignments.
steel
photographs
terial.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
as
From
"Hogs, " lead article in Fortune, 1929
One assignment
took Margaret to the stockyards of Chi-
Accompanied by Luce's editor Parker Lloyd-Smith,
she was to do the photographs for a story on the Swift meatcago.
packing industry. She prowled the plant, trying to figure
out how to communicate the force of the billion dollar industry in which over 15 million hogs poured through the
yards in a single year and ended up as processed meat.
Working
closely with Lloyd-Smith, she
made
a
sequence of
pictures that together told a story.
She turned her lens on thousands of pigs pouring into
the stockyards. She showed how they were prodded into
WITH A CAMERA
IN
HER HAND
48
narrow
alleys while
men
stood by appraising their value in
and cents. She shot pictures in the slaughterhouse
where hogs were reduced to dressed carcasses hanging by
the thousands in row upon row from hooks on beams. She
showed white-gowned men with flashing, gleaming knives
dollars
carving the carcasses into different cuts of meat.
Then
she
explored the curing room where thousands of hams hung
from
rafters. In the final shots,
mammoth
her camera zoomed in on
heaps of pig dust, the ground-up remains of car-
would be used as meal for other animals. Writer
Lloyd-Smith retched from the putrid odors and fled. But
Margaret stayed on in that foul-smelling room getting her
casses that
photographs.
When
she
left,
she quickly ripped the cloth
and cables from her cameras because they had absorbed the
pungent odors.
"Hogs" became the lead story in the first issue of Fortune magazine when it hit the newsstands in February, 1930.
In that issue there were three other series of Margaret's pictures. In addition to "Hogs," she told the story of glass from
its origin as crumbled fragments of rock to its transformation by the glass blower to beautiful and practical objects.
"Trade Routes across the Great Lakes" was an essay on
iron, steel, coal, and the freighters that carry raw products
to the steel mill. Her final photographs dealt with orchids
from their planting to their bloom.
Seventeen series of her photographs appeared during
the first year in Fortune. If Fortune provided her with a
showcase for her talents, she gave Fortune its style and tone.
She did much more. She opened up the field of photography
to limitless possibilities
when
she introduced the concept of
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
49
with her photographs. By concentrating on a
single subject, she added mood and tension to the series of
telling a story
She also selected what was significant and made
important graphic statements that were often as revealing as
the written story. Other photographers and writers were
moving in the same direction. But Margaret was one of the
pioneers; her work would lead the way to photojournalism
and the photo essay, which would become a dominant development in the world of photography.
Many of her industrial photographs are now seen as
works of art as well as valuable documents of the industrial
process. With an artist's eye, she portrayed the rhythm and
pictures.
pattern in a piece of machinery.
beauty in
so rich
a coil of wire.
and
telling that
Or
it
Or
she isolated the simple
she crowded a frame with detail
looked like a Renaissance painting.
She shot pictures from every angle. Looking from the bot-
tom
up, she showed the angular lines of an electric tower.
Looking down, she photographed a worker pouring hot liq-
uid into molds.
Margaret arrived at assignments steeped in technical information on the subject so that she could talk knowledgeably to the engineers and plant foremen who guided her
through the labyrinth of industrial plants. A bevy of assistants carried her bulky cameras and film packs and set up
the lighting.
With her camera
danger.
ploits
No
in her hand, she
never thought about
assignment was too perilous, and her daring exas famous as her photographs. Dizzy Heights
became
Have No Terror for
newspaper article.
This Girl Photographer headlined
WITH A CAMERA
IN
HER HAND
one
50
For
a Fortune
assignment, she photographed the day-to-
day construction of the Chrysler Building, scheduled to become New York's tallest skyscraper. At street level she shot
pictures of steel girders spearing space with geometric patterns. She showed the outside and the inside of the hoist that
carried men and materials to high floors. She herself rode
the hoist to the top level of the skeletal skyscraper. Eight
hundred
feet
above the ground, she clung to
a girder and,
with an icy wind buffeting her, photographed the massive
the upper extremity, of the Chrysler tower before it
finial,
was sheathed
in steel.
am not frightened," she shouted to
who wanted to tie her down to a beam
"I
ers
a
group of work-
for safety. "I like
the feeling of being free," she said.
At the upper
level,
she watched workers building steel
gargoyles out over the streets below.
The view from
the
high floor fascinated her. She became absorbed in the vast
urban landscape that stretched for miles south to the tip of
the city and from river to river. She looked up into a broad
sweep of cloud-filled sky. And she was determined to move
her studio from Cleveland to the Chrysler Building.
Margaret rented space for the Bourke-White Studio on
the sixty-first floor of the Chrysler Building. Decorator
John Vassos designed and furnished the new offices in the
modern Art Deco style with built-in furniture made of natural woods, glass, and aluminum. Into one wall, Margaret
had an aquarium built for her tropical fish. When she gave
The vitality of industry; the Chrysler Corporation
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
^
52
huge terraces with praying manand two pet alligators a friend had sent from
parties, guests shared the
tes, tortoises,
Florida.
Ambitious and energetic, Margaret searched for new
worlds to explore, new doors to pry open. From her talk
with industrialists in the United States, she became increasingly curious about the
Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics
known
She had
heard that in that land halfway across the world, machines
were transforming a backward feudal country into a mod(until the
Revolution of 1917
ern industrial
When
as Russia).
state.
Fortune sent Margaret on assignment to
Germa-
ny, she decided to push on from there to the country she
had heard so much about. Fortune, convinced that the Soviet
Union would not permit a photographer the freedom to
take pictures, would not sponsor her trip. Still, Margaret
was determined to go.
She did not pretend that she understood politics. She
had no interest in the subject. It did not matter to her that
the Soviet
Union was building
socialism and that
its
a
new
kind of society called
concepts were considered incom-
Western countries.
She knew only that in their first Five-Year Plan they were
constructing the world's largest dam, that machines were
dramatically changing a vast landscape and helping people
advance from ignorance and poverty into the benefits of
patible with the political philosophy of
the industrial age.
During her
Germany, Margaret bombarded the
Soviet Consulate with visits and phone calls asking for a visa
stay in
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
S3
would permit her
that
to enter the country.
She impressed
the Russian officials with her portfolio of industrial photographs.
Sergei Eisenstein, the noted Russian filmmaker
whom
Margaret had met in the States, interceded in her behalf. She stood by with a trunkload of canned goods to see
her through the Soviet food shortage. Tons of cameras and
films were ready to be shipped.
Margaret's determination won for her an extraordinary
triumph. She was finally handed a visa, and within a few
days of her entry into the Soviet Union, she was made a
guest of the government. She was provided with an interpreter and sheaves of paper to ease her way through shortages in travel space and the terrible confusion that existed at
every level of government.
For five weeks in the summer of 1930, and in two subsequent visits, Margaret covered thousands of miles. To reach
outlying districts she traveled by train and by boat, on
camel and on horseback. She pushed her way through
muddy roads, forded rivers, used caves for her darkroom, and
developed film in hotel bathtubs. She took eight hundred pictures that included farm cooperatives, factories, mills, and
quarries. She photographed turbines, cranes, derricks, blast
furnaces, and pieces of machinery rising everywhere on empty plains. She turned her camera to record the construction
of the massive dam at the Dnieper River. She also experimented with the movie camera and did two short films of
her
trip.
At the same time
that she reported
on the Soviet indus-
development, she described the terrible famine that
gripped the country and made people's lives so difficult.
trial
WITH A CAMERA
IN
HER HAND
A
The
worker, called an iron puddler, in a steel mill; Stalingrad, 1930
cans of food she had brought from Germany, which she
had shared, had run out, and for
a
week she
lived
on baked
beans.
As she worked, Margaret reveled
in the
magic of her
camera, excited over the "blackness and whiteness" of pho-
tography that "makes
jects. ...
It
is
it
so
suitable
for
industrial
sub-
honest and revealing and clean cut, an
as-
tounding means of expression and the best for portraying
the power and force of industry," was the way she put it.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
ss
Machines, for Margaret, were things in themselves.
They had form and force and were "rich with the breath of
doing." She saw that the Soviet
Union used machines
as
beneficent instruments to change the lives of people. For
the
first
time in
tionship of
many
years, she noticed people
men and women
to machines.
and the
"They
rela-
are trans-
forming the economic life of the country which in turn is
transforming them," she wrote. She photographed workers,
old and young, skilled and unskilled, learning to use tractors
Children in a nursery at a Russian automobile factory, 1931
56
and dynamos. She watched
women working
in
heavy indus-
and she realized that new futures were open to them. She learned that many women
were studying medicine and engineering.
Her passion for machines made her an ally of the
socialist state. In turn, the Russians loved Margaret BourkeWhite and called the photographer the "artist of the
machine age." They appreciated her ability to endure
hardships, take risks, and never complain. They also enjoyed
her temperament. One day, as she was being driven to a
farm collective, a herd of horses galloped by. "Stop," she
called to the driver of the car. She tore after the horses on
foot, her camera over her shoulder. Her interpreter ran
after her with film holders while the driver followed along
in the car with reserves of film. She shot pictures of the
horses, at first as "dots on the horizon." Closer up, they became "bodies rushing by her."
Margaret was back home in 1931 when her first book
was published. Eyes on Russia, illustrated with forty photographs, was a record of her experiences in the Soviet Union.
Unanimous praise for the book increased her popularity,
and she became a success on the lecture circuit. She brought
to crowded halls a firsthand report on the exotic, mysterious
country thousands of miles away. The New York Times Magazine carried a series of her articles and photographs. In
1933, after the United States and the Soviet Union estabtry,
operating
drill presses,
lished diplomatic relations, her
two travelogues received
wide distribution.
She had become a dashing and glamorous figure. Her
energy and her inventive mind made her extraordinarily
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
57
productive. Advertising agencies hired her to put her skills
into commercial photography. Buick cars
and Goodyear
became her largest accounts. But she also did glossy ads
for silver, food, and cosmetics, making her clients' products
appear more attractive than competitors'. She would say
that commercial advertising taught her how to work with
color film and light to achieve realistic effects. She could
make a rubber tire look like rubber and not like stiff cardboard. Advertising paid extremely well, and Margaret became an affluent woman.
For six months of the year she worked for Fortune magazine. The other six months she devoted to advertising. A
tires
staff of eight
helped her turn out her work.
For a brief period in 1934, Margaret concentrated on
doing photomurals, a blown-up photograph or series of photographs that cover a wall. She reached a highlight in her
career as an industrial photographer in her mural for the
National Broadcasting Company. She called it Trapping the
Magical Waves of Sound. In the mural she showed, in
a se-
quence of photos, the complex pieces of machinery that control the sending and receiving of sound. The photomural,
160 feet in circumference by 10 feet high, decorated the circular reception room of NBC's office in Radio City, New
York, and was viewed by thousands of visitors.
While Margaret lived high up in the clouds, her mind
filled with machines and commercial accounts, a different
drama
filled
the streets below.
Fortune magazine had begun publishing just as the
New
York stock market crash of November, 1929, broke over the
world and ushered in the turbulent years of the Great DeWITH A CAMERA
IN
HER HAND
S8
pression.
The new
publication, addressing itself to the vital-
remained in industry, climbed to success. But the
depression had toppled financial empires, putting millions
of people out of work. Unemployment cut across all lines,
dragging down workers, the middle class, professionals, and
artists. In demonstrations and public meetings held across
the country, the unemployed demanded jobs and relief
through federal programs. Artists photographers, painters, writers, and dancers
joined in the outcry and used
ity that
—
—
awaken public conscience to the painful soand economic conditions.
An assignment from Fortune would turn Margaret
their talents to
cial
around and force her
to confront the realities of the day.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
PACES SHE
CCULD NOT
PASS cy
In a tiny two-seater plane, Margaret Bourke-
White was flying over the states of the Midwest from the Dakotas to Texas. Fortune had
assigned her to photograph the effects of
months of drought on the once fertile land.
Where tall golden wheat and corn used to
grow, Margaret looked down over miles of
caked, parched earth and dried-up riverbeds. For months a
ruthless sun had beat down from a cloudless sky, withering
crops and scorching the earth, turning it to fine sand. From
the air and from the ground, she photographed the whirling
yellow clouds of duststorms that blew with gale strength,
clogging the lungs of children, grown-ups, and animals.
Millions of farm people were at the mercy of the
drought. Margaret visited farms and watched children being
From
You Have Seen Their Faces; Lansdale, Arkansas, 1936
61
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•'•'
t4tSm £>
^.mmm
v
s¥%?
89»
S^S
^
iaf^>*i
P
v-.
Ti
C<z£ft/,
—
parched earth
ffo drought;
South Dakota, 1934
put to bed with towels over their faces to keep out the fine
dust that seeped through invisible cracks. She saw the poverty and suffering of families who, with sticks of furniture
on broken-down cars and wagons, drifted along dustcracked roads looking for work. "Here were faces engraved
with the very paralysis of despair. These were faces I could
piled
not pass by," she said.
When
she returned to
New
York, her experiences in
the dust bowl (as that area of the country
turned her dreams to nightmares.
One
came
to be called)
terrifying night she
dreamed that an avalanche of cars was careening down on
her. She could not escape them. They were about to crush
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
63
her
when
she awakened and found herself writhing on the
floor with a strained back.
Her dreams
tising accounts.
reflected her real conflicts over her adver-
Was
she succumbing to the pressure of the
advertising world and sacrificing her artistic integrity? she
asked herself. Did she
tell
the truth
product to make people buy
it? Is
when
that the
she enhanced a
way
she wanted
photography? With her good sense and her eye
for news, she had begun to realize that the center of excitement had shifted to the streets and to the culture that had
grown up around the Great Depression. She took steps to
to use her
redirect her
life,
cutting herself loose from the advertising
world and turning her fierce capacity for work to the conditions in the United States.
The social upheaval of the 1930s had gripped many talented artists. Margaret, too, wanted to understand the conditions in which people lived and how events affected them.
And she wanted to put photography to use to communicate
her
new
tions
social awareness, to
of poverty-stricken
thought, would
a writer
tell
document the miserable condi-
families.
Perhaps
book,
a
she
the story. But she wanted a collaborator,
who would
describe what she photographed.
Word
soon reached her that Erskine Caldwell, the writer, was
looking for a photographer.
Caldwell's book and play Tobacco Road had
successful but controversial figure.
South, he
knew
Born and
made him
a
raised in the
firsthand the sordid aspects of southern
life
he described so poignantly in his work. Now he wanted to
write a book and document with photographs the suffering
and poverty with which he was
familiar.
He was
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
especially
64
sensitive to the degrading conditions suffered
by black peo-
ple.
Caldwell's appearance gave no hint of his inner com-
and broad-shouldered, with sandy-colored hair
and light blue eyes, he had a soft, gentle voice. He could be
charming and talk at great length on many subjects; or he
could use words sparingly. In his somber moods, he froze
plexity. Tall
into silence.
The
Bourke-White-Caldwell project got under
way in June, 1936. Margaret flew down to Georgia and
joined Caldwell there. In his small car she stowed five cameras, tripods, flashbulbs, and film. She also securely tucked
away two glass jars that contained egg cases of praying manjoint
tes.
She was
life
cycle and
er's
in the midst of
photographing their dramatic
would not leave them behind.
During the first few days, each tried to judge the
character.
Long experience with
taught Margaret
how
a
silent father
oth-
had
She
cope with Caldwell's silence.
kept quiet and carefully gazed out at the southern countryside. Margaret had learned before the project started that
to
Caldwell had reservations about working with
a
woman,
and with Bourke-White in particular whose work he did not
admire. A few days into the venture, it looked as if she
would have to pack her gear and head for home. Caldwell
showed up in her hotel room one evening and explained
that he felt like a "tourist guide" because she had nothing to
offer. Perhaps they had better call the whole thing off, he
thought. Shocked, because the project was so meaningful to
her, Margaret burst into tears. The emotional outburst
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
65
WFZ
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y
Jk
lu
n^.
]
*"
M
^\
U
~^y\
v
r
t
R.-/*
^^^^d w m^
fifii
Margaret, photographing the
a praying mantis,
life cycle
of
'^JSErf
as photographed by
Carl Mydans, 1938
cleared the
drawn
air.
In the following days, they found themselves
to each other
and then they were
in love.
Their
rela-
tionship became idyllic, bringing into blossom each one's
more generous
nature.
And
the collaboration was saved.
Caldwell had studied the conditions of the southern
tenant farmer and sharecropper. In his soft voice he tutored
Margaret with
facts
and
figures, helping her
poverty of the farm population.
visible in every state they
Its
understand the
crippling effects were
covered in the Deep South, from
Georgia and South Carolina to Arkansas and Louisiana. She
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
—
66
saw walls of wooden huts
lined with newspapers to keep out
the cold; children sharing a single coat and pair of shoes
one day one child wore them
and the next day
men and
women lined with deep ruts like dried-up riverbeds. She
saw black people suffering the wretched insults of racism.
Typically, Margaret did not romanticize the misery she
saw, nor did she recoil before painful realities. Poverty was
destructive, and she showed its ravages in the misshapen
bodies and diseased faces of the poor.
You Have Seen Their Faces, the joint Bourke-WhiteCaldwell book, became a landmark publication. In words
and photographs their work dramatically documented the
another;
crumbs of food
miserable conditions
to school
for meals;
among
and
faces of
the country's sharecroppers.
Margaret's sixty-four pictures are direct, stark, and compelling.
They
represent some of her best work.
Margaret's photographs, as well as those of photogra-
phers Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans,
and Ben Shahn, influenced the U.S. government to take action in behalf of the poor farm population.
Vital areas of activity had opened up to Margaret with
her increased social awareness. In 1935 she had written an
article called "Dust Changes America" for a liberal weekly,
the Nation, on her experiences during the drought. That
same publication carried another of her articles, in which
she suggested that photographers use the medium to portray
the real world around them. In 1936 Margaret joined the
first American Writers' Congress. At a conference in New
York City, a broad coalition of distinguished artists and au-
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
67
thors,
among them Edward
Steichen, Ralph Steiner, Paul
Manship, and Norman Bel Geddes, discussed the relationship between art and society. They drew up a program that
included the defense of freedom of expression at home and
the fight against war and fascism abroad.
Margaret exhibited her work and lectured at the Photo
League. This newly formed organization of working photographers was actively engaged in recording and illuminating economic and social conditions. Distinguished artists
work at the League's
York
City
headquarters.
Among
them were Paul
New
Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Lewis
lectured, taught, or exhibited their
Hine, and Dorothea Lange.
Margaret's initiation into the world of political and social activity
enlarged her perception of events. She brought
her enriched vision to the mainstream of her work. This be-
came apparent when she undertook assignments
for a
new
publication.
magazine was still in the planning stage when
Bourke-White was asked to join the staff as one of four
leading photographers. Its publisher, Henry R. Luce (also
Life
the publisher of Fortune) envisioned another
publication, a photographic magazine.
It
new
would
kind of
visually
communicate the news of the day in a well-planned series
of pictures. Photographers would be sent to all parts of the
world to record important events and work up background
material for their stories.
Margaret to Fort Peck, Montana, to
prepublication workup of a dam under construction.
Life's editors sent
do
a
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
68
They
figured she would turn out brilliant industrial photo-
graphs, which they would use as
fill-in
material in an issue
of the magazine.
On
the flatlands of northeastern Montana, Margaret
found the world's largest earthen dam being built. The
government-funded, multimillion-dollar project had put
to work ten thousand unemployed men. With the bulky
cameras she favored, Margaret moved around the construction site, shooting pictures of massive concrete columns, the
underpinnings of the huge dam. She took pictures of construction equipment including a huge steel "liner" with its
steel disks and radiating steel prongs. But to her industrial
photographs she added something new. She had become
curious about the way workers and their families lived, and
about the thousands of people drawn like magnets to the
shantytowns that had mushroomed around the construction
site.
From
the air Margaret shot pictures of miles of barren,
dusty plains with rows of small wooden shacks hugging the
foreground.
From
the street she focused on the shabby,
broken-down homes where families lived with no indoor
running water, poor sanitation facilities, and a total lack of
health care. She showed the sleazy, rundown shops that
lined the one-street towns. She took her cameras indoors,
into the dance halls where young women called taxi-dancers
worked through the night earning five cents a dance to partner a man. In saloons she showed men and women lining
the bars. One of the photographs showed a small, sad-looking child sitting on a saloon bar. Her mother had a job in the
saloon, and for want of child care facilities, she had to take
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
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T *«fB^^
:*k
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^^ ^ ^^^^ ^W Blr
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No
—a
child care facilities
the
of
girl on a saloon bar; Fort Peck,
work with
'
Montana, 1936
Margaret recorded the scant,
led by people cut adrift from established centers
little girl to
sordid lives
little
**
human activity.
Her photographs
her.
astonished the editors of
Life.
These
emotionally packed pictures about people were not what
they had in mind. But they found Margaret's story so revealing that they changed their plans.
issue,
On
the cover of Life's first
they put Margaret's photographs of the giant concrete
columns of the Fort Peck dam.
Two
men, looking
insignifi-
them scale. Her other
photographs of the construction site became the strong
cant at the base of the columns, give
opening photo essay.
Margaret had given the
its
first issue
of Fortune magazine
lead story in 1930. In 1936, her creative
photography and
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
—
70
strong story sense helped launch Life into orbit. The graphic presentation of the news had dazzling public appeal. Life's
publishers could hardly keep up with the
months' huge
demand. With the magazine's inordinate success, Margaret
became one of the most widely known and internationally
popular photographers.
Progress in camera technology made possible the pictorial magazine. New camera equipment, imported from
abroad, was light and flexible, easy to handle. A few photographers of that period, using these candid or miniature cameras, could take pictures in a fraction of a second. What the
pictures lost in rich detail, they
made up
first
in spontaneity
and
naturalness. With one or two of these cameras dangling
around their necks, photographers could push their way
into crowded news scenes that were once the exclusive preserve of the writer. A photographer could record a scene
more quickly than a reporter could take down words. And
photography was universally understood, leaping barriers
of language and cultural differences.
learned
how
A new
breed of editors
to arrange a series of pictures for telling im-
pact.
Picture magazines such as
swamped
the newsstands.
A
Life, Look, Peek, Pic,
and others
flood of talent fought
its
way
news photography. Ruthless
the tone of the marketplace. Those
into the broadening field of
competition for jobs set
who made it to the top had to be tough, bold, and aggressive.
They had to produce exciting, newsworthy pictures to get
key assignments.
It
has been said that Life editors pitted
their talented photographers against each other to
them turn out innovative work.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
make
71
In this arena, dominated by men, Margaret Bourke-
White became
a celebrity.
Did being
a
woman
help her or
hinder her? she was often asked. Colleagues have mentioned
win entry into
with
vied
each other to car-
that she used her feminine attractiveness to
high places, that influential
men
ry her gear. Time, Inc. president
Henry Luce was seen
ging around her heavy cameras.
He would
lug-
be followed in
by generals, admirals, and even a potentate or
two. Margaret could be charming, flash a winning smile,
and create eddies of excitement around her. And she was often presumptuous, requesting colleagues to transport home
cartons of material from foreign assignments. But, above all,
she had the self-confidence to carve out her own space and
write her own rules. Crucial to her success was not gender,
as she had made abundantly clear, but drive, talent, and
later years
courage.
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
t
mi
m
^SJta^
f
m
NEEVCLS
AS A CAT
**
"Photography
is
my
life
work," Margaret
magazine in
For young people interested in becom-
told an interviewer for Scholastic
1937.
ing industrial or news photographers, she
had straightforward advice. "You have to be
strong and healthy," she said. She went into
further detail at a college conference on careers where she said, "You have to be as strong as a horse
to work under tension, sleep irregular hours and eat on the
run." Essential, also, were "patience, courage, a sense for
detail and an honest view of life." A few years later she
would add to these qualifications a readiness to work under
dangerous conditions such as riding in bomber raids and
dangling from helicopters.
.
Margaret, the internationally successful photographer
73
.
.
74
But Peggy, or Maggie,
other outstanding qualities,
She had
all,
was
on the job, had
according to a Life photo editor.
sense of composition, and above
as she
called
wonderful eye, a
"the tenacity and persistence that resulted in pictures
a
that could not be otherwise taken."
She was besieged with requests to lecture, give interviews, attend elegant functions, and support worthwhile
causes. In her busy schedule she found time to dance, swim,
and ski. Her prematurely white hair made her strikingly
beautiful. Natural high color suffused her strong cheekbones. She clothed her slim, willowy figure in imported,
couturier-designed clothes, favoring the color red. For work
she wore tailored pants suits long before they became the
fashion.
Many on
knew Margaret could be
needs. Because they saw how
her technical staff
kind and responsive to their
mercilessly she drove herself, they endured long hours and
hard work. In the darkroom, technicians Oscar Graubner
and later George Karas worked to bring her prints up to
star quality. Peggy Sargent managed the myriad office and
technical details. At social functions, Margaret showed her
keen wit and charm. But when she worked, she was a terror.
"For a few minutes I think I could commit murder if
anyone gets in the way of what I am doing," she once said.
"A
picture
is
perishable.
people and surroundings
utterly pictorial.
The
.
.
.
There
fall
Picture
is
that
moment when
into a relationship that
is
suddenly there.
It
is
could
and forever." While trying to seize
that moment, she would get as "nervous as a cat" and, driven
by powerful inner pressure, would become blind to every
vanish in a minute
.
.
.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
75
On
danger and
of her
location,
risk.
young men
assisting with flash bulbs
and
lights
She would push everything and everyone out
way and go
after the picture.
Then came
the thrill of
putting her face in the camera, pivoting her camera around,
and finding herself locked in with what she saw in the lens.
At such times, she said, "the outside world is closed away as
effectively as if the genie of the lamp had clapped his hands
and dissolved the earth leaving me with my camera and my
subject."
"NERVOUS AS A CAT'
76
She tried to make "Skinny," as she called Erskine Caldwell, understand her commitment to her work
that she
cherished it even above marriage. For "Kit," as Caldwell
called her, and Skinny there was only leftover time from
their individual careers. Still, they were deeply in love and
saw each other whenever possible.
From the mid- 1930s on, Margaret traveled over a world
in turmoil as one of Life's leading photographers. Free to
improvise and to work out the nature of her assignments,
she sent back photographs enriched by her own social
awareness. Sometimes the only woman photographer present, she pushed and shoved her way into a crowded newsroom as in Washington, D.C., where she covered the second
inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She flew
—
to
Louisville,
Ohio,
when
disastrous
floods
put
three
quarters of the city under water. She hitchhiked from the
airport,
thumbing
rides in rowboats. Threats
were made
to
and cameras when she photographed a story of corruption in Jersey City under boss Mayor Hague. Then in
1937 she was sent to cover the appointment of a new governor-general of Canada.
Margaret packed her camera gear, warm clothes, and a
ski suit she would live and work in for days. In her luggage
she carefully stowed her butterflies. Determined to photograph their life cycle, she had raised them from eggs to caterpillars to the chrysalis stage, and now they were about to
her
life
hatch.
She flew to the Canadian Northwest where a small
pontoon plane picked her up and flew her along the isolated
waterways to join the touring Canadian governor-general,
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
77
Butterflies ready to hatch; the Arctic,
1937
Lord Tweedsmuir, and his party. They explored the barren
lands of the Arctic on an old-fashioned wood-burning
steamboat, the S.S. Distributor. Margaret shot pictures of the
Arctic tundra, those vast empty treeless plains covered by
ice, as well as pictures of the sparse trapper camps and communities where Canadian Eskimos had learned from their
ancestors how to work and live in the frozen north.
Aboard ship, Margaret's butterflies had become the important topic of conversation. "Hey, Maggie, when is the
"NERVOUS AS A CAT'
"Koptanna and her baby Nalsuyals; "
blessed event coming?"
the Arctic,
Lord Tweedsmuir wanted
Margaret had taped ten wriggling chrysalises
the ship.
The
As
1937
to
know.
to the rail of
in childhood, she kept a round-the-clock vigil.
governor-general gave her books to read, and others
brought her food. Then, just as the ship reached the middle
of Great Bear Lake, far up north in the Arctic Circle, the
chrysalises split open. The captain, true to his word,
brought the ship to a halt so that its vibrations would not
disturb the delicate photographs. Lord Tweedsmuir and an
aide-de-camp handed Margaret film packs. Twenty minutes
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
79
later,
ten
their
way
mourning cloak
out of the chrysalises. "For thirty years," said the
captain, "I've sailed this ship,
a
man
fell
had begun to push
butterflies
and
overboard, and here
I
I
never stopped
stop
it
for a
it
damn
even
if
butter-
Margaret fed the newly hatched insects a sweet mixture of sugar and water and let them fly away into the Arcfly."
tic.
At the small trading posts
in the desolate north
where
the ship stopped for mail and supplies, Margaret found
cablegrams from Erskine Caldwell awaiting her.
HOME ... he wired.
COME
Margaret had deep feelings for Caldwell, and she wavered. But long before the feminist revolution of the 1960s,
she had defined her life in terms of her work. She had freed
herself from the traditional roles
marriage and family by
which women then shaped their lives. She had become independent, self-sufficient, and filled with the pride of accomplishment. Marriage might cut into her independence and
trap her into conflicts. Should she go out on an assignment
or should she stay at home? Could she have a family and a
full career as well? She knew she needed inner peace. That
—
—
was her secret. Freedom from conflict gave her strength.
She could be single-minded in her work and handle the excitement and turmoil of the world in which she moved.
She tried to put Caldwell out of her mind as she went
off in search of a small plane for an additional
from
Life.
Arctic
The
editors
wanted
a
assignment
photo story on
how
the
Ocean looked during the summer. She chartered an
old-fashioned vintage plane flown by an expert pilot, Art
Rankin.
He knew
every inch of the
unmapped
"NERVOUS AS A CAT"
land that lay
80
months of the year. Joining her as fellow passengers on the plane were a bishop on
his way to visit remote villages and a composer who wrote
covered by thick layers of
ice ten
travel books.
The small plane flew from a tiny Canadian town toward Cameron Bay, 350 miles further into the Arctic Ocean.
The pilot had removed the door of the plane and tied Margaret to the base of the seat so that she could lean out and
When
take pictures.
tugged
at the
she
hung
too far out, the composer
rope and hauled her back
pictures of the icy patterns below
gray.
The
A
fog had rolled
pilot,
in,
in.
when
She was shooting
everything turned
completely blocking
visibility.
navigating through the turbulent sky and wor-
brought the plane down on a
spit of land attached to a rocky cliff. Margaret and her three
companions found themselves marooned on an uninhabited
island in the barren Lewes River. The plane radio, too weak
to transmit messages to the nearest inhabited island, 300
miles away, could only receive messages. "Art Rankin's
plane unreported," they heard over the radio. And then an
additional message was broadcast: "Margaret Bourke-White,
Skinny wants to know when are you coming home?"
ried he
would run out of
The
fuel,
four marooned people stretched their emergency
and kept their spirits up by singing, talking, and
drinking tea brewed over odd pieces of kindling. At the end
of the second day, a sliver of light broke through the fog.
The pilot rushed everyone into the plane and flew through
the strand of visibility, only to find himself buffeted by a
rations
driving storm.
Two
hours
later,
he landed the plane
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
at a
81
small settlement. Margaret sent Caldwell a message that she
was returning.
For the balance of that year, 1937, Margaret worked in
the United States doing masterful photographs of Hollywood and of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, among others. In
early 1938, Life sent her abroad to do a photo story on
Czechoslovakia. Accompanied by Erskine Caldwell, she
spent six months in Europe working on Life assignments, as
well as on another joint book with Caldwell.
By 1938, Europe was trembling before the savage onslaught of German Nazi aggression. Hitler's armies had already annexed Austria. Refugees from that country had fled
to Czechoslovakia for safety, and their lives were again in
danger when the Germans threatened to annex the Germanspeaking territory along the Czech border called the Sudetenland.
Bourke-White recorded for Life the terror of people
trapped by Nazi violence and racial hatred. By March, 1939,
when the Bourke-White-Caldwell book North of the Danube
was published, Hitler had already annexed all of Czechoslovakia and the world was forewarned of its terrible fate
World War
II.
Returning from Europe with Caldwell aboard the S.S.
made the decision to try marriage once
more. To avoid the publicity that would attend the marriage
of two well-known people whose romance was public
knowledge, she and Caldwell decided to fly from New York
to Nevada. In Reno they rented a taxi to take them to a deserted town called Silver City, where they found a pastor
Aquitania, Margaret
NERVOUS AS A CAT'
82
who
agreed to marry them in an old unused church.
and
Returning
The
shopkeeper were witnesses.
East, Margaret and Caldwell found a house
in Darien, Connecticut. On a dead-end road in a wooded,
taxi driver
a
hilly section of the countryside, they furnished a large colo-
home, setting aside a studio for Caldwell and work
space for Margaret. He would write short stories and novels. She would record in photographs the life histories of insects. That was their plan in April, 1939. A year later Margaret took a leave of absence from Life magazine and put in a
few months as chief photographer for P.M., a new daily
newspaper. Margaret knew P.M.'s creator, Ralph Ingersoll,
from his days as her editor on Fortune and later as vice-president and general manager of Time, Inc., the parent organization of both Fortune and Life. Ingersoll hoped to put together a crusading liberal newspaper. To make sure its
editorial policy was not influenced by big business, the
newspaper would not carry advertising.
During the period that Margaret worked for P.M., she
and Caldwell pooled their talents again. Traveling over ten
thousand miles of the United States, they recorded in words
and pictures the everyday life of rural and city people. By
the time their book Say, Is This the U.S.A.? was published in
1941, World War II had unleashed its full terror in Europe
and Asia. Margaret Bourke-White made the decision to return to the staff of Life and accepted assignments that would
nial
take her to the focal points of the world's turmoil.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
Margaret and husband Erskine Caldwell, Christmas
"NERVOUS AS A CAT'
card,
1940
DOING ALL
THE THINGS
**
THAT WGMEN
NEVER DC •*
Margaret stood on the balcony of her room
National Hotel in Moscow and looked
out over the heart of the city. Spread out before her was Red Square, and across the
square she could see the Kremlin, the Russian seat of government, with its ancient
buildings and churches surrounded by a
wall. Outside the Kremlin wall stood St. Basil's Cathedral,
its golden domes and towers decorating the sky.
She and Erskine had arrived in the Soviet Union toward the end of May, 1941. To be sure they would get to
Moscow safely, they avoided war-torn Europe and took the
Western route. They flew across the Pacific Ocean, with
stops in China where Margaret took portraits of Chinese
at the
Lifeboat survivors, en route to North African
Airforce search plane, 1942
85
war front, waving
to
a British
86
From China
leaders.
they flew to Moscow. Within
a
few
days of their arrival, they were given permission to travel
through the south of the Soviet Union where Margaret
would take
pictures.
On
their
way
to the Black Sea, stop-
farm collectives and rest homes, they could feel the
growing tension in the air. Crowds of people were pressed
ping
at
together around
lic
communal
radios and loudspeakers in pub-
squares listening to announcements.
heard the news
et cities
On
June
22,
they
—the Germans had dropped bombs on Sovi-
along the southern border. Russian troops were be-
ing rushed into battle.
had foreseen that World War II might
spread to the Soviet Union. They sent Margaret there relying on her popularity with government officials from her
visits ten years before. And now, as the German attack on
Her
Life editors
the Soviet
Union began, she was
the only accredited U.S.
photographer there.
room
Moscow, she had stashed away the
six hundred pounds of camera equipment she had brought
with her. There were three thousand flashbulbs, film packs,
In her hotel
in
twenty-two lenses, tanks, developer, tools for
repairing equipment, and replacements for parts. She was
five cameras,
ready to shoot pictures of the war
tect
when
the military, to pro-
troop actions from spies, issued orders during the
first
few days that anyone caught with a camera would be arrested and jailed. For three weeks she beseeched officials to relent, to let
her shoot her pictures that, she convinced them,
could favorably influence public opinion in the United
States.
She
finally
won
a
photographer's "passport," only to
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
87
be advised by the U.S. ambassador that
were being immediately evacuated.
all
U.S. citizens
Margaret and Erskine refused to leave Moscow.
They took long walks through the freezing city. Rain
and snow pelted Moscow and the countryside, the worst
spring weather in anyone's memory. Everywhere they saw
people prepare for war. Young children were removed to
the countryside; truckloads of men filed through Red
Square on the way to the front; women, older men, and older children served as fireguards and helped enforce blackout
rules; the golden domes of St. Basil's and the Kremlin palaces were painted a dull gray; and shelters were dug deep
into the earth. Bourke-White and Caldwell were in a subway shelter on July 22 when the first German bombs fell on
Moscow.
The
next day they hurried over to Spazzo House, the
temporary headquarters of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
From the rooftop of Spazzo House or from the open balcony outside her hotel rooms, Margaret would stand at night
and record the unearthly spectacle of the German bombardment of Moscow. By the light from flaming incendiary
bombs she shot her pictures. In her camera she tracked parachute flares dropping to earth, bombs bursting over targets,
and Russian searchlights piercing the sky pinning down
German
planes for their antiaircraft guns.
While bombers whizzed overhead, she and Caldwell
took turns slipping through blacked-out streets to the radio
station where they broadcast "live" to U.S. audiences their
reports on the attack and defense of Moscow.
DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT WOMEN NEVER DO'
The night bombing of the Kremlin; Moscow, July, 1941
Margaret scored a journalistic scoop with her exclusive
photos. She capped that with an unprecedented private photo session with Russia's wartime leader, Josef Stalin. Guards
led her through winding corridors into the depths of the
Kremlin. Ushered into Stalin's inner office, she saw before
her a dour, granite-faced man. In her nervousness over the
interview, she dropped flashbulbs all over the floor. She was
down on her knees scrambling after them when she looked
up and saw Stalin laughing at her. She photographed him
with a rare smile on his face. Life featured this unusual por-
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
89
In Russian fur hats, returning home by convoy through the Arctic, 1941
trait of Stalin, as
made him
well as Margaret's account of
how
she
smile.
In the
fall
of 1941, Bourke-White and Caldwell
were
taken, along with other foreign journalists, to Smolensk, the
Russian war front.
They
sloshed through miles of
bombed-
out countryside, flattening themselves in mud-filled fields
when German bombers flew overhead. As the Russians retreated before the German onslaught, Margaret saw them
put into effect their "scorched earth" policy. They burned
everything in the path of the enemy that they could not cart
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT
WOMEN NEVER
DO'
90
away
— homes, barns, electrical
installations. Factories
were
dismantled and, with the workers and their families,
re-
remote sites. The great dam at the Dnieper River,
which Margaret had seen the Russians build ten years before, was blown up.
More than ever, with a camera in her hand and pressured by Life to send more of her exclusive pictures, Margaret became blind to danger and death. She broke every rule
for safety. In Moscow she hid under the bed in her hotel
rooms to elude blackout wardens rushing everyone into
shelters; or she sneaked out to the open balcony or onto the
rooftop as bombs fell. She missed by one second the bomb
that fell on Spazzo House. That time, when she heard the
telltale whizz overhead, she scrambled down from the roof
into the house and flattened herself on the floor. The windows crashed in around her, cutting her fingers, but she escaped a heavy ventilator blown in from the windowsill. She
drove herself so mercilessly that she began to feel like a different person, unreal, emptied of feelings
"strange, remote, immune," she would say. She shot pictures of the horrors of war
mass destruction and the innocent dead
huddled in doorways. "War is war," she said, "and it has to
moved
to
—
—
be recorded."
At
a later date she
would describe more fully how she
protecting screen draws itself across
though a
the technique
my mind and makes it possible to consider
of photography ... as though I were making an abstract
while
composition. This blind lasts as long as it is needed
I am actually operating the camera. Days later, when I develop the negatives, I [am] surprised to find I cannot bring
felt.
"It
is
as
.
.
.
.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
.
.
91
myself to look
at the films. I
have to have someone else han-
and sort them for me."
Bourke-White and Caldwell returned to the United
States in the late fall aboard a cargo ship, part of a convoy,
that made its way over the Arctic Ocean and the North Sea.
They arrived home in time to fulfill lecture engagements.
People everywhere wanted to hear Margaret's eyewitness
account of the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the
Soviet counterattacks. She spent time in her Connecticut
home to write the book Shooting the Russian War.
In December, 1941, the United States entered World
War II. And Bourke-White, with few to equal her in courage and skill, became the first woman photographer accredited to the U.S. Air Force. She was stationed in England,
where U.S. bombers were preparing their attack on the
Continent. During short trips into London, she did a portrait of Winston Churchill, the English prime minister and
head of the war effort, that Life featured on a cover.
In England, Margaret learned of Allied plans to open
another war front in North Africa. Determined to be at the
center of action, she had herself transferred to Africa and
was assigned passage on a transport carrying troops, includdle
ing women in the armed forces called WACS (Women's
Army Corps), as well as medical personnel.
The
night before the ship was scheduled to reach
its
was torpedoed by a German submarine. Margaret, dumped out of her bunk by the jolt, quickly dressed,
grabbed a small knapsack in which she kept a camera and
film, and fought her way through corridors and up the
stairs. While thousands were filing to their lifeboat stations,
destination,
it
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT
WOMEN NEVER DO"
92
Margaret stood on the deck shooting photographs. Only
when she heard "Abandon ship!" did she rush to her assigned place and step into a lifeboat. The lifeboat was half
flooded and had a broken rudder, but Margaret, along with
the other passengers, used their helmets to scoop out the water. When she could, she helped row the boat. Never had
Margaret been so touched by an experience. Warmth and
understanding for people surged through her as she
watched these men and women draw on deep inner strength
in the face of catastrophe. They showed concern for one another and handled their fears by telling jokes, laughing, and
singing. After twenty hours of barely keeping afloat on a
navy destroyer picked them up. Margaret had
seen other lifeboats vanish from view.
For six months Margaret remained in Algeria, where
the survivors were taken. During that time she became the
rough
only
sea, a
woman
to fly in a
bombing
raid.
To
ensure her safety,
she went through rigorous drilling in rules and regulations
governing
such
missions.
Her bomber and
thirty-two
others, called Flying Fortresses, flew over an airfield near
Tunis and dropped
planes,
blasting
their
them
off
bombs on German troops and
the field. The successful raid
helped to make the African front an Allied stronghold.
From
Africa, Margaret returned to the United States.
Her marriage
had already broken up. She admitted she was unable to compromise with her work. "Mine
is a life into which marriage does not fit very well/' she said.
She again returned to the war front, this time to Italy.
In recognition of her skill in industrial and engineering
photography, the U.S. Department of Defense requested
to Caldwell
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
With two army photographers; North Africa, 1943
that she
make
a
photographic record of the Services of Sup-
This little-known branch of the army managed the
transportation of supplies to the front. Margaret's photos
would bring recognition to the vital work of the Engineers,
Signal, and Medical Corps.
In Italy, Margaret found her way into the Cassino Valley, where one of the grimmest battles of the war was taking
place. U.S. forces were trying to dislodge the enemy entrenched in surrounding hills. For five months Margaret
stayed with the Allied forces, covering the heavy fighting on
the ground and in the air. She flew in a light plane called a
ply.
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT
WOMEN NEVER DO"
94
Cub on
dangerous missions to spot enemy positions. On one flight, she was busy taking pictures of the
shell-pocked earth beneath her and did not notice four German fighter planes in pursuit. Only the extreme skill of the
American pilot, who quickly took a steep dive and flew the
plane beneath treetops and over a streambed, brought the
Cub safely back to base.
Piper
its
As World War
II
came
to a close in the bitter spring of
Margaret Bourke-White entered Germany with the
victorious U.S. armies under General George C. Patton. In
the war's aftermath, she saw the burned-out cities. Far
1945,
A
survivor of the Holocaust; Leipzig- Mochau concentration camp; Germany,
1945
+
95
worse, she bore witness to the
human wreckage
that result-
ed from the Nazi policy of political repression and genocide
against the Jews. In concentration camps,
where millions
had been put to death, she found hollow-eyed survivors.
Outside the camps were fields piled high with human bones.
How could she take photographs of such atrocities? She was
in a stupor, she said, as if she had a veil over her mind. "Correspondents," she explained, "are in a privileged and someThey have an obligation to pass
times unhappy position.
on what they see to others." Her awesome photographs of
.
the
.
.
we now call the German atrocities,
world. They have become permanent docu-
Holocaust,
as
stunned the
ments of that period.
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT
WOMEN NEVER
DO'
1
(
*=«
I
...
eyes like
the eagle*
**
"Do you know how to spin?" Margaret was
asked when she arrived in India in the
spring of 1946.
"Oh, I didn't come to spin. ... I came to
photograph the Mahatma spinning," she re-
!
ma
unless you
plied.
"How
know how
Margaret persisted,
can you understand the Mahat-
came the question.
but no amount of charm and
to spin?"
per-
suasion would get her past secretaries and aides to photo-
graph Mahatma Gandhi of India unless she learned how to
use the charkha, the spinning wheel. It had become the symbol of the nonviolent struggle for India's independence
from England.
Margaret, an aerial photographer, dangling by cable from a whirlybird, 1951
97
98
Gandhi's granddaughter taught Margaret how to spin.
She showed her how to sit on the floor with her legs crossed
before her in front of the old-fashioned wooden wheel and
work its simple mechanism. Margaret, the photographer of
the machine age, was amazed at her clumsiness. She entangled herself in the thread, breaking
it,
and was unable
to
spin out a continuous piece of yarn. But she finally learned
how
to spin.
She learned more; she learned how
to
slow her
pace. In India she could not charge around pushing people
and things out of her way. Here a monumental struggle was
being waged by a different set of rules.
The
been in
leader of the struggle,
jail
many
Mohandas K. Gandhi, had
times for his beliefs. Millions of people
him and became his devoted followers, calling him
Mahatma, meaning "Great Soul." He led the people in acts
loved
of civil disobedience, such as the refusal to pay taxes and the
all English goods. The Indian people began to
produce their own cloth, and the spinning wheel in every
home symbolized their strength and independence. With
the eyes of the world on him, Gandhi often went into a "fast
unto death" to win concessions from England and reforms
from the corrupt and powerful Indian princes.
Margaret had read books and articles on India for background material, but only when she was in India did she
fully understand the profound nature of the country's many
problems. She was subdued and nervous when she was finally ushered into Gandhi's presence. It was Monday, his
day of silence. She saw before her a man of seventy-six years
of age, gaunt, brown-skinned, wearing spectacles, sitting
cross-legged on the floor, his spinning wheel at his side.
boycott of
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
Mahatma Gandhi
on his day of silence; next
to
him
his cbarka,
a simple spin-
ning wheel; India, 1946
Dressed only in a homespun white loincloth, he was deeply
immersed in reading piles of newspaper clippings. In order
not to shatter the silence in the room, Margaret was permitted to use only three small, or peanut, flashbulbs for lighting. She fumbled with two of them, spoiling them. With the
third, she took the now famous photograph of a relaxed, vital Gandhi sitting beside his spinning wheel, reading.
To carry out her Life assignment to do an in-depth
study of conditions in India, Bourke-White spent most of
1946 there and returned for lengthy visits in 1947 and 1948.
She traveled extensively over the country making a record
EYES LIKE THE EAGLE
—
100
of the lavish,
wanton luxury of
India's princes
and the fam-
ine and disease that plagued millions of the poor. In the tanneries in the south, she found
young children working
in
lime pits that corroded their flesh. In Calcutta she took pho-
tographs of decaying bodies over which vultures were
—
swooping scenes from which tough journalists fled.
Independence could only improve conditions, Margaret
thought. And when the great day came in 1946 that India
won its independence from England and could form its own
government, Margaret was there. But with freedom came
new chaos. Within India lived two strong and warring religious forces, the Hindus and the Moslems. To accommodate
them, and to end their historic violence, India was partitioned into two nations and became Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan. When the actual division of the land took
place, Margaret traveled down to the small border villages
and there witnessed epic scenes that made her think of the
Old Testament. She saw the exodus of millions of people
from their ancestral homelands, forced to seek new refuges.
They formed an endless line of humanity on the march
men, women, and children, old and young, on foot, in
bullock carts, the weak on the backs of the strong. Only in
postwar Germany had Margaret beheld such agony and
despair. Thousands died from hunger, disease, and the brutal attacks of marauding bands and hostile religious groups.
Despite her observations, Margaret remained hopeful
that India would find its way to a more democratic society.
Sensitive to the progress of Indian
women, she reported
that
they were entering the educational system and breaking
with age-old tradition by removing the
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
veils
from
their
7fo dispossessed
—# young boy at a
refugee camp, near
New Delhi;
India,
1947
She also learned that the peasants were demanding
the breakup of feudal estates and that mill workers were organizing to improve their conditions.
Before her departure from India on January 30, 1948,
Margaret paid Gandhi a visit. She had become fond of him,
and he of her, though he called her "the torturer" because of
her persistence in taking his picture. She spent twenty minutes with Gandhi while he worked on the charkha. She
faces.
EYES LIKE THE EAGLE
102
found him less optimistic about peace in the world. Strongly
opposed to the manufacture and explosion of the atom
bomb, he said he would meet the bomb with prayer and
nonviolence rather than with shelters. "I no longer want to
live in a world of darkness and madness," he told Margaret.
As she left him, Margaret turned for a last look and
wished him good-bye.
A few hours later, Gandhi was struck down by an assassin's bullet while addressing a prayer meeting in New
Delhi. Margaret had been the last foreign journalist to see
him
alive.
Deeply shocked over
his death, yet ever the essential
photojournalism she stayed on in India to photograph the funeral procession. She stationed herself
on the cornice of
a
roof and watched the funeral bier pass by. Gandhi's body,
covered with rose petals, was on a flag-draped weapons car-
was on a five-mile course to the shores of the sacred
river Jumna. There, in keeping with Hindu tradition, it
would be set aflame. A million grieving people formed a
mighty procession behind the funeral cortege.
Helped by friends, Margaret was taken along back
roads to the site of the funeral pyre. She fought for space on
bridges and ramparts, pushing her way through the surging
mass of people, shooting pictures. For a few minutes she
saw all her work wasted when her camera equipment fell
from her hands and packets of film broke open. Someone
in the crowd rescued her material. Finally, with only a
Rolleiflex around her neck and set in focus, she fought her
way through the crowd to a truck and climbed up on the hood.
She held her camera up to photograph the moment when
rier that
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
103
the flames of the simple, sandalwood pyre roared
upward
and she realized that she was being pushed off the truck. She
clung to the windshield, determined to hold on, when two
men, the truck's owners, forcibly removed her. She pleaded
with them, but nothing worked until voices from the crowd
she does not stop her
shouted out, "Let the woman stay!
Let her stay." Another woman,
work. What a woman!
clinging to the truck, called to Margaret's persecutors, "She
.
.
.
.
.
.
has the agility of a snake, hair like
flax, a face like
the sun,
and eyes like the eagle. You should learn from her zeal."
Margaret stayed on the truck and took her pictures.
Gandhi's assassination sent shock waves through the
world. Life sent other photographers to India to record the
funeral procession and the profound grief of the Indian people at the loss of their great apostle of peace.
The magazine
featured Bourke-White's photographs and those of Cartier-
Bresson.
Upon
her return to the United States, Margaret stayed
in her Connecticut
home
to
complete work on her book
about India, Halfway to Freedom.
Though at the peak of her career, each assignment was
and the conditions of their lives,
continued to draw Margaret as intensely as machines did
when she was younger. Though she had compassion for suffering, her work remained restrained, reflecting objective
reality rather than an emotional response. But this restraint
cracked when she saw the human suffering during a visit to
South Africa in March, 1950.
Margaret knew, as the whole world knew, that apartheid, or apartness, was the legal policy of the South African
still
a challenge. People,
"EYES LIKE THE EAGLE"
104
government
white people.
while
it
to
It
keep black African people separated from
enabled the white minority to stay in power
deprived the black majority of every
human
right.
Black people in South Africa could not learn to read and
write; they could not train for decent jobs or vote or express
their opinions.
They were
barricaded in shantytowns, the
victims of police and government brutality.
Margaret rushed through her schedule, taking traditional photographs of government officials, their sports, and
social scenes. She shot pictures of the magnificent countryside with its cloudless blue sky. Then, typically, she probed
beneath the surface. She made her way, one Sunday, to a
gold mine. Gold and diamond mines, worked by black men,
formed the backbone of the country's wealth. At this particular compound she found miners putting on a show of
traditional dances. It was a way of expressing loneliness for
families and villages many had left behind more than a
year before to seek livelihood in the mines.
Two
of the dan-
were so beautiful and so graceful that Margaret decided
to base her photo essay on them and show where they
worked, lived, and slept.
She discovered, on inquiring for their names, that they
had no names, only numbers. They worked two miles down
a mine shaft in a "remnant" area where cave-ins were frequent. To do a full story, according to Margaret's way of
thinking, she had to go down into the mine. Officials were
shocked at her suggestion, but she fought them off and
showed up at the mine entrance on a prearranged day in
warm clothes, a crash helmet on her head, and a whistle
around her neck in case of an accident. Attended by reluc-
cers
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
105
mine foremen, she stepped into a mine cage for the
slow descent below sea level, into the steamy darkness of the
earth. The cage came to rest in a damp, dark pit. A system of
tant
made it possible to breathe.
She found the two miners curled up in a cramped pocket of space, chipping away at rock with pickaxes. She did
not recognize them as the dancers of a few nights before.
air circulation
She saw
down
and bodies. In their eyes, which would haunt her forever, she saw
their deep pain and scarred spirits. In the midst of taking
their pictures, she almost fainted from the heat and was relieved to be brought back to the surface of the mine. But she
knew that these black men spent most of their lives down in
the pit and that many collapsed and died from work and
Gold
miners
graphed
two
while
miles
y
rivers of sweat
photoworking
underground;
Johannesburg, South Africa,
1950
pouring
their faces
106
photo story, showed the way miners
were forced to live in windowless concrete barracks where
they slept "rolled up like sausages on the floor."
The photograph of the two black miners became one of
Margaret's favorites. She saw the "sorrow of all mankind in
the miners' eyes," she would say. She ended the lengthy essay with the picture of a three-year-old black child standing
behind barbed wire.
heat. Margaret, in her
At the mad pace at which she worked, Margaret moved
from one daring feat to another. Often she asked for the
most dangerous assignment, or she thought one up.
In 1950 she had gone into the bowels of the earth for
her South African photographs.
A
year later she hung sus-
pended by cable from a helicopter high above the United
States and its bordering seas to get a view of the country
from the top down. She had become Life's aerial photographer. To prepare for this assignment, she had consulted
navy helicopter pilots. And for months she barnstormed the
country with traffic patrols and pipeline inspectors, flying
so low over bridges and mountains that she could almost
stretch out her hand and touch them.
She felt perfectly safe hanging from a helicopter, or
"whirlybird," as it was called. It became another angle, or
photographic platform, from which Margaret took pictures.
The whirlybird hovered over a scene while Margaret recorded, for Life, such views as sightseers poking their heads
out of the crown of the Statue of Liberty and crowds of people at a Coney Island beach. A memorable photograph taken
this way was of snow geese flying over a Virginia bay.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
107
A
three-year-old behind the barbed wire
of her shanty town home; Johannesburg,
South Africa, IPSO
On
this road she chose, of ever-escalating external ex-
went to Korea in 1952. A war between North
and South Korea, in which the United States and the United Nations played roles, had been in progress for a couple of
citement, she
"EYES LIKE THE EAGLE"
108
Tokyo on her way and was in a station wagon shooting pictures of a May Day demonstration
when her car was stoned. She was caught in the midst of a
violent outbreak between police and students. Only when
years.
She stopped off
in
she could no longer see out of eyes streaming with tear gas
did she give
up shooting her
pictures.
In an automobile which was stoned during a demonstration; Tokyo, Japan,
1952
109
From Tokyo
she flew to Korea and worked on her story
about the Korean people and, in particular, about
commu-
behind U.S. lines.
But something was happening to Margaret, something
she would not admit to herself. She was having trouble getting in and out of jeeps, and her hands were stiffening on
the camera. There was also a dull ache in her left leg and
arm.
nist guerrilla strongholds
44
EYES LIKE THE EAGLE'
THE TOUGHEST
ASSIGNMENT
She had called herself "Maggie the Indehad never been seriously
sick in her life. She had taken for granted
her excellent health and agile body that responded to her needs like a perfectly tuned
instrument. The sudden stiffening of her
structible," for she
joints
made her
stagger.
To
cover up her
awkwardness, because it embarrassed her, she thought up
devices to gain time. She would pretend she had dropped
something, perhaps a pencil, and would bend down to retrieve it. This gave her a few extra minutes during which
she would regain her ability to walk.
For
a
while she continued with her work. But col-
leagues noticed her difficulties.
of a car, and
when
Someone had
to help her out
she framed a picture in her camera, some-
Margarets daily workout,
stretching
ill
and
exercising to keep limber
112
had to snap the shutter. Within a year her joints became increasingly stiff and her hands began to tremble.
The medical diagnosis of Margaret's symptoms was
Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's is crippling and incurable,
leading to increased stiffening of muscles and joints, tremor,
and garbled speech. When Margaret learned the diagnosis,
her life underwent swift and dramatic changes. She put every bit of her energy, ingenuity, and perseverance into conquering the illness.
She had made her home in Connecticut a haven. Even
in her busiest years, she had restored her psychic energy
and inner peace in the quiet countryside. Often she had
spread a blanket outdoors on a bed of leaves and fallen
one
else
In retirement at her Connecticut home during the 1960's
113
asleep looking through
Now,
too,
tall
trees at star-filled patches of sky.
during the early years of
illness,
sleep outdoors in good weather. She
fortable
on
a
she preferred to
would be made com-
lounge near the pool and doze off to the sounds
of insects and small animals scurrying through the grass.
With her cat, Sita, keeping vigil, she was never lonely.
To combat the disease, Margaret twice underwent
gery.
The
procedures,
still
in
the
experimental
sur-
stage,
brought her moderate relief. She gained temporary control
over her trembling hands, as well as some facility in movement. But only the most taxing, disciplined regimen of
physical therapy kept her mobile.
She converted an open porch of her home into a miniature gymnasium where, with the help of a therapist, she did
daily prescribed exercises. To keep her fingers flexible, she
crumpled paper by the hour or wrung water out of towels.
She did knee bends, played ball, and lifted weights. She
danced the tango to maintain muscle coordination. Neighborhood children taught her how to play jacks and badminton and how to jump rope. Each day she walked one to three
miles down the lanes and roads near her home, stopping to
weed the ground around a cluster of wild columbine and
jack-in-the-pulpit. Or she would stop to admire the mountain laurel and dogwood trees that filled the woods each
spring with their delicate blossoms.
When she could no longer hold a pen in her hand, she
learned to tap out words on a typewriter. That is how she
worked on her autobiography, Portrait of Myself When she
could no longer sit at a typewriter, she had a tall table built
and did her writing standing up. Though her last story for
.
THE TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT
114
appeared in 1956, the editors kept her name on the
masthead until 1969 and promised Margaret the assignment
to photograph the moon. Margaret had every hope that she
Life
would have recovered sufficiently
will could overcome her illness.
Her
to
do
spirit in fighting Parkinson's
so, as if
won
her force of
her as
many
lau-
had her extraordinary life as a photographer. "If I
ill," she remarked, "I was glad it was an illness I
could do something about. I researched it as if it were another photographic assignment." She addressed groups of
people with the same illness to encourage them by her example. She attended social functions, traveled, and went to
dances. She always looked beautiful, whether her white hair
was shorn down to her scalp, as it was after surgery, or
whether she wore it long and full. Even when her body was
rels as
had
to be
beginning to stoop, she wore fetching gowns. But more than
physical beauty enhanced her. Her excitement about life
never wavered and her eyes, to the very end, mirrored her
enthusiasm for every scene. Outside her windows she would
see the daily
panorama of nature unfold. At
stiffness in her fingers eased, she took
cats,
times,
when
the
photographs of her
her friends, and neighborhood children. She had an-
other weapon: "If you banish fear nothing terribly bad can
happen to you," she told a newspaper interviewer.
Honors and awards multiplied. They had come her way
from her first years as a photographer when, in 1928, one of
her steel pictures won first prize in a Cleveland Museum of
Art photography show. She was also celebrated for her daring exploits. Even the comic books made her a heroine.
"The World's Most Famous Photographer Was a Girl," fea-
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
US
tured an issue of Real Facts Comics.
handed her
a citation;
won
The War Department
she picked up honorary degrees from
American
Woman
Achievement
Award, and was elected to the Woman's Hall of Fame. In
1959, the Overseas Press Club held a dinner dance called
"Peggy's Night" to celebrate her recovery from surgery. In
1960, a television movie based on her life featured movie star
Theresa Wright in the lead role. Millions of viewers learned
universities,
an
about Margaret's battle against her
Colleagues and friends,
who
illness.
brought
along packages of her favorite food and prepared special
dishes for her. Margaret looked forward especially to visits
by Alfred Eisenstaedt and Carl Mydans, Life colleagues. She
missed her sister, Ruth, who died in 1964 (their mother had
died many years before). Ruth, always loving and warm, had
helped her with her books, reading the manuscripts and
visited
often,
making valuable editorial suggestions. Her brother, Roger,
and his family came from the Midwest where they lived to
see her, and her cousin Robert Connolly and his family visited from New Jersey. "What a beautiful person she was,"
said her cousin sometime later. "She never complained."
In June, 1971, Margaret attended the fiftieth reunion of
class. Accompanied by her companion of many years, Mrs. Marge Russell, she was driven
to the country club in Plainfield, New Jersey. She was
helped from the car into a wheelchair. By then she could
talk only in a loud whisper. She greeted each classmate by
name. "Hello, Jack," she said to her old co-editor of the high
school magazine, John Daniel, whom she had not seen in fifty years. She spoke to him about his work in the ministry.
her high school graduation
THE TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT
116
She fondly inquired about
all
those absent from the gather-
ing.
Two
She
and
months
left
later, in
behind
telling, so filled
a
August, 1971, she died.
monumental body
with her visual
of work, so alive
artistry, that
it
rein-
woman. The camera, which had become
an extension of her, led her on great adventures. At the
same time, she stretched the scope of the camera and made it
more meaningful, more responsive to her vision.
Even at the peak of her artistry, said photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White was as willing and
eager as any person on a first assignment. "She would get
up at the crack of daybreak to photograph a bread crumb
if necessary." For millions of people she documented and illuminated the historic events of twenty-five years: U.S. invokes the brilliant
dustry, the Great Depression, Soviet industrialization, wars
and revolutions, and the human condition. She
left
not only
a visual record of history but a written record as well.
Edward A.
Steichen,
Her
photographer and friend, with Margaret at an earlier time
117
books, illustrated with her compelling photographs,
still
convey the drama of major events.
She had love and appreciation not only for the big
things of the age. She maintained, until the end, her love for
everything in nature.
Her friend Sean Callahan visited her in
ward the end of her life. On the way in, he
He
the hospital to-
noticed a pray-
up and put it into an
empty bottle. At Margaret's bedside, he held up the bottle
for her to see his gift. She was by then almost completely
paralyzed and had lost all power of speech. But Callahan
had worked out with Margaret a form of communication
ing mantis on a bush.
picked
it
through the blinking of her eyes. After a brief visit Callahan
prepared to leave and bid her good-bye, leaving the praying
mantis behind on her night table. He noticed that Margaret
seemed fretful, and through the activity of her eyes he understood what she wanted him to do. Her last message was
that he take the praying mantis outdoors and release it
so
that it could be free.
—
Praying mantis by Margaret Bourke-White
THE TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT
SELECTED
ElELICGRAPHy
BOOKS BY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE
Eyes on Russia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931.
U.S.S.R. Photographs. Albany, New York: The Argus Press, 1934.
(with Erskine Caldwell) You Have Seen Their Faces. New York: The Viking Press,
1937.
(with Erskine Caldwell) North of the Danube. New York: The Viking Press, 1939.
(with Erskine Caldwell) Say, Is This the U.S.A.? New York: Duell, Sloan and
Pearce, 1941.
Shooting the Russian War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942.
They Called It "Purple Heart Valley. " New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944.
"Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly. " New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946.
Halfway to Freedom. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949.
(with John La Farge) A Report of the American Jesuits. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Cudahy,
1956.
Portrait of Myself.
New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
PUBLISHED PHOTOGRAPHS
The Cornell Alumni News,
May
IN:
December
23, 1926;
June 2 and 23; September 29,
Fortune, February 1930 to October 1937.
19;
January
13
and
20;
February
10;
1927.
November 1936 to May 1956.
P.M. June 1940 to December 1940.
Life,
ALSO:
Brown, Theodore M. Margaret Bourke-White,
White,
Photojournalist,
Andrew Dickson
Museum
of Art, Cornell University, 1972.
Callahan, Sean, ed. The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White,
New
York Graphic
Society, 1972.
Margaret Bourke-White, The Cleveland Years 1927-1930.
temporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, 1976.
I
The New Gallery
found these materials invaluable to my research. They are for
might want to look them over in the library.
terested reader
B.S.
118
of Con-
adults, but an in-
INDEX
marriage to Chapman, 24-25
name change from White, 32
parents' influence on, 9-13
advertising photos, 57
aerial
photography, 106
Africa
North, in
WWII, 91-92
South, gold mines
in,
Air Force, accreditation
Algeria, in
WWII,
Parkinson's disease, 109, 111-114, 117
104-106
to,
qualities
and work
style,
73-76
school years, 13-17
91
social awareness,
92
66-67
studio in Cleveland, 32, 39-40
American Bar Association, 31
American Woman Achievement Award,
studio in Chrysler Building, 50-52
butterflies
115
childhood interest in, 3-4
photos of, 76, 77-79
American Writers' Congress, 66-67
apartheid, in South Africa, 103-104
Aquitania, S.S., 81
architectural photography, 27-28, 32-33
Calcutta, photos of, 100
Architecture magazine, 33
Caldwell, Erskine
Arctic Ocean photos, 79-80
book collaborations with
Art Deco, 36
assassination of Gandhi, 102-103
marriage to
WWII
Bel Geddes,
Norman,
76, 79,
81-82, 92
Union, 85-91
childhood interest in, 3, 8, 13
bombers, raid in, 92
Buick cars, 57
Bound Brook, N.J., childhood home,
Bourke, Grandparents, 5
Bourke-White, Margaret
as camp counselor, 21-22
early childhood, 7-9
college years, 19-28
death, 116-117
honors, 114-115
love of nature, 3-4
cameras
and college photography
birds,
trip,
marriage to Caldwell,
MB-W,
in Soviet
Callahan, Sean, 118
67
Bemis, Alfred, 38-39
marooned on Arctic
MB-W,
63-66, 81, 82
and
7
camp
pictorial magazines, 70
counselor, job
as,
21-22
Canada photos, 76-79
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 67, 103
Cassino Valley photos, 92
caterpillars,
childhood interest
3-4
charkha (spinning wheel), 97-99, 101
Chicago stockyards, photo essay on,
47^8
81-82, 92
in,
Chapman, Everett (Chappie), 24-25
Chapman, Mrs., 25
80
76, 79,
class, 20
early familiarity with, 17
Chrysler Building, 50-52
119
5
120
work
Churchill, Winston, 91
Cleveland, studio
Cleveland
in, 32,
Museum
39-40
for,
Frog Book,
45-46, 48-49,
58,
69
1
of Art, 114
WWII, 94-95
Connolly, Robert, 115
Gandhi, Mohandas K. (Mahatma), and
dian independence, 97-103
contrast, in photography, 35
Germany
concentration camps, in
postwar, 94-95
Cooper Union, 6
Cornell Alumni News,
27
in
Cornell University, 26-28
of,
of,
gold mine photos, 104-106
Goodyear, 57
Graubner, Oscar, 74
Great Depression, 57-58, 63
81
dams, photos
WWII, 86-94
Gilpin, Laura, 20
German annexation
Czechoslovakia,
In-
67-69
dancing, at school, 15
Daniel, John,
16,
115
Darien, Conn., house
dark, childhood fear
in, 82,
112-113
Hague, Mayor, 76
Halfway to Freedom (Bourke-White), 103
handwriting, 12-15
of, 12
Defense Department, Services of Supply,
92-93
Head, Henry R., 27
Hindus, and Indian independence, 100
degrees, honorary, 115
Hine, Lewis, 67
diaries, 13
Hitler, Adolf, 81
"Hogs," photo essay, 48
Holocaust photos, 94-95
House and Garden, 33
Distributor, S.S., 77
dust bowl, photos
of,
61-63
"Dust Changes America," 66
Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 115, 116
India, independence, 97-103
Eisenstein, Sergei, 53
industrial design, 36
Ethical Culture Society,
industry photos, 33-43
5
Evans, Walker, 66
Ingersoll, Ralph, 82
Eyes on Russia (Bourke-White), 56
Italy, in
The Family Medical Book, 13
Karas, George, 74
Five-Year Plan, Soviet Union, 52
Korean War, 107-109
fears,
childhood, 12
Flying Fortress, 92
Fort Peck, Montana,
WWII, 93-94
Kulas, ElroyJ., 37, 39
dam
photos, 67-69
Fortune magazine
Lange, Dorothea,
Chrysler building construction photos,
50
drought photos, 61-62
stockyard photos, 47-48
Lake Bantam, photos
lecture circuit, 56
Leiter, Earl,
Life
38-39
magazine
aerial photos, 106
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
of, 21
20, 66,
67
121
Arctic photos, 79-80
Nazis, 81,95
Canada photos, 76-79
New
dam
North of
photos, 67-70
York Times Magazine, 56
Danube (Bourke-White and
the
Caldwell), 81
Churchill cover, 91
India assignment, 98-103
last
Oracle, 16
story for, 114
Otis Steel Co. photos, 36- 39
South Africa photos, 103-107
Soviet photos, 86-90
Overseas Press Club, 115
Lloyd-Smith, Parker, 47, 48
Look magazine, 70
Pakistan, and Indian independence, 100
Luce, Henry, 43,45, 46, 67, 71
Parkinson's disease, 109, 111-114, 117
Patton,
Luf, Charlotte, 16
George C, 94
Peek magazine, 70
machine age, 36
machine esthetic,
machines
photos
of,
3
36,
photo essay, 47-49,
photography
43
architectural, 27-28, 32-33
Teachers College, 20
commercial, 57
at Cornell, 26-28
class at
magazines, pictorial, 70
Fortune; Life
Manship, Paul, 67
meat-packing industry, photo essay on,
47-48
Michigan, University of, 23-25
mines, gold, photos of, 104-106
modernism, 36
Moscow, bombing of, 85-89
Moscowitz, Benjamin, 28
Moslems, and Indian independence, 100
Moth Book,
Museum
MB-W's
life,
of Natural History,
115
New
first jobs,
news, 49, 70-71
Photo League, 67
photomurals, 57
physical therapy, 113
Pic magazine, 70
Piper Cub,
Plainfield
York,
WWII
mission
High School,
16,
in,
93-94
115-116
popularity
28
Mydans,
21-23
industrial, 33-43
P.M. newspaper, 82
poems, 16-17
15
movie, based on
69-70
aerial, 106
3-43
Soviet, 55-56
see also
67,
at
Carl, 65, 115
high school, 15-16
at college, 23
Portrait o//Wjw//(Bourke-Wriite), 113
Nation, 66
Pratt Institute, 6
National Broadcasting Company, photo-
praying mantis, photos
mural
Purdue University,
for, 57
National Hotel, Moscow, 85
Natural History Museum, Cleveland, 25
nature, love
of, 4,
8-9, 17
radio broadcast from
Rankin, Art,
INDEX
79,
80
of, 64, 65,
25
Moscow,
87
117
5
122
Teachers College, Columbia University,
Real Facts Comics, 114-115
Reptile Book,
19
1
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 76
Time magazine, 43
Rothstein, Arthur, 66
Time
Russell,
Marge, 115
Inc., 82
toads, childhood interest in, 4
Tobacco Road (Caldwell), 63
Tokyo, photos of May Day demonstra-
Rutgers University, 19
Ruthven, Alexander, 23
tion, 108
"Trade Routes across the Great Lakes,"
Sargent, Peggy, 74
48
Say, Is This the t/.S.^..?
(Bourke-White and
Caldwell), 82
Trapping
the
Magical Waves of Sound (pho-
tomural), 57
magazine, 73
School of Photography, 20, 46
Services of Supply, 92-93
Scholastic
Tweedsmuir, Lord, 77-78
unemployment, Great Depression,
Shahn, Ben, 66
58
sharecroppers, book on, 63-66
ships, torpedoed,
91-92
Shooting the Russian
War (Bourke-White),
Vassos, John, 50
91
snakes, childhood
interest in,
4,
9,
21,
in, 63-66
South Africa, photos of gold miners in,
South, book on sharecroppers
103-107
spinning wheel, Gandhi and, 97-99, 101
Soviet
Union
in 1930s,
in
WACs
(Women's Army Corps),
War Department,
23
52-56
Steichen,
photos
Edward
White, Clarence H., 20, 46
White, Grandparents, 5
White, Joseph (father), 4-7
20-21
factory, 17
Spazzo House, Moscow,
Stalin, Josef, 88-89
steel mills,
Western Reserve University, 25
Weston, Edward, 67
dies,
WWII, 85-91
91
citation from, 115
of,
87,
love of nature, 8-9
90
personality, 9-10
33-43
A., 20, 67, 116
White, Lazarus (uncle), 21
White, Minnie Bourke (mother), 4-7, 115
Steiner, Ralph, 20, 46, 67
on dancing partners,
Stieglitz, Alfred, 20
influence of, 10-13
stockyard photos, 47-48
White, Roger (brother),
stoning of car, in Japanese demonstra-
White, Ruth
tion, 108
The Story of Steel, 39
Strand, Paul, 67
15
4, 7,
115
Woman's
Hall of Fame,
women
Sudetenland, 81
and career,
surgery, 113
in India, 100
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
1
15
(sister), 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 31,
71
1
15
123
World War
II, 81,
82
Holocaust, 94-95
in
England, 91
92-94
in Italy,
in
North
Africa, 91-92
in Soviet Union, 85-91
Wright, Teresa, 115
You Have Seen Their Faces (Bourke- White
and Caldwell), 66
INDEX
PHCTCGEADH CREDITS
The
estate of
24, 54, 62, 83,
Margaret Bourke-White: jacket (Oscar Graubner), pp.
The George Arents Research Library
Syracuse University,
Roger
7, 8, 9,
11,
89
B. White): pp.
ii,
2, 5, 6, 34,
(by permission of
41 (Ralph Steiner), 42, 44, 47, 72, 77, 96, 108,
110, 112
LIFE magazine, Time
Incorporated:
sole agent for the following
78,84,88,94,99,
The Time-LIFE Syndication
photographs appearing
is
the
101, 105, 107, 117
Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson
Magnum
Service
in this book. pp. 60, 65, 69,
Museum
of Art: pp. 18
Prints, Incorporated: pp. 116
The Museum
of
Modern Art
Collection (by permission of Roger B. White):
pp. 51, 55
The National
Archives: pp. 40
The New Gallery
of
Contemporary
Art, Cleveland,
Ohio (by permission of Rog-
er B. White): pp. 30
US Army:
pp. 93
The Witkin
Gallery, Incorporated: pp. 75
Courtesy of Bernard Hayden, Bound Brook,
New Jersey:
pp. 14
The photographs on the following pages were taken by Margaret Bourke-White: pp.
30, 34, 40, 47, 51, 54, 55, 60, 62, 69, 77, 78, 84, 88, 94, 99, 101, 105, 107,
124
117
18,
cffsy^,
'
AN EYE CN
THE W€CLE)
AN EYE CN
TEE WCREE
Margaret Bourke-White,
Photographer
BEATRICE SIEGEL
Warne
New York London
Frederick
To
£
Copyright
my
dear
Aunt Naomi
1980 by Beatrice Siegel
Xo part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
means without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief
All rights reserved.
or by any
quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in
a
magazine
or newspaper.
Frederick
New
Warne &
York,
New
Co., Inc.
York
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Siegel, Beatrice.
An
eye on the world.
Bibliography:
p.
Includes index.
SUMMARY: A
biography of
a
woman renowned
for her photographic interpretations
of war, revolution, and poverty and for her personal battle against Parkinsonism.
2.
States
ISBN
A
—
—
Bourke-White, Margaret, 1904-1971 Juvenile literature. 2. Photographers UnitBiography Juvenile literature. [1. Bourke-White, Margaret, 1904-1971.
770\92'4 [B] [92] 79-2432
Photographers] I. Title. TR140.B6S58
1.
ed
—
—
0-7232-6173-3
Selection of the Junior Literary Guild
Printed in the U.S.A. by Maple Press
Book Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
vii
On Cameras by Morris Engel
OF TOADS, SNAKES,
ix
AND BUTTERFLIES
3
THE GIRL WHO TAKES PICTURES 19
"DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN
PEARLS" 31
WITH A CAMERA IN HER HAND 45
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY 61
"NERVOUS AS A CA T" 73
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THA T WOMEN NEVER DO"
"EYES LIKE THE EAGLE"
97
THE TO UGHEST ASSIGNMENT 1 1
Selected Bibliography
Index
119
Photograph Credits
V
US
124
85
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
would
my gratitude
like to express
to
Roger
B.
White
erous help and for permission to use family diaries,
photographs.
I
would
also like to express
my
for his gen-
and
Ralph
letters,
appreciation to
one of Miss Bourke-White's editors and friend, for read-
Ingersoll,
ing the manuscript.
Others
thor,
would
I
who
like to
me
gave
thank
are:
Sean Callahan, editor and au-
the benefit of his personal experiences with
Miss Bourke-White; Theodore M. Brown, Professor of Art History, Cornell University, for a lengthy interview; Carolyn A. Davis,
the helpful guardian of the Bourke-White Collection and
script Librarian,
The
Manu-
George Arents Research Library, Syracuse
University; and Susan Kismaric, Assistant Curator, Department of
Photography,
Thanks
and
my
Museum
also to
husband,
of
Modern
Art,
New
York.
Ann Cooper, a research resource,
who undertook the role of research
photographer
Sam
Siegel,
assistant.
And
finally
I
would
like to
express
my appreciation
to the family
members, schoolmates, and colleagues of Margaret Bourke-White
who kindly drew on their memories of past days for this book.
BEATRICE SIEGEL
vii
r
V-
i
7? r\
«^'^
CN CAMERAS
By Morris Engel
Though
the cameras Margaret Bourke-White used at the beginning of her career are still in use today, they bear little resemblance to the small, easy-to-handle instruments most of us know.
Today, the latest miniature candid cameras are completely automatic, and some even have automatic focus. They use a roll of film
that can give 20 or 36 pictures and permit the recording of any rap-
moving subject. In the 1920s, however, these technical advanwere not available.
Margaret's first cameras were large and their operation required
idly
tages
Margaret had to select and compose the subject. Then, she had to determine the exposure, set the
shutter speed and lens opening, and focus the lens under the dark
covering cloth needed to shut out the light. Finally, she would insert the film holder (each picture was made from a single sheet of
film), remove the slide, and release the shutter. The slow speed of
the camera required the use of a tripod (a three-legged stand)
which held the camera steady.
slow and painstaking
steps. First,
IX
X
Margaret's basic cameras were the
/4 and
4%
a light
Soho Reflex,
Speed
heavy
Graflex, and a 35mm Contax. When on assignment, she added to
these cameras varied focal length lenses which permit differentsized images, wide views, and close-ups. She also needed large
supplies of film and flashbulbs. It made a substantial load of equipment.
In the decade of the 1930s, Margaret added to her arsenal of
equipment newly-developed compact cameras. These small cam3
Graphic, and the Linhof. She also used
x
eras permitted her a greater flexibility of
manding
(film size)
movement
subjects she photographed, especially during
a
in the de-
World War
II.
Margaret was continuously confronted with decisions: which
camera to use, and which lens, whether to use a flash (and if so, a
single or multi-flash), and whether or not to use a tripod. At the
same time she had to decide questions of even greater importance,
such as: who, what, where, when, and why to photograph. These
questions had to be quickly answered.
The camera gear that Margaret carried around created many
supply problems. She was a prolific "shooter" with many cameras
in constant use.
Margaret's work
ample evidence that she solved most of her
problems. It was perhaps good timing that the photographic improvements in cameras, film, lenses, and flash equipment coincided with her
own
is
development.
Margaret Bourke-White understood cameras, both the larger and
Her talent was so great that she made remarkable
photographs with the early, slower cameras. The newer, faster
ones gave her even greater range and freedom.
smaller ones.
XI
well-known photographer and filmmaker. He
and Margaret Bourke-White knew one another at the Photo
League in the late 1930s, and both worked at one of the landmark
newspapers of the 1940s, P.M.
MORRIS ENGEL
is
a
AN EYE CN
THE WORLD
\
V*
cr TOADS,
SNAKES, AND
DDTTCDDLICS
Through
the long night Margaret sat on the
edge of her chair, her eyes fixed on an overturned glass on the windowsill. All
summer
she had collected caterpillars and lined them
up under
glass jars. In
books on insects she
had found out what these caterpillars ate
and had fed each one a diet of its favorite
leaves. She had watched the caterpillars change into the
next stage of growth, enclosed in a firm case called a chrysalis. Earlier that warm September day she had noticed a
slight wriggle in one of the chrysalises. Now, joined by her
family in the all-night
Margaret at
11, holding
vigil,
she waited. Occasionally she
a baby robin while the father robin feeds
3
it
glanced over
at
her parents and her older
sitting patiently
on
sister,
Ruth, also
stiff-backed dining-room chairs.
Only
her two-year-old brother, Roger, seven years younger than
Margaret, was
still
asleep in his upstairs bedroom.
"Look," Margaret shouted when she saw the chrysalis
split open. Then, completely absorbed, she sat through the
long, slow process and saw a wet, curled up, shapeless insect
slowly pull itself out of the chrysalis, stretch and smooth out
its wrinkled wings, and become transformed into a full-
blown beautiful butterfly.
Not only caterpillars interested Margaret. She brought
home
toads,
damp
pieces of tree bark encrusted with strange
with insects. Her favorite pet was a boa
constrictor her father had given her as a gift. She knew it
was a harmless snake. So was the old puff adder that sometimes lay curled up in her mother's lap when she sat reading
newspapers in front of the fireplace. But friends and neighbors who dropped in to visit often shrieked in fright when
they saw so much wildlife scattered over the dining-room
eggs,
and
jars filled
floor.
Even before Margaret learned
to read
and write
in the
neighborhood school, her parents taught her to love everything in nature. She never saw them deliberately crush the
smallest insect. A bee buzzing around the house would be
caught in a glass and carefully freed outdoors.
Her parents had in common a love for nature. And they
both came from poor families that had settled in the United
States in the mid-1800s. In
was very
Her
many
ways, though, their ances-
Joseph White, was of Polish Jewish origin, and her mother, Minnie Bourke, was Irish
try
different.
father,
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
5
At
Protestant.
Her
one,
Margaret looking out at
the
father had been brought
world
up
to believe that
was more fundamental than faith in God and
therefore he never practiced his religion. Every person, he
was taught, was worthy and deserved to be treated with respect and dignity. His parents, Margaret's Grandmother
and Grandfather White, were active in the Ethical Culture
Society in New York City, where such ideas were discussed
and fostered. Her maternal grandparents, the Bourkes, were
more conventional church members. Grandmother Bourke
thought Minnie "was going to the devil" because she did not
faith in people
observe the Sabbath.
Joe White and Minnie Bourke met and started their
courtship in Central Park during the early-morning bird
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
walks.
Then
they rushed off to daytime jobs. At night they
both attended school. Joe White was studying engineering
at Cooper Union and Minnie Bourke was going to Pratt Institute to learn
those days.
On
stenography, a desirable
skill for
women
in
Saturdays or Sundays they would pedal off
spend the day in the countryside. Margaret's father was even then a silent man, his head full of
ideas for new machines. Her mother, lively and outgoing,
filled the silence with enthusiastic talk about everything
around her.
on
their bicycles to
A
two-year-old toddler, stacking blocks; sister Ruth at
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
left
Brother Roger at work in the garden
After their marriage Minnie and Joe White remained in
York, and Margaret was born there in June, 1904. A
New
few years
sey, to
later the family
moved
to
Bound Brook,
New Jer-
be near the printing plant where Mr. White,
now
an
engineer and inventor, worked.
Margaret grew up in a large house surrounded by trees
and open fields. Within walking distance were the woods
and rolling hills of the Watchung Mountains. In that lovely
rural area Margaret found excitement in each season and every change of weather. On cold wintry days, when the snow
glistened on fields and mountains, Margaret and Ruth,
sometimes with brother Roger in their care, would go coasting down the mountain slopes. Or they would ice-skate on a
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
Margaret climbing up
to join Ruth
n
frozen pond. In the spring, Margaret brought
of wild flowers and put out bread
rows. She used a
crumbs
home bunches
song spargood part of her free time to help plant and
for the
the vegetable garden. During summer vacations, her
mother taught her and her friends how to cook and how to
sew. There were always the walks to the library with Ruth
when they challenged each other to a balancing match on
weed
the thin edge of a high
wooden
fence.
But nature walks with their father, when Margaret and
Ruth could coax him out-of-doors, were unforgettable adventures. He could call birds to him by imitating their song.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
Margaret's father, Ruth, and family pet Rover
And
By
he taught the children
how
to pick
up harmless snakes.
dreamed she
the time Margaret was ten years old, she
would become a great authority on snakes, a herpetologist;
she would travel to the jungles of foreign lands for rare species "doing all the things that women never do." Above all,
she knew she had to travel, like her Irish ancestors whose
sons had run away to sea.
While Margaret's father was gentle and smiling on
their nature walks, he was very different at home. Most of
the time, after dinner, he would work at his drawing board.
Or he would sit in a living-room chair sunk into a deep siOF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
10
unaware of the family tiptoeing around him. Even
when Margaret's mother asked him a question, he might remain silent. The question hung in the air like a puff of
smoke. Sometimes, a week later, he would answer it.
"He's a perfectionist," Margaret's mother would explain, trying to help Ruth, Margaret, and Roger understand
the father who sat in their midst but yet was in another
world. "He's trying to solve an engineering problem," Margaret's mother would say. Sometimes on one of those rare
lence,
occasions
would
on the
when
the family ate in a restaurant, Margaret
see her father
push
his food aside
and draw sketches
tablecloth.
Margaret often watched her father. She adored him;
and it pained her to see how hard he worked, to see his face
become grim and stern and to know she could not penetrate
the wall of silence that surrounded him.
Early in the marriage, Minnie Bourke showed the
strain of sharing a home with her withdrawn husband. "If
only he would talk more," Margaret would hear her mother
complain of her father. Her mother had the full responsibility of the large house and three growing children. And if
Margaret's father was a perfectionist, her mother also set
high standards for herself and the children. She firmly believed that time had to be put to constructive use. From
morning to night she was busy in the home and in the community. (Later on she would take college courses, study
braille, and become a devoted teacher of the blind.) Though
the family was well off and could afford many comforts,
Mrs. White had only the occasional help of a gardener,
handyman, and seamstress. She kept a watchful eye on exAN EYE ON THE WORLD
11
Margaret s mother, posed and photographed by Joseph White
penditures and could account for every penny in the same
way
she could account for every hour. With that same vigi-
meet her high ideals.
"Reject the easy path! Do it the hard way!" she
drummed into Margaret with her ABCs. When Margaret
came home from school after an exam, her mother would
say, "I hope, Margaret, if there was a choice of questions,
that you answered the difficult ones and not the easy ones."
"Tell the truth," was another daily lesson. "Margaret,
was it an accident or carelessness that you broke the soup
plate?" her mother would ask when a plate shattered to the
lance, she educated the children to
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
12
She forgave an accident and punished carelessness,
but none the less expected a truthful answer.
Growing up in a large rambling house surrounded by
trees filled Margaret with terrors of the dark and of being
floor.
She clung to Ruth when she thought she heard
strange sounds during the night. To help Margaret face her
childhood fears and overcome them, Margaret's mother took
the situation in hand. She made Margaret comfortable with
a favorite jigsaw puzzle or book and left her alone in the
house, at first for five minutes and then for longer stretches
of time. One day Margaret discovered she had spent four
hours alone in the house and had actually enjoyed the
alone.
solitude.
To
help her handle her fear of the dark, Margaret's
mother devised another game. She made Margaret walk
partway around the outside of the house in one direction as
night fell. When Margaret was about to scream in fright, she
would find her mother coming from the opposite direction
with outstretched hands. Margaret learned that nothing sinister lurked behind the maple trees. In fact, she began to enjoy the outdoors in the dark.
Even Margaret's handwriting received her mother's
For her eleventh birthday, Margaret received
from her mother with a note:
full attention.
a gift
Dear Margaret:
you
will practice writing in this book every day or at
days each week during vacations, and your handwriting shows improvement by September 30th, you may make out
a list of surprises, one of which you would like as a reward.
If
least five
Your loving Mother
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
13
P.S. It
would be
and write
it
a good plan to choose a sentence for each page,
over and over until the page is filled.
.
.
.
Margaret's penmanship did improve and in meticulous
handwriting she started the
first
of
many
diaries the year
Her mother made her understand
no
matter what her experiences and feelings were they were
valuable and worth recording.
Each day Margaret felt challenged to meet her mother's
demands and win her approval. She worried when she
thought her mother might hear false tales about her. "I was
she was eleven.
trying to be as nice as
I
that
could tonight but Grandmother
[Grandmother Bourke was visiting at the time] and Ruth
were cross," she wrote in a note when her mother was out.
When Margaret and Ruth fulfilled their mother's expectations, she rewarded them with a special treat. She took
down from the book shelves a heavy volume they called
"The Family Medical Book." Together they pored over diagrams and charts of muscles, bones, and blood vessels. By
the time she entered high school, Margaret had learned the
mysteries of the human body and how babies were born. In
many ways she was more advanced than her school friends.
She had so many things on her mind that sometimes she
would sit in the classroom and stare out the window. She
could be thinking of the baby robin that had fallen from its
nest and that she had rescued. She had worried about what
to feed it when one day, sitting on the lawn with the tiny
robin in her lap, the father robin hopped over with a worm
in
mouth to feed the chick.
Even if at times her mind wandered, she was
its
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
so bright
Elementary school graduation
class;
Margaret seated on
that she quickly learned every lesson she
celled particularly in writing.
When
grass, left
was given. She
ex-
she was only fourteen,
in her
second year in high school, she entered the writing
competition open to students in the upper classes and won
the coveted prize for "excellence in literary composition."
Her excitement
at
winning the prize
—three books
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
she
se-
15
lected for the cash
an experience
award of
later in the
fifteen dollars
—was dimmed by
week. At the senior class graduat-
ing exercises in the school auditorium, the principal called
Margaret to the stage and handed her the books. Afterward,
when the auditorium was cleared of chairs and converted to
a dance floor, she proudly stood around, confident that her
winning an award would make her popular. She loved to
dance and would waltz around the kitchen at home with a
dish towel draped around her. Her mother, who always
seemed so wise, would say, "If you are a good dancer you
will always get dancing partners." But it did not work out
that way. That evening in the school auditorium, Margaret,
tall, slender, with lovely deep blue eyes and abundant dark
hair, stood alone along a wall of the dance floor, hugging her
heavy books, a bright smile on her face and not one boy
—
asked her to dance.
What was wrong? She straightened her dress and patted
down her hair. She watched the boys line up and wait for
other girls to be free, while she stood along the wall clutching her prize books: the Frog Book, the Moth Book, the Reptile
She continued to smile even though a hot flush of embarrassment was creeping up her cheeks. Finally, an older
girl, a friend of her sister's, whirled her around the dance
floor. She stumbled through the dance, positive everyone
was staring at her. In those days girls did not dance together
Book.
in public.
Though Margaret yearned
to be
popular and to have
dancing partners, she was never an intimate part of a school
group. When classmates gathered together and laughed over
something ridiculous in a comic strip, or at a light movie, or
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
16
even about the latest fad in chewing gum, Margaret would
not know what they were talking about. Her mother would
not allow comic books in the house. Only rarely was she al-
lowed
to
go to
a
movie. She was not permitted to
chew gum,
play cards, use cosmetics, wear frilly clothes, or do anything
her mother considered
and useless. She could not even
visit classmates who had comic books in their homes.
Margaret had a few close friends but, cut off from light
amusements, she struck most students as "different." The
silly
boys considered her too serious-minded to invite to
On
own
a
dance.
Margaret often did appear distant and reserved. Sometimes she
had the air of a superior being looking down on her classmates. "My home is in heaven, I'm here on a visit," was the
comment one classmate made of her. Still, the students respected her and elected her class president one year. She
made the swimming team, went on canoe trips, and played
basketball and hockey. No one could deny her competence
and her bright mind. She had a great store of information
and could easily roll off the names of Greek gods; she knew
classical music as well as classical literature. She put her
knowledge and her marvelous facility with words to use
when she became an editor of the Plainfield High School senior class book, the Oracle. With another editor, John Daniel, she wrote appropriate and witty comments under each
graduate's picture. She told her best friend, Charlotte Luf,
whom she called Tubby, that she and John were writing a
poem for the class book, and in lofty tones Margaret recited
a sample verse:
the other hand, deeply involved with her
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
life,
17
"We're starting on the Road of
Life,
Unconquered lands before us
Where each one hopes
But how we hate
The
lie
to find success;
to say
goodbye!"
highlights of Margaret's growing-up years
were
Sunday visits to the factory with her father.
There she would see the rotary presses he had invented,
which had brought about a radical change in printing, making possible a continuous printing process. On one memorable day her father took her to a foundry where the parts for
one of his machines were being cast. She climbed up to a
sooty balcony with him and looked down into the dark
depths. She would never forget the thrill of seeing the sudden burst of flying sparks and flowing metal that lit up the
pitch blackness. Margaret was beside herself with excitethe occasional
ment.
Not only printing
presses but cameras, lenses, prisms,
and the magic qualities of color engaged her father's inventive mind. Margaret would laughingly pose with the family while her father experimented with different lenses.
Though cameras were lying around the house, Margaret
never took a picture in those days. She would casually pick
one up and examine it, but cameras held no interest for her.
Nevertheless, familiarity with cameras became part of the
legacy from her parents along with hard work habits, perseverance, courage and an enduring love for nature.
—
OF TOADS, SNAKES, AND BUTTERFLIES
f
*
*
ft
V
;
v......
THE GIRL WHC
TAKES PICTURES
^
When
she graduated from high school, at
age seventeen, Margaret had no great interest in a specific career.
Science was impor-
and teaching was a possibility.
Teaching had become a popular profession
for young women going on to college. But
the arts also absorbed her. At Rutgers College, which was only twenty minutes from where she lived,
she took courses that summer in dancing and swimming. In
the fall she entered Teachers College, Columbia University,
and started the long daily train trip to New York City. Entant to her,
rolled in the Practical Arts division, she took the usual first-
year courses in biology, French, and drawing. But to add to
her knowledge of design and composition, she signed up for
The library tower and
clock,
Cornell University, 1926-27; one of the phototo help meet expenses
graphs Margaret sold for a dollar
19
20
photography with Clarence H. White, a lecturer in
Fine Arts at Teachers College. For the class, her mother
gave her an lea Reflex camera for which she had paid only
twenty dollars because it had a cracked lens.
Clarence H. White was a man of worldwide reputation
whose work hung in museums in both the United States and
Europe. An associate of the great photographers Alfred
Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, he offered his students an
appreciation of photography as a fine art and as a way to exa class in
press beauty, while leaving the practical instruction in
shooting and developing pictures to an assistant. White
worked on
and paper
his
own
prints with various chemical processes
to achieve a "soft focus."
portraits are distant,
His scenic studies and
moody, and shadowy
—they look
as if
they had been shot through a mist.
To
take the class in photography, Margaret traveled the
West 120th Street
up to West 144th Street, where Clarence White ran his
School of Photography. There she also listened to guest lecturers and picked up odd bits of knowledge from other students, many of whom, like Ralph Steiner, were starting distinguished careers of their own. Margaret would say in later
years, "The seed was planted with that course." Dorothea
Lange and Laura Gilpin were also among the outstanding
photographers who took classes with Clarence White in
short distance from Teachers College on
their early years.
At the end of Margaret's
Though
first
semester
at college,
her
Margaret
and her family had to face hard problems. Mr. White, always a dreamer, had made no provisions for their financial
father died.
grief-stricken over their loss,
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
21
care.
Margaret offered to leave college and look for
but her mother
made
it
a job,
clear that she expected the children
with their educations. Somehow they would
manage, she said. Uncle Lazarus White, her father's brother
and also a successful engineer, remained close to the family.
He tried to complete an invention for a new color printing
process Margaret's father was working on at the time of his
to continue
er, to
He was
howevadvise the family about financial matters and help
death, but the details
were too obscure.
able,
with the children's education.
Margaret knew now that she had to earn money, and
that summer she put to use her knowledge of photography.
It
qualified her for a job as a counselor in a children's
camp
She taught children how to take pictures
and how to develop them in the darkroom she had set up.
But she completely enchanted them with her knowledge of
wildlife. One evening when the children were especially
noisy, she jumped up on a table and told them the exciting
story about "the beauty sleep a caterpillar takes and wakes
up more beautiful." On nature walks she would show them
a garter snake, and to their amazement and delight, she
would pick it up and explain the difference between harmless and dangerous reptiles. She made pets of two snakes,
and soon the children were freely handling them. They collected every bug and wild flower and brought them to Margaret as if they were precious gifts.
During a three-day hike to the top of a high mountain,
Margaret took pictures of its rolling slopes. She had already
shot pictures of Lake Bantam, where the camp was located.
When the camp directors saw the scenic beauty Margaret
in Connecticut.
THE GIRL WHO TAKES PICTURES
22
portrayed, they asked her to print two hundred picture
postcards for sale to visiting parents.
After she saw the children off to bed, Margaret rushed
over to the darkroom. Night after night, with the assistance
of another counselor, she printed the cards.
When most
of these were quickly sold, the directors or-
dered another five hundred cards for the following season.
To
earn additional money, Margaret took
town and convinced
them for sale. By the end
cards to
a
several gift shop
sample of the
owners
to of-
summer she had orders
proud of myself. I feel as
if I can make my living anywhere," she wrote in her diary.
To fill the orders, she stayed on in camp after the children had departed. It was a lonely time, and the days
dragged. Her friends among the counselors had also left,
and even though the kitchen staff was helpful, she spent almost all her time alone in the darkroom, doing each card by
hand. When finally she had hung the last print up to dry,
she figured out she had made almost two thousand cards
that summer.
Margaret was glad to leave camp behind her and get
back home to Bound Brook. Her brother, Roger, was away
at boarding school, but she, her mother, and Ruth had a joyous reunion and stayed up half the night talking. Part of
their discussion concerned Margaret's return to college.
They were trying to figure out how, with their limited
funds, they could manage it. But the problem was resolved a
few days later in an unexpected way. A wealthy family in
town, who had set up a fund for worthy students recommended by high school teachers, offered to put Margaret
fer
for over a thousand cards. "I
of the
am
so
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
23
through a year at the University of Michigan. "I'm really
going back to college," an elated Margaret reported to her
mother.
She repacked her belongings and set off for Ann Arbor,
Michigan. There she shared an apartment with three other
young
students.
During
registration, she signed
ence courses, certain she was
and would become
up
for sci-
headed in the right direction
a biologist. Still fascinated
by herpetol-
ogy, she took a special course with the noted authority Dr.
Alexander D. Ruthven.
The days when Margaret had no dancing partners were
long behind her. Tall, lean, her dark hair cut short, and
glowing with energy, she had a deep, warm sense of "belonging" to the university. She moved through her days as
purposefully as an arrow heading for its target. She worked
hard at her courses, went out on weekend dates, snakedanced through the town when Michigan's football team
won
and attended concerts by herself when she
needed solitude. She found time to earn money by taking
pictures of campus clubs and organizations. The editor of
the college yearbook asked her to do some photographs. She
could be seen, camera in hand, scrambling over buildings or
standing on an open balcony. Peg White, as they called her
on campus, was the girl who takes pictures. One friend
called her a "demon photographer" and predicted "future
fame." And though only a sophomore, she was asked to become photo editor of the yearbook. She turned it down because by then her mind was on other matters.
She had been on her way to lunch one day at the campus cafeteria when a young man, on his way out of the
a victory,
THE GIRL
WHO TAKES
PICTURES
24
Everett
Chapman
(Chappie), Margaret's
first hushand, as a student at
University,
Michigan
1924
building, trapped Margaret in the revolving door.
He
kept
it
spinning until she agreed to go out with him. Everett
"Chappie" Chapman, a tall, cheerful, bright young man,
was working for his doctorate in electrical engineering. He
and Peg fell deeply in love. A professor in the College of Engineering offered them his home for the marriage ceremony.
And
Margaret, eager to be dressed in traditional white,
borrowed
his wife's
wedding gown.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
25
In a small cottage located off campus, Margaret set up
housekeeping and started a complex life as wife, student,
and part-time breadwinner. She felt even more confused in
her multiple roles when she followed Chappie to a teaching
job at Purdue University in Indiana. At twenty years of age,
she was the youngest faculty wife on campus. She tried to
assume her responsibilities, but often she was no older than
the students she chaperoned or entertained. In classes,
where she continued her science studies, she was regarded
as a teacher's wife. She had no friends, and when she felt
shaken by marital problems, she did not know where to
turn.
Chappie, she discovered, was as dedicated to electric
welding
as
her father had been to his inventions. She accept-
ed the single-mindedness in his work, but she had to compete for his affections with his mother.
A
manding woman, Mrs. Chapman came
for long visits
beautiful but de-
and
disrupted the household, pushing Margaret and Chappie
The problems became
and Margaret sought
professional advice. But, by the second year, Margaret had
to admit to herself that the marriage could not continue.
When it finally broke up, she wept in anguish, distraught at
the failure and at the loss of someone she loved so deeply.
She stayed on in the Midwest, forcing herself each day to
apart.
her job in the Natural History
severe,
Museum
At night she routinely took courses
at
in Cleveland, Ohio.
Western Reserve Col-
lege.
The time
the pain.
came when Margaret could close away
She knew then that no one would again touch her
finally
THE GIRL WHO TAKES PICTURES
26
She would say later, "I had been through the valley of the shadow. ... It was as though everything had been
packed into those two short years and would never seem so
so deeply.
hard again/'
Requiring only one more year of college credits to get
degree, she looked for a beautiful
campus
far
a
from the
scenes of her failed marriage. She chose Cornell University
New
York and arrived there
September, 1926,
just as the first burst of fall foliage draped the countryside in
vivid colors. She found the large campus rimmed with
in upstate
in
Gothic-style ivy-covered buildings, one of which was the
library with
hour.
From
its
the
tower and clock that rang out the quarter
campus
hilltop she could look
down
over a
and the famous Lake Cayuga.
Beautiful as the campus was, Margaret felt lost among
the thousands of students hurrying to class. Still determined
to become a biologist, she filled her program with science
courses. And, desperately in need of money, she took a job
as a waitress in return for her meals. Later on she had a
clerical job. But from her first days at Cornell, she wandered around the campus with her camera in her hand. She
had already spotted scenes she wanted to record.
Margaret put to use all she had learned about photography over the years. She had a sense of search, almost a mission, to find the scene that appealed to her. She moved
around studying angles for good shots, looking for an effective composition. One day, when a heavy snow made the
valley of well-marked fields
Cornell buildings look especially beautiful, she cut classes to
take pictures. She ran around in the snow, leaving a trail of
footprints to
make
the scene
more dramatic. At other times
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
27
she climbed up to the top of the library tower to survey the
campus from a height. She took photographs of a dormitory
dawn
seen through a mist, of waterfalls, of college buildings framed by tall trees, and of the distant football stadium
with lowering clouds in the foreground.
at
Evenings Margaret hurried down the steeply sloped
streets of Ithaca into the town, where she had located a commercial photographer, Henry R. Head. Impressed with the
eagerness of the young girl, he rented her the use of his
darkroom. There she made sample enlargements, developing her prints in the Clarence H. White tradition, seeking
the misty, blurred effect.
She displayed samples of her work on
a table
in the corridor outside the college dining
she set up
room. Students
and teachers, eager for mementos of their Cornell years,
placed orders for her photographs.
said,
"Why,
It thrilled
her
these don't look like photographs at
number
when
they
all."
up
Encouraged by the
hundreds of pictures and pulled together a group of students to work as salespeople on a commission basis. The
Cornell Co-op agreed to carry the pictures and, to add to her
glory, the Cornell Alumni News printed a few of her photographs and paid five dollars for each picture used on a cover.
Letters came in from Cornell alumni admiring her work
and asking whether she intended to become an architectural
of orders, she printed
photographer.
Margaret saw a dazzling new vista open before her. Arphotography? Was she talented enough? she
asked herself. She liked the feel of a camera in her hand, and
she had begun to experience the heady excitement of "catch-
chitectural
THE GIRL WHO TAKES PICTURES
28
ing the
moment" when
a
scene
hung
together.
Still,
the decisive change from science to photography as a
earn
a living,
make
way to
to
she needed an objective opinion of her work.
During Easter
vacation, Margaret, with a portfolio of
pictures under her arm, boarded a train to
New
York
City,
where she made her way to the offices of a distinguished architectural firm recommended to her. The head of the company, Benjamin Moscowitz, was rushing off to catch a train.
But Margaret pursued him to the elevator, talking and
showing him her photographs. When he saw Margaret's picture of the Cornell library tower, he said, "Let's go back and
look at these."
all
He
assured Margaret that,
had
a
members of the firm. They
based on the work they saw, she
called in other
future in architectural photography.
Encouraged by these words of praise, Margaret took the
train back to Cornell. During the long, slow trip, she had
many hours in which to think about her future. In the offing was the dazzling possibility of a career in photography.
On the other hand, she had received a job offer from the
Museum
of Natural History in
New
York.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
I
.
"DYNAMOS ACE
MCEE BEALTIEUL
THAN PEARLS 9*
Confident about her ability, Margaret chose
photography as her life work. With her
clear,
straightforward
knew
it
way
of thinking, she
involved great responsibility to em-
bark on such an uncertain career, especially
when
she
knew
she had to earn
money
at
once to support herself.
She packed her college degree along with her belongings into her trunk and took a train from Ithaca to Buffalo,
New York. There she boarded a night boat that sailed along
Lake Erie to Cleveland, Ohio, where she had lived briefly
after her marriage ended and where her mother and brother
had settled. Her sister, Ruth, had taken law courses and was
working in Chicago for the American Bar Association.
Margaret's award-winning photograph of a 200-ton ladle used in the making of
steel;
Otis Steel
Company, 1928
31
32
To celebrate
ret
her
new independence,
she became Marga-
Bourke-White, attaching her middle name Bourke
(also
her mother's maiden name) to the family name. In Cleve-
Margaret opened the first Bourke-White Studio in
1927. She turned a one-room apartment into her living-andwork space. Each morning she pushed the in-a-door bed out
of the way and made the living room into a reception room.
She used the kitchen as her darkroom and the breakfast alcove as her printing room. She washed her prints in the
land,
bathtub.
With only one
suit in her
wardrobe, and that
a dull
gray, Margaret brightened her appearance with accessories.
One day
she wore the suit with a red hat and red gloves; the
next day with blue hat and blue gloves. In high-heeled
walked miles of pavement, knocking on the doors
of architectural firms recommended by Cornell alumni. She
won her first commission from a firm of young architects
that, like her, had yet to make its mark. The architects had
difficulty getting acceptable photographs of a school they
had designed. Margaret saw why when she visited the
school and found the building surrounded by muddy
grounds and littered with gravel and unused lumber. She
spent five days viewing the scene in varying light. She arose
at sunrise to look at the school in the morning and returned
in the evening to see it in the setting sun. One morning,
when the sunrise lighted a cloudless sky, she rushed over to
the school only to find the grounds strewn with garbage.
She ran to a florist, bought handfuls of asters, stuck them in
the mud away from the debris, and shot her pictures from a
shoes, she
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
33
low angle, over the top of the flowers, showing the school
framed by flowers and by the sunrise.
Impressed with her ingenuity as well as her skill, the
architects bought several of Margaret's photographs at five
dollars each and succeeded in getting them published in
Architecture magazine.
The first burst of publicity made Margaret a busy
She picked up commissions from banks,
landscape artists, and architects. Her photographs of
stately homes and gardens had a misty, pictorial quality in the
Clarence H. White tradition. Dappled light played over
gardens and lily ponds, or was seen through grillwork and
leaded glass windows. Her compositions were so effective
that House and Garden, as well as other magazines, began to
feature her work.
Though Margaret was busy with these commissions
that paid her expenses, she began to find increasing excitephotographer.
ment in an entirely different
week she drove an old battered
landscape. Several times a
car she had bought over to
downtown
Cleveland,
Only people who worked there
traveled to
the low-lying industrial valley in
called the Flats.
that bleak stretch of land spread out along the
winding
Cuyahoga River. But Margaret saw the drama and beauty of
modern industry in the Flats. The heavy smoke pouring
from the chimneys of the steel mills, the mounds of iron ore,
and the roaring freight and automobile traffic fascinated her
the way rare jewels might fascinate others. She found form
and pattern in smokestacks, in vaulting arches holding up
bridges, in tall electric towers, and in cranes. She studied
DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS'
**t\\> n*
"
vmp^
Prv~*
r.
Cu
\_ w.
touj
3*
n
'
>Jfci
3J
T
±-S?
1 l-~
„
'\,
.
,
„,
,..,
.
».
—•#•—
'**
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35
them
under varying conditions of light; she climbed up on derricks and scaffolds to see them from different angles. When
she thought she could isolate a scene that would reveal the
power of industry, she set up her tripod and camera, put her
the tangled scenes at different hours of the day to see
head under the cloth, and shot her pictures.
Afterward, in frustration, she threw most of her negatives in the wastepaper basket. She did not know how to
capture on film the energy and vital force of this industrial
backyard. Accidentally, however, she learned an important
lesson.
One
day, while photographing at the Flats, she
saw
camera a small, dilapidated boat appear on the Cuyahoga inlet framed by the steel mill and tall smokestacks. At
each end of the boat stood a man with a pole in his hand,
slowly moving the boat along. She quickly shot pictures.
When the boat moved out of camera range, she ran down to
the banks of the river, explained to the men what she was
doing, and implored them to continue moving the boat back
and forth for another hour.
That evening, when she developed her prints, she
shouted in joy. "That's how my ship came in," she would
say in later years. "Here was contrast. In form. In line. In
bulk and lighting and balance. The old and the new." That
experience taught her the value of contrast for a good photograph or for any work of art. By showing in one frame an
ancient way of handling a boat and complex steel structures,
she highlighted the modern world of industry.
in her
An
early landscape picture
—
the
William H. Albers home; Cincinnati, Ohio,
1929
DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS
36
She carefully placed the pictures in her portfolio and
the next day hastened over to an important business executive who was holding up an advertising catalogue until he
found the right illustrations. He bought four of Margaret's
photographs and paid her more than she had ever earned.
Margaret's fascination with machines and industry
seemed a natural extension of her childhood experiences.
Still, hers was not a lone voice, for many artists of that time
had begun to celebrate American technology.
In the 1920s, artists had a new vision of the United
States as a great industrial power that would expand forever
and remain a creative force. They found surging drama in
steel and electricity, in bridges spanning rivers, in skyscrapers built into the sky. The machines of industry were worshipped as if they were deities. Common, everyday articles
like furniture, pots and pans, and dishes became objects of
novel design and fashion. And a galaxy of new ideas and terminology soon flashed upon the art world: Machine Esthetic, Machine Age, Industrial Design, Modernism. This was
only one aspect of the decade that became known as the
"roaring twenties" with its booming economy, its lavish Art
Deco design, its jazz, and its gay dances the fox trot, the
shimmy, and the Charleston.
Margaret found beauty and excitement not only in the
outward forms of machines but in machines in motion, in
action and change, and in the raw process of production.
She wanted to see the actual workings of a steel mill. During the many hours she had trudged through the slag and
smoke of the Cleveland Flats, she had her eye on the Otis
Steel Company, wondering how she could get inside the
—
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
37
heavy door marked Private. A business acquaintance helped
her gain an interview.
She stood before Elroy J. Kulas, president of the company, pleading for permission to take pictures of the making of
steel. She spoke about the power she saw in industry and
which we live. "Steel mills," she
said in her earnest, sincere manner, "are at the very heart of
industry with the most drama, the most beauty."
Mr. Kulas found Margaret convincing. Still, he hesitated. No one had ever photographed the making of steel. Visitors had been known to pass out from the smoke and heat.
Finally he expressed his worry that Margaret might faint
from the fumes in the mill.
"I am not the fainting kind," she assured Mr. Kulas.
Persuaded by her self-confidence, he called in other
company officials and notified them of Margaret's project.
how
it
reflected the age in
Then he
sailed off for a five-month trip to
Europe.
Margaret would never forget her first view of the inside
of a steel mill. Spread out before her were meaningless
shapes, like scenes from abstract paintings. Only after many
visits could she adjust to the roar and glare of the mill and
put into context the giant hoods and cranes, the huge furnaces, and the sweating workers in heatproof masks and
clothes moving about in the dark depths. When the furnaces
were pulled, Margaret saw flames spew out of the darkness.
Automatic ladles dipped into seething liquid and poured it
into molds. Up on the catwalk surveying the flaming mass
below, Margaret began to shoot pictures. Or she climbed
into an overhead crane and shot down into the molten mass.
Sometimes she took pictures from hanging ladders. When
"DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS"
38
she developed her negatives, she did not recognize anything
she had photographed.
Margaret was in trouble. Without realizing it, she had
undertaken a colossal project. Technically she could not
cope with the problems with the lack of lighting, with the
scorching heat that blistered the varnish off her camera, and
with the extreme contrasts in light and shade. Photography
—
had not yet progressed to the use of flashbulbs, film, and
lenses adequate to meet the needs of her difficult project.
Plant workers and officials, who expected Margaret to
show up for a few days, take her pictures and leave, were
astonished to see her return week after week with her heavy
camera and tripod. They worried that she would
break a leg or fall into the molten metal. But she stalked the
mill, a strange and lonely figure, a woman in a man's workplace, searching for the exact spot and for the light that
would enable her to print on film the burst of flame and
5X7
sparks of the making of
steel.
Completely at a loss, she called on Alfred Bemis, a commercial photographer in Cleveland who had helped her out
before. "Berne" and his assistant, Earl Leiter, joined Margaret at the steel mill. The three of them experimented with
new cameras. They brought in floodlights and laid cables in
an effort to get adequate lighting. They shot off flashpans.
But nothing worked. Margaret would not give up; the steel
mill became the laboratory in which she experimented and
learned the basic lessons on how to light a picture. She
tried every
new
device that
came
into Bemis's store.
day, a photography salesman, on his
show
the film industry
way
new magnesium
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
to
One
Hollywood
flares,
to
dropped into
39
the shop. Persuaded to join Bemis, Leiter, and Margaret at
the steel mill, he
worked out
strategy with
them
as if
they
were attacking an enemy target. While they waited for the
u
molten metal to reach its heat" before the pouring, Margacrawled along the catwalk, preparing angles for her
shots. Finally, she set her camera on the crossrail. Then, just
ret
bubbled in the ladles, the magnesium flares
were fired off in a cloud of smoke, lighting the scene, and
Margaret shot her pictures.
That night, with her friends surrounding her, Margaret
developed her negatives. They saw on film great ladles,
hooks and cranes, and the actual path of sparks. She had
photographed the making of steel.
When Elroy Kulas returned from Europe, Margaret
brought him twelve photographs out of about five hundred
she had shot. Astonished with what he saw, Kulas bought
eight pictures at a hundred dollars each and ordered eight
more. He put them in a book called The Story of Steel, which
he sent to stockholders. The pictures were reproduced in
magazines and newspapers.
With her pictures of steel, Margaret was launched on
her career. "I feel as if the world has been opened up and I
hold all the keys," she wrote to her mother. Other industrialists commissioned her to photograph their plants. She
as the metal
took pictures of ore boats, coal
rigs,
bridge construction, cyl-
and dynamos. She had an extraordinary eye for deshe could isolate a piece of machinery and show not
inders,
sign;
only
its
power but
To meet
its
beauty.
the rush of work, she
moved from her cramped
quarters to a studio high up in the Terminal Tower, Cleve-
"DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS"
i
:
11
r
^
_^
-~~
o'
'"
— railroad
The
Flats
and
Terminal
the
titii
yard
Tower in
background; Cleveland,
Ohio,
1929
land's
tallest
skyscraper.
A
secretary
and
a
technician
helped her turn out her work.
At age twenty-four she had become the
of photography.
The
press
rated
"girl
wonder"
her "a leader
among
camera artists of America." Her signature on a
photograph became a mark of distinction. Not only was she
known as a unique photographer but as a person who disreindustrial
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
41
garded danger in her search for the exact spot for her pictures.
She paid careful attention to her clothes and liked to
look fashionable. In the smart look of the day, she wore her
dark hair with a dip over one eye.
To a newspaper reporter who found it unusual that a
young, attractive woman like Margaret preferred to photograph seamy industrial subjects rather than gardens and ba-
Margaret on location
in Cleveland, Ohio,
photographed by Ralph Steiner, 1928
42
Margaret, a leading
industrial photog-
rapher at 24
43
bies,
.
.
.
she said, "I dislike bothering with obvious prettiness
what makes
my
hunt and hunt for
job as a photographer fascinating
just the
is
to
viewpoint that would make
cranes, smokestacks or drawbridges beautiful." In her pas-
became an ardent exponent
of the Machine Esthetic. "Dynamos are more beautiful than
pearls," she told another interviewer. "The purpose of art,"
she would say, "is to find beauty in the big things of the age.
sion for the industrial scene, she
Today that big thing is industry."
Her reputation spread to the East Coast where Henry
R. Luce, the successful publisher of Time magazine,
was
working on plans for a new periodical. In the spring of 1929,
Luce sent Margaret a telegram: HAVE JUST SEEN YOUR
STEEL PHOTOGRAPHS. CAN YOU COME TO NEW YORK
WITHIN WEEK AT OUR EXPENSE? Unfamiliar with Luce's
name, Margaret decided to take advantage of the invitation
in order to visit New York. But when she met Luce and listened to his plans, she
knew
she could not turn
down
fer.
DYNAMOS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN PEARLS
his of-
•
>
WITH A CAMERA
IN HER HAND
At twenty-five years of
new showcase
age,
Margaret found
would
make her internationally prominent. She ac-
a
cepted
Henry
for her talents that
Luce's offer of a position as
photographer and assistant editor on
his new magazine. Fortune, as it would be
called, would explore every aspect of the industrial process from the "steam shovel to the Board of Directors." The camera would be put to new use, to interpret
and document the modern world.
Margaret saw at once that Luce's ideas were stretching
the concept of photography to a new dimension and that
photography itself would have to grow to meet the demands
made on it.
staff
Margaret sloshing through
the
mud
45
on location; Russia, 1930
46
Filled with excitement at her
new
position, she
phoned
an old friend, Ralph Steiner, whom she had met years before at the Clarence H. White School of Photography. Over
the years she had seen
him from time
admiring
him as an honest craftsman, she accepted his critical comments. Early on he had directed her away from trying to
make photographs look like paintings, in the Clarence H.
White tradition. When he had passed through Cleveland in
the late 1920s and visited Margaret, he had ridiculed her
fussy need to match the color of her camera cloth to the color of her suit. At that time Margaret had found it fashionto time and,
when she wore a purple suit, a
suit. "What difference does it make
able to use a purple cloth
blue cloth with her blue
what color cloth you focus your pictures with as long as
they are good pictures?" he wanted to know. And now in
New York to see Henry Luce, Margaret looked up Steiner
to show him her latest work. She would never win his admiration, she sorrowfully concluded, and wrote as much in a
letter to her mother in May, 1929. "I spent last evening with
Steiner, going over
my
pictures.
He
is
always very
critical,
you know, and never praises me, but he did say that he
thought I had improved, and that my viewpoint was becoming more direct and mature."
For the
first
couple of years that Margaret worked for
Fortune magazine, she maintained her studio in Cleveland
and traveled from there
permission to use her
She gave Luce
promotional ma-
to her assignments.
steel
photographs
terial.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
as
From
"Hogs, " lead article in Fortune, 1929
One assignment
took Margaret to the stockyards of Chi-
Accompanied by Luce's editor Parker Lloyd-Smith,
she was to do the photographs for a story on the Swift meatcago.
packing industry. She prowled the plant, trying to figure
out how to communicate the force of the billion dollar industry in which over 15 million hogs poured through the
yards in a single year and ended up as processed meat.
Working
closely with Lloyd-Smith, she
made
a
sequence of
pictures that together told a story.
She turned her lens on thousands of pigs pouring into
the stockyards. She showed how they were prodded into
WITH A CAMERA
IN
HER HAND
48
narrow
alleys while
men
stood by appraising their value in
and cents. She shot pictures in the slaughterhouse
where hogs were reduced to dressed carcasses hanging by
the thousands in row upon row from hooks on beams. She
showed white-gowned men with flashing, gleaming knives
dollars
carving the carcasses into different cuts of meat.
Then
she
explored the curing room where thousands of hams hung
from
rafters. In the final shots,
mammoth
her camera zoomed in on
heaps of pig dust, the ground-up remains of car-
would be used as meal for other animals. Writer
Lloyd-Smith retched from the putrid odors and fled. But
Margaret stayed on in that foul-smelling room getting her
casses that
photographs.
When
she
left,
she quickly ripped the cloth
and cables from her cameras because they had absorbed the
pungent odors.
"Hogs" became the lead story in the first issue of Fortune magazine when it hit the newsstands in February, 1930.
In that issue there were three other series of Margaret's pictures. In addition to "Hogs," she told the story of glass from
its origin as crumbled fragments of rock to its transformation by the glass blower to beautiful and practical objects.
"Trade Routes across the Great Lakes" was an essay on
iron, steel, coal, and the freighters that carry raw products
to the steel mill. Her final photographs dealt with orchids
from their planting to their bloom.
Seventeen series of her photographs appeared during
the first year in Fortune. If Fortune provided her with a
showcase for her talents, she gave Fortune its style and tone.
She did much more. She opened up the field of photography
to limitless possibilities
when
she introduced the concept of
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
49
with her photographs. By concentrating on a
single subject, she added mood and tension to the series of
telling a story
She also selected what was significant and made
important graphic statements that were often as revealing as
the written story. Other photographers and writers were
moving in the same direction. But Margaret was one of the
pioneers; her work would lead the way to photojournalism
and the photo essay, which would become a dominant development in the world of photography.
Many of her industrial photographs are now seen as
works of art as well as valuable documents of the industrial
process. With an artist's eye, she portrayed the rhythm and
pictures.
pattern in a piece of machinery.
beauty in
so rich
a coil of wire.
and
telling that
Or
it
Or
she isolated the simple
she crowded a frame with detail
looked like a Renaissance painting.
She shot pictures from every angle. Looking from the bot-
tom
up, she showed the angular lines of an electric tower.
Looking down, she photographed a worker pouring hot liq-
uid into molds.
Margaret arrived at assignments steeped in technical information on the subject so that she could talk knowledgeably to the engineers and plant foremen who guided her
through the labyrinth of industrial plants. A bevy of assistants carried her bulky cameras and film packs and set up
the lighting.
With her camera
danger.
ploits
No
in her hand, she
never thought about
assignment was too perilous, and her daring exas famous as her photographs. Dizzy Heights
became
Have No Terror for
newspaper article.
This Girl Photographer headlined
WITH A CAMERA
IN
HER HAND
one
50
For
a Fortune
assignment, she photographed the day-to-
day construction of the Chrysler Building, scheduled to become New York's tallest skyscraper. At street level she shot
pictures of steel girders spearing space with geometric patterns. She showed the outside and the inside of the hoist that
carried men and materials to high floors. She herself rode
the hoist to the top level of the skeletal skyscraper. Eight
hundred
feet
above the ground, she clung to
a girder and,
with an icy wind buffeting her, photographed the massive
the upper extremity, of the Chrysler tower before it
finial,
was sheathed
in steel.
am not frightened," she shouted to
who wanted to tie her down to a beam
"I
ers
a
group of work-
for safety. "I like
the feeling of being free," she said.
At the upper
level,
she watched workers building steel
gargoyles out over the streets below.
The view from
the
high floor fascinated her. She became absorbed in the vast
urban landscape that stretched for miles south to the tip of
the city and from river to river. She looked up into a broad
sweep of cloud-filled sky. And she was determined to move
her studio from Cleveland to the Chrysler Building.
Margaret rented space for the Bourke-White Studio on
the sixty-first floor of the Chrysler Building. Decorator
John Vassos designed and furnished the new offices in the
modern Art Deco style with built-in furniture made of natural woods, glass, and aluminum. Into one wall, Margaret
had an aquarium built for her tropical fish. When she gave
The vitality of industry; the Chrysler Corporation
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
^
52
huge terraces with praying manand two pet alligators a friend had sent from
parties, guests shared the
tes, tortoises,
Florida.
Ambitious and energetic, Margaret searched for new
worlds to explore, new doors to pry open. From her talk
with industrialists in the United States, she became increasingly curious about the
Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics
known
She had
heard that in that land halfway across the world, machines
were transforming a backward feudal country into a mod(until the
Revolution of 1917
ern industrial
When
as Russia).
state.
Fortune sent Margaret on assignment to
Germa-
ny, she decided to push on from there to the country she
had heard so much about. Fortune, convinced that the Soviet
Union would not permit a photographer the freedom to
take pictures, would not sponsor her trip. Still, Margaret
was determined to go.
She did not pretend that she understood politics. She
had no interest in the subject. It did not matter to her that
the Soviet
Union was building
socialism and that
its
a
new
kind of society called
concepts were considered incom-
Western countries.
She knew only that in their first Five-Year Plan they were
constructing the world's largest dam, that machines were
dramatically changing a vast landscape and helping people
advance from ignorance and poverty into the benefits of
patible with the political philosophy of
the industrial age.
During her
Germany, Margaret bombarded the
Soviet Consulate with visits and phone calls asking for a visa
stay in
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
S3
would permit her
that
to enter the country.
She impressed
the Russian officials with her portfolio of industrial photographs.
Sergei Eisenstein, the noted Russian filmmaker
whom
Margaret had met in the States, interceded in her behalf. She stood by with a trunkload of canned goods to see
her through the Soviet food shortage. Tons of cameras and
films were ready to be shipped.
Margaret's determination won for her an extraordinary
triumph. She was finally handed a visa, and within a few
days of her entry into the Soviet Union, she was made a
guest of the government. She was provided with an interpreter and sheaves of paper to ease her way through shortages in travel space and the terrible confusion that existed at
every level of government.
For five weeks in the summer of 1930, and in two subsequent visits, Margaret covered thousands of miles. To reach
outlying districts she traveled by train and by boat, on
camel and on horseback. She pushed her way through
muddy roads, forded rivers, used caves for her darkroom, and
developed film in hotel bathtubs. She took eight hundred pictures that included farm cooperatives, factories, mills, and
quarries. She photographed turbines, cranes, derricks, blast
furnaces, and pieces of machinery rising everywhere on empty plains. She turned her camera to record the construction
of the massive dam at the Dnieper River. She also experimented with the movie camera and did two short films of
her
trip.
At the same time
that she reported
on the Soviet indus-
development, she described the terrible famine that
gripped the country and made people's lives so difficult.
trial
WITH A CAMERA
IN
HER HAND
A
The
worker, called an iron puddler, in a steel mill; Stalingrad, 1930
cans of food she had brought from Germany, which she
had shared, had run out, and for
a
week she
lived
on baked
beans.
As she worked, Margaret reveled
in the
magic of her
camera, excited over the "blackness and whiteness" of pho-
tography that "makes
jects. ...
It
is
it
so
suitable
for
industrial
sub-
honest and revealing and clean cut, an
as-
tounding means of expression and the best for portraying
the power and force of industry," was the way she put it.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
ss
Machines, for Margaret, were things in themselves.
They had form and force and were "rich with the breath of
doing." She saw that the Soviet
Union used machines
as
beneficent instruments to change the lives of people. For
the
first
time in
tionship of
many
years, she noticed people
men and women
to machines.
and the
"They
rela-
are trans-
forming the economic life of the country which in turn is
transforming them," she wrote. She photographed workers,
old and young, skilled and unskilled, learning to use tractors
Children in a nursery at a Russian automobile factory, 1931
56
and dynamos. She watched
women working
in
heavy indus-
and she realized that new futures were open to them. She learned that many women
were studying medicine and engineering.
Her passion for machines made her an ally of the
socialist state. In turn, the Russians loved Margaret BourkeWhite and called the photographer the "artist of the
machine age." They appreciated her ability to endure
hardships, take risks, and never complain. They also enjoyed
her temperament. One day, as she was being driven to a
farm collective, a herd of horses galloped by. "Stop," she
called to the driver of the car. She tore after the horses on
foot, her camera over her shoulder. Her interpreter ran
after her with film holders while the driver followed along
in the car with reserves of film. She shot pictures of the
horses, at first as "dots on the horizon." Closer up, they became "bodies rushing by her."
Margaret was back home in 1931 when her first book
was published. Eyes on Russia, illustrated with forty photographs, was a record of her experiences in the Soviet Union.
Unanimous praise for the book increased her popularity,
and she became a success on the lecture circuit. She brought
to crowded halls a firsthand report on the exotic, mysterious
country thousands of miles away. The New York Times Magazine carried a series of her articles and photographs. In
1933, after the United States and the Soviet Union estabtry,
operating
drill presses,
lished diplomatic relations, her
two travelogues received
wide distribution.
She had become a dashing and glamorous figure. Her
energy and her inventive mind made her extraordinarily
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
57
productive. Advertising agencies hired her to put her skills
into commercial photography. Buick cars
and Goodyear
became her largest accounts. But she also did glossy ads
for silver, food, and cosmetics, making her clients' products
appear more attractive than competitors'. She would say
that commercial advertising taught her how to work with
color film and light to achieve realistic effects. She could
make a rubber tire look like rubber and not like stiff cardboard. Advertising paid extremely well, and Margaret became an affluent woman.
For six months of the year she worked for Fortune magazine. The other six months she devoted to advertising. A
tires
staff of eight
helped her turn out her work.
For a brief period in 1934, Margaret concentrated on
doing photomurals, a blown-up photograph or series of photographs that cover a wall. She reached a highlight in her
career as an industrial photographer in her mural for the
National Broadcasting Company. She called it Trapping the
Magical Waves of Sound. In the mural she showed, in
a se-
quence of photos, the complex pieces of machinery that control the sending and receiving of sound. The photomural,
160 feet in circumference by 10 feet high, decorated the circular reception room of NBC's office in Radio City, New
York, and was viewed by thousands of visitors.
While Margaret lived high up in the clouds, her mind
filled with machines and commercial accounts, a different
drama
filled
the streets below.
Fortune magazine had begun publishing just as the
New
York stock market crash of November, 1929, broke over the
world and ushered in the turbulent years of the Great DeWITH A CAMERA
IN
HER HAND
S8
pression.
The new
publication, addressing itself to the vital-
remained in industry, climbed to success. But the
depression had toppled financial empires, putting millions
of people out of work. Unemployment cut across all lines,
dragging down workers, the middle class, professionals, and
artists. In demonstrations and public meetings held across
the country, the unemployed demanded jobs and relief
through federal programs. Artists photographers, painters, writers, and dancers
joined in the outcry and used
ity that
—
—
awaken public conscience to the painful soand economic conditions.
An assignment from Fortune would turn Margaret
their talents to
cial
around and force her
to confront the realities of the day.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
PACES SHE
CCULD NOT
PASS cy
In a tiny two-seater plane, Margaret Bourke-
White was flying over the states of the Midwest from the Dakotas to Texas. Fortune had
assigned her to photograph the effects of
months of drought on the once fertile land.
Where tall golden wheat and corn used to
grow, Margaret looked down over miles of
caked, parched earth and dried-up riverbeds. For months a
ruthless sun had beat down from a cloudless sky, withering
crops and scorching the earth, turning it to fine sand. From
the air and from the ground, she photographed the whirling
yellow clouds of duststorms that blew with gale strength,
clogging the lungs of children, grown-ups, and animals.
Millions of farm people were at the mercy of the
drought. Margaret visited farms and watched children being
From
You Have Seen Their Faces; Lansdale, Arkansas, 1936
61
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•'•'
t4tSm £>
^.mmm
v
s¥%?
89»
S^S
^
iaf^>*i
P
v-.
Ti
C<z£ft/,
—
parched earth
ffo drought;
South Dakota, 1934
put to bed with towels over their faces to keep out the fine
dust that seeped through invisible cracks. She saw the poverty and suffering of families who, with sticks of furniture
on broken-down cars and wagons, drifted along dustcracked roads looking for work. "Here were faces engraved
with the very paralysis of despair. These were faces I could
piled
not pass by," she said.
When
she returned to
New
York, her experiences in
the dust bowl (as that area of the country
turned her dreams to nightmares.
One
came
to be called)
terrifying night she
dreamed that an avalanche of cars was careening down on
her. She could not escape them. They were about to crush
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
63
her
when
she awakened and found herself writhing on the
floor with a strained back.
Her dreams
tising accounts.
reflected her real conflicts over her adver-
Was
she succumbing to the pressure of the
advertising world and sacrificing her artistic integrity? she
asked herself. Did she
tell
the truth
product to make people buy
it? Is
when
that the
she enhanced a
way
she wanted
photography? With her good sense and her eye
for news, she had begun to realize that the center of excitement had shifted to the streets and to the culture that had
grown up around the Great Depression. She took steps to
to use her
redirect her
life,
cutting herself loose from the advertising
world and turning her fierce capacity for work to the conditions in the United States.
The social upheaval of the 1930s had gripped many talented artists. Margaret, too, wanted to understand the conditions in which people lived and how events affected them.
And she wanted to put photography to use to communicate
her
new
tions
social awareness, to
of poverty-stricken
thought, would
a writer
tell
document the miserable condi-
families.
Perhaps
book,
a
she
the story. But she wanted a collaborator,
who would
describe what she photographed.
Word
soon reached her that Erskine Caldwell, the writer, was
looking for a photographer.
Caldwell's book and play Tobacco Road had
successful but controversial figure.
South, he
knew
Born and
made him
a
raised in the
firsthand the sordid aspects of southern
life
he described so poignantly in his work. Now he wanted to
write a book and document with photographs the suffering
and poverty with which he was
familiar.
He was
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
especially
64
sensitive to the degrading conditions suffered
by black peo-
ple.
Caldwell's appearance gave no hint of his inner com-
and broad-shouldered, with sandy-colored hair
and light blue eyes, he had a soft, gentle voice. He could be
charming and talk at great length on many subjects; or he
could use words sparingly. In his somber moods, he froze
plexity. Tall
into silence.
The
Bourke-White-Caldwell project got under
way in June, 1936. Margaret flew down to Georgia and
joined Caldwell there. In his small car she stowed five cameras, tripods, flashbulbs, and film. She also securely tucked
away two glass jars that contained egg cases of praying manjoint
tes.
She was
life
cycle and
er's
in the midst of
photographing their dramatic
would not leave them behind.
During the first few days, each tried to judge the
character.
Long experience with
taught Margaret
how
a
silent father
oth-
had
She
cope with Caldwell's silence.
kept quiet and carefully gazed out at the southern countryside. Margaret had learned before the project started that
to
Caldwell had reservations about working with
a
woman,
and with Bourke-White in particular whose work he did not
admire. A few days into the venture, it looked as if she
would have to pack her gear and head for home. Caldwell
showed up in her hotel room one evening and explained
that he felt like a "tourist guide" because she had nothing to
offer. Perhaps they had better call the whole thing off, he
thought. Shocked, because the project was so meaningful to
her, Margaret burst into tears. The emotional outburst
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
65
WFZ
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y
Jk
lu
n^.
]
*"
M
^\
U
~^y\
v
r
t
R.-/*
^^^^d w m^
fifii
Margaret, photographing the
a praying mantis,
life cycle
of
'^JSErf
as photographed by
Carl Mydans, 1938
cleared the
drawn
air.
In the following days, they found themselves
to each other
and then they were
in love.
Their
rela-
tionship became idyllic, bringing into blossom each one's
more generous
nature.
And
the collaboration was saved.
Caldwell had studied the conditions of the southern
tenant farmer and sharecropper. In his soft voice he tutored
Margaret with
facts
and
figures, helping her
poverty of the farm population.
visible in every state they
Its
understand the
crippling effects were
covered in the Deep South, from
Georgia and South Carolina to Arkansas and Louisiana. She
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
—
66
saw walls of wooden huts
lined with newspapers to keep out
the cold; children sharing a single coat and pair of shoes
one day one child wore them
and the next day
men and
women lined with deep ruts like dried-up riverbeds. She
saw black people suffering the wretched insults of racism.
Typically, Margaret did not romanticize the misery she
saw, nor did she recoil before painful realities. Poverty was
destructive, and she showed its ravages in the misshapen
bodies and diseased faces of the poor.
You Have Seen Their Faces, the joint Bourke-WhiteCaldwell book, became a landmark publication. In words
and photographs their work dramatically documented the
another;
crumbs of food
miserable conditions
to school
for meals;
among
and
faces of
the country's sharecroppers.
Margaret's sixty-four pictures are direct, stark, and compelling.
They
represent some of her best work.
Margaret's photographs, as well as those of photogra-
phers Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans,
and Ben Shahn, influenced the U.S. government to take action in behalf of the poor farm population.
Vital areas of activity had opened up to Margaret with
her increased social awareness. In 1935 she had written an
article called "Dust Changes America" for a liberal weekly,
the Nation, on her experiences during the drought. That
same publication carried another of her articles, in which
she suggested that photographers use the medium to portray
the real world around them. In 1936 Margaret joined the
first American Writers' Congress. At a conference in New
York City, a broad coalition of distinguished artists and au-
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
67
thors,
among them Edward
Steichen, Ralph Steiner, Paul
Manship, and Norman Bel Geddes, discussed the relationship between art and society. They drew up a program that
included the defense of freedom of expression at home and
the fight against war and fascism abroad.
Margaret exhibited her work and lectured at the Photo
League. This newly formed organization of working photographers was actively engaged in recording and illuminating economic and social conditions. Distinguished artists
work at the League's
York
City
headquarters.
Among
them were Paul
New
Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Lewis
lectured, taught, or exhibited their
Hine, and Dorothea Lange.
Margaret's initiation into the world of political and social activity
enlarged her perception of events. She brought
her enriched vision to the mainstream of her work. This be-
came apparent when she undertook assignments
for a
new
publication.
magazine was still in the planning stage when
Bourke-White was asked to join the staff as one of four
leading photographers. Its publisher, Henry R. Luce (also
Life
the publisher of Fortune) envisioned another
publication, a photographic magazine.
It
new
would
kind of
visually
communicate the news of the day in a well-planned series
of pictures. Photographers would be sent to all parts of the
world to record important events and work up background
material for their stories.
Margaret to Fort Peck, Montana, to
prepublication workup of a dam under construction.
Life's editors sent
do
a
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
68
They
figured she would turn out brilliant industrial photo-
graphs, which they would use as
fill-in
material in an issue
of the magazine.
On
the flatlands of northeastern Montana, Margaret
found the world's largest earthen dam being built. The
government-funded, multimillion-dollar project had put
to work ten thousand unemployed men. With the bulky
cameras she favored, Margaret moved around the construction site, shooting pictures of massive concrete columns, the
underpinnings of the huge dam. She took pictures of construction equipment including a huge steel "liner" with its
steel disks and radiating steel prongs. But to her industrial
photographs she added something new. She had become
curious about the way workers and their families lived, and
about the thousands of people drawn like magnets to the
shantytowns that had mushroomed around the construction
site.
From
the air Margaret shot pictures of miles of barren,
dusty plains with rows of small wooden shacks hugging the
foreground.
From
the street she focused on the shabby,
broken-down homes where families lived with no indoor
running water, poor sanitation facilities, and a total lack of
health care. She showed the sleazy, rundown shops that
lined the one-street towns. She took her cameras indoors,
into the dance halls where young women called taxi-dancers
worked through the night earning five cents a dance to partner a man. In saloons she showed men and women lining
the bars. One of the photographs showed a small, sad-looking child sitting on a saloon bar. Her mother had a job in the
saloon, and for want of child care facilities, she had to take
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
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T *«fB^^
:*k
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r
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JV
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^^ ^ ^^^^ ^W Blr
*.^fe
No
—a
child care facilities
the
of
girl on a saloon bar; Fort Peck,
work with
'
Montana, 1936
Margaret recorded the scant,
led by people cut adrift from established centers
little girl to
sordid lives
little
**
human activity.
Her photographs
her.
astonished the editors of
Life.
These
emotionally packed pictures about people were not what
they had in mind. But they found Margaret's story so revealing that they changed their plans.
issue,
On
the cover of Life's first
they put Margaret's photographs of the giant concrete
columns of the Fort Peck dam.
Two
men, looking
insignifi-
them scale. Her other
photographs of the construction site became the strong
cant at the base of the columns, give
opening photo essay.
Margaret had given the
its
first issue
of Fortune magazine
lead story in 1930. In 1936, her creative
photography and
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
—
70
strong story sense helped launch Life into orbit. The graphic presentation of the news had dazzling public appeal. Life's
publishers could hardly keep up with the
months' huge
demand. With the magazine's inordinate success, Margaret
became one of the most widely known and internationally
popular photographers.
Progress in camera technology made possible the pictorial magazine. New camera equipment, imported from
abroad, was light and flexible, easy to handle. A few photographers of that period, using these candid or miniature cameras, could take pictures in a fraction of a second. What the
pictures lost in rich detail, they
made up
first
in spontaneity
and
naturalness. With one or two of these cameras dangling
around their necks, photographers could push their way
into crowded news scenes that were once the exclusive preserve of the writer. A photographer could record a scene
more quickly than a reporter could take down words. And
photography was universally understood, leaping barriers
of language and cultural differences.
learned
how
A new
breed of editors
to arrange a series of pictures for telling im-
pact.
Picture magazines such as
swamped
the newsstands.
A
Life, Look, Peek, Pic,
and others
flood of talent fought
its
way
news photography. Ruthless
the tone of the marketplace. Those
into the broadening field of
competition for jobs set
who made it to the top had to be tough, bold, and aggressive.
They had to produce exciting, newsworthy pictures to get
key assignments.
It
has been said that Life editors pitted
their talented photographers against each other to
them turn out innovative work.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
make
71
In this arena, dominated by men, Margaret Bourke-
White became
a celebrity.
Did being
a
woman
help her or
hinder her? she was often asked. Colleagues have mentioned
win entry into
with
vied
each other to car-
that she used her feminine attractiveness to
high places, that influential
men
ry her gear. Time, Inc. president
Henry Luce was seen
ging around her heavy cameras.
He would
lug-
be followed in
by generals, admirals, and even a potentate or
two. Margaret could be charming, flash a winning smile,
and create eddies of excitement around her. And she was often presumptuous, requesting colleagues to transport home
cartons of material from foreign assignments. But, above all,
she had the self-confidence to carve out her own space and
write her own rules. Crucial to her success was not gender,
as she had made abundantly clear, but drive, talent, and
later years
courage.
FACES SHE COULD NOT PASS BY
t
mi
m
^SJta^
f
m
NEEVCLS
AS A CAT
**
"Photography
is
my
life
work," Margaret
magazine in
For young people interested in becom-
told an interviewer for Scholastic
1937.
ing industrial or news photographers, she
had straightforward advice. "You have to be
strong and healthy," she said. She went into
further detail at a college conference on careers where she said, "You have to be as strong as a horse
to work under tension, sleep irregular hours and eat on the
run." Essential, also, were "patience, courage, a sense for
detail and an honest view of life." A few years later she
would add to these qualifications a readiness to work under
dangerous conditions such as riding in bomber raids and
dangling from helicopters.
.
Margaret, the internationally successful photographer
73
.
.
74
But Peggy, or Maggie,
other outstanding qualities,
She had
all,
was
on the job, had
according to a Life photo editor.
sense of composition, and above
as she
called
wonderful eye, a
"the tenacity and persistence that resulted in pictures
a
that could not be otherwise taken."
She was besieged with requests to lecture, give interviews, attend elegant functions, and support worthwhile
causes. In her busy schedule she found time to dance, swim,
and ski. Her prematurely white hair made her strikingly
beautiful. Natural high color suffused her strong cheekbones. She clothed her slim, willowy figure in imported,
couturier-designed clothes, favoring the color red. For work
she wore tailored pants suits long before they became the
fashion.
Many on
knew Margaret could be
needs. Because they saw how
her technical staff
kind and responsive to their
mercilessly she drove herself, they endured long hours and
hard work. In the darkroom, technicians Oscar Graubner
and later George Karas worked to bring her prints up to
star quality. Peggy Sargent managed the myriad office and
technical details. At social functions, Margaret showed her
keen wit and charm. But when she worked, she was a terror.
"For a few minutes I think I could commit murder if
anyone gets in the way of what I am doing," she once said.
"A
picture
is
perishable.
people and surroundings
utterly pictorial.
The
.
.
.
There
fall
Picture
is
that
moment when
into a relationship that
is
suddenly there.
It
is
could
and forever." While trying to seize
that moment, she would get as "nervous as a cat" and, driven
by powerful inner pressure, would become blind to every
vanish in a minute
.
.
.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
75
On
danger and
of her
location,
risk.
young men
assisting with flash bulbs
and
lights
She would push everything and everyone out
way and go
after the picture.
Then came
the thrill of
putting her face in the camera, pivoting her camera around,
and finding herself locked in with what she saw in the lens.
At such times, she said, "the outside world is closed away as
effectively as if the genie of the lamp had clapped his hands
and dissolved the earth leaving me with my camera and my
subject."
"NERVOUS AS A CAT'
76
She tried to make "Skinny," as she called Erskine Caldwell, understand her commitment to her work
that she
cherished it even above marriage. For "Kit," as Caldwell
called her, and Skinny there was only leftover time from
their individual careers. Still, they were deeply in love and
saw each other whenever possible.
From the mid- 1930s on, Margaret traveled over a world
in turmoil as one of Life's leading photographers. Free to
improvise and to work out the nature of her assignments,
she sent back photographs enriched by her own social
awareness. Sometimes the only woman photographer present, she pushed and shoved her way into a crowded newsroom as in Washington, D.C., where she covered the second
inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She flew
—
to
Louisville,
Ohio,
when
disastrous
floods
put
three
quarters of the city under water. She hitchhiked from the
airport,
thumbing
rides in rowboats. Threats
were made
to
and cameras when she photographed a story of corruption in Jersey City under boss Mayor Hague. Then in
1937 she was sent to cover the appointment of a new governor-general of Canada.
Margaret packed her camera gear, warm clothes, and a
ski suit she would live and work in for days. In her luggage
she carefully stowed her butterflies. Determined to photograph their life cycle, she had raised them from eggs to caterpillars to the chrysalis stage, and now they were about to
her
life
hatch.
She flew to the Canadian Northwest where a small
pontoon plane picked her up and flew her along the isolated
waterways to join the touring Canadian governor-general,
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
77
Butterflies ready to hatch; the Arctic,
1937
Lord Tweedsmuir, and his party. They explored the barren
lands of the Arctic on an old-fashioned wood-burning
steamboat, the S.S. Distributor. Margaret shot pictures of the
Arctic tundra, those vast empty treeless plains covered by
ice, as well as pictures of the sparse trapper camps and communities where Canadian Eskimos had learned from their
ancestors how to work and live in the frozen north.
Aboard ship, Margaret's butterflies had become the important topic of conversation. "Hey, Maggie, when is the
"NERVOUS AS A CAT'
"Koptanna and her baby Nalsuyals; "
blessed event coming?"
the Arctic,
Lord Tweedsmuir wanted
Margaret had taped ten wriggling chrysalises
the ship.
The
As
1937
to
know.
to the rail of
in childhood, she kept a round-the-clock vigil.
governor-general gave her books to read, and others
brought her food. Then, just as the ship reached the middle
of Great Bear Lake, far up north in the Arctic Circle, the
chrysalises split open. The captain, true to his word,
brought the ship to a halt so that its vibrations would not
disturb the delicate photographs. Lord Tweedsmuir and an
aide-de-camp handed Margaret film packs. Twenty minutes
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
79
later,
ten
their
way
mourning cloak
out of the chrysalises. "For thirty years," said the
captain, "I've sailed this ship,
a
man
fell
had begun to push
butterflies
and
overboard, and here
I
I
never stopped
stop
it
for a
it
damn
even
if
butter-
Margaret fed the newly hatched insects a sweet mixture of sugar and water and let them fly away into the Arcfly."
tic.
At the small trading posts
in the desolate north
where
the ship stopped for mail and supplies, Margaret found
cablegrams from Erskine Caldwell awaiting her.
HOME ... he wired.
COME
Margaret had deep feelings for Caldwell, and she wavered. But long before the feminist revolution of the 1960s,
she had defined her life in terms of her work. She had freed
herself from the traditional roles
marriage and family by
which women then shaped their lives. She had become independent, self-sufficient, and filled with the pride of accomplishment. Marriage might cut into her independence and
trap her into conflicts. Should she go out on an assignment
or should she stay at home? Could she have a family and a
full career as well? She knew she needed inner peace. That
—
—
was her secret. Freedom from conflict gave her strength.
She could be single-minded in her work and handle the excitement and turmoil of the world in which she moved.
She tried to put Caldwell out of her mind as she went
off in search of a small plane for an additional
from
Life.
Arctic
The
editors
wanted
a
assignment
photo story on
how
the
Ocean looked during the summer. She chartered an
old-fashioned vintage plane flown by an expert pilot, Art
Rankin.
He knew
every inch of the
unmapped
"NERVOUS AS A CAT"
land that lay
80
months of the year. Joining her as fellow passengers on the plane were a bishop on
his way to visit remote villages and a composer who wrote
covered by thick layers of
ice ten
travel books.
The small plane flew from a tiny Canadian town toward Cameron Bay, 350 miles further into the Arctic Ocean.
The pilot had removed the door of the plane and tied Margaret to the base of the seat so that she could lean out and
When
take pictures.
tugged
at the
she
hung
too far out, the composer
rope and hauled her back
pictures of the icy patterns below
gray.
The
A
fog had rolled
pilot,
in,
in.
when
She was shooting
everything turned
completely blocking
visibility.
navigating through the turbulent sky and wor-
brought the plane down on a
spit of land attached to a rocky cliff. Margaret and her three
companions found themselves marooned on an uninhabited
island in the barren Lewes River. The plane radio, too weak
to transmit messages to the nearest inhabited island, 300
miles away, could only receive messages. "Art Rankin's
plane unreported," they heard over the radio. And then an
additional message was broadcast: "Margaret Bourke-White,
Skinny wants to know when are you coming home?"
ried he
would run out of
The
fuel,
four marooned people stretched their emergency
and kept their spirits up by singing, talking, and
drinking tea brewed over odd pieces of kindling. At the end
of the second day, a sliver of light broke through the fog.
The pilot rushed everyone into the plane and flew through
the strand of visibility, only to find himself buffeted by a
rations
driving storm.
Two
hours
later,
he landed the plane
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
at a
81
small settlement. Margaret sent Caldwell a message that she
was returning.
For the balance of that year, 1937, Margaret worked in
the United States doing masterful photographs of Hollywood and of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, among others. In
early 1938, Life sent her abroad to do a photo story on
Czechoslovakia. Accompanied by Erskine Caldwell, she
spent six months in Europe working on Life assignments, as
well as on another joint book with Caldwell.
By 1938, Europe was trembling before the savage onslaught of German Nazi aggression. Hitler's armies had already annexed Austria. Refugees from that country had fled
to Czechoslovakia for safety, and their lives were again in
danger when the Germans threatened to annex the Germanspeaking territory along the Czech border called the Sudetenland.
Bourke-White recorded for Life the terror of people
trapped by Nazi violence and racial hatred. By March, 1939,
when the Bourke-White-Caldwell book North of the Danube
was published, Hitler had already annexed all of Czechoslovakia and the world was forewarned of its terrible fate
World War
II.
Returning from Europe with Caldwell aboard the S.S.
made the decision to try marriage once
more. To avoid the publicity that would attend the marriage
of two well-known people whose romance was public
knowledge, she and Caldwell decided to fly from New York
to Nevada. In Reno they rented a taxi to take them to a deserted town called Silver City, where they found a pastor
Aquitania, Margaret
NERVOUS AS A CAT'
82
who
agreed to marry them in an old unused church.
and
Returning
The
shopkeeper were witnesses.
East, Margaret and Caldwell found a house
in Darien, Connecticut. On a dead-end road in a wooded,
taxi driver
a
hilly section of the countryside, they furnished a large colo-
home, setting aside a studio for Caldwell and work
space for Margaret. He would write short stories and novels. She would record in photographs the life histories of insects. That was their plan in April, 1939. A year later Margaret took a leave of absence from Life magazine and put in a
few months as chief photographer for P.M., a new daily
newspaper. Margaret knew P.M.'s creator, Ralph Ingersoll,
from his days as her editor on Fortune and later as vice-president and general manager of Time, Inc., the parent organization of both Fortune and Life. Ingersoll hoped to put together a crusading liberal newspaper. To make sure its
editorial policy was not influenced by big business, the
newspaper would not carry advertising.
During the period that Margaret worked for P.M., she
and Caldwell pooled their talents again. Traveling over ten
thousand miles of the United States, they recorded in words
and pictures the everyday life of rural and city people. By
the time their book Say, Is This the U.S.A.? was published in
1941, World War II had unleashed its full terror in Europe
and Asia. Margaret Bourke-White made the decision to return to the staff of Life and accepted assignments that would
nial
take her to the focal points of the world's turmoil.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
Margaret and husband Erskine Caldwell, Christmas
"NERVOUS AS A CAT'
card,
1940
DOING ALL
THE THINGS
**
THAT WGMEN
NEVER DC •*
Margaret stood on the balcony of her room
National Hotel in Moscow and looked
out over the heart of the city. Spread out before her was Red Square, and across the
square she could see the Kremlin, the Russian seat of government, with its ancient
buildings and churches surrounded by a
wall. Outside the Kremlin wall stood St. Basil's Cathedral,
its golden domes and towers decorating the sky.
She and Erskine had arrived in the Soviet Union toward the end of May, 1941. To be sure they would get to
Moscow safely, they avoided war-torn Europe and took the
Western route. They flew across the Pacific Ocean, with
stops in China where Margaret took portraits of Chinese
at the
Lifeboat survivors, en route to North African
Airforce search plane, 1942
85
war front, waving
to
a British
86
From China
leaders.
they flew to Moscow. Within
a
few
days of their arrival, they were given permission to travel
through the south of the Soviet Union where Margaret
would take
pictures.
On
their
way
to the Black Sea, stop-
farm collectives and rest homes, they could feel the
growing tension in the air. Crowds of people were pressed
ping
at
together around
lic
communal
radios and loudspeakers in pub-
squares listening to announcements.
heard the news
et cities
On
June
22,
they
—the Germans had dropped bombs on Sovi-
along the southern border. Russian troops were be-
ing rushed into battle.
had foreseen that World War II might
spread to the Soviet Union. They sent Margaret there relying on her popularity with government officials from her
visits ten years before. And now, as the German attack on
Her
Life editors
the Soviet
Union began, she was
the only accredited U.S.
photographer there.
room
Moscow, she had stashed away the
six hundred pounds of camera equipment she had brought
with her. There were three thousand flashbulbs, film packs,
In her hotel
in
twenty-two lenses, tanks, developer, tools for
repairing equipment, and replacements for parts. She was
five cameras,
ready to shoot pictures of the war
tect
when
the military, to pro-
troop actions from spies, issued orders during the
first
few days that anyone caught with a camera would be arrested and jailed. For three weeks she beseeched officials to relent, to let
her shoot her pictures that, she convinced them,
could favorably influence public opinion in the United
States.
She
finally
won
a
photographer's "passport," only to
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
87
be advised by the U.S. ambassador that
were being immediately evacuated.
all
U.S. citizens
Margaret and Erskine refused to leave Moscow.
They took long walks through the freezing city. Rain
and snow pelted Moscow and the countryside, the worst
spring weather in anyone's memory. Everywhere they saw
people prepare for war. Young children were removed to
the countryside; truckloads of men filed through Red
Square on the way to the front; women, older men, and older children served as fireguards and helped enforce blackout
rules; the golden domes of St. Basil's and the Kremlin palaces were painted a dull gray; and shelters were dug deep
into the earth. Bourke-White and Caldwell were in a subway shelter on July 22 when the first German bombs fell on
Moscow.
The
next day they hurried over to Spazzo House, the
temporary headquarters of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
From the rooftop of Spazzo House or from the open balcony outside her hotel rooms, Margaret would stand at night
and record the unearthly spectacle of the German bombardment of Moscow. By the light from flaming incendiary
bombs she shot her pictures. In her camera she tracked parachute flares dropping to earth, bombs bursting over targets,
and Russian searchlights piercing the sky pinning down
German
planes for their antiaircraft guns.
While bombers whizzed overhead, she and Caldwell
took turns slipping through blacked-out streets to the radio
station where they broadcast "live" to U.S. audiences their
reports on the attack and defense of Moscow.
DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT WOMEN NEVER DO'
The night bombing of the Kremlin; Moscow, July, 1941
Margaret scored a journalistic scoop with her exclusive
photos. She capped that with an unprecedented private photo session with Russia's wartime leader, Josef Stalin. Guards
led her through winding corridors into the depths of the
Kremlin. Ushered into Stalin's inner office, she saw before
her a dour, granite-faced man. In her nervousness over the
interview, she dropped flashbulbs all over the floor. She was
down on her knees scrambling after them when she looked
up and saw Stalin laughing at her. She photographed him
with a rare smile on his face. Life featured this unusual por-
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
89
In Russian fur hats, returning home by convoy through the Arctic, 1941
trait of Stalin, as
made him
well as Margaret's account of
how
she
smile.
In the
fall
of 1941, Bourke-White and Caldwell
were
taken, along with other foreign journalists, to Smolensk, the
Russian war front.
They
sloshed through miles of
bombed-
out countryside, flattening themselves in mud-filled fields
when German bombers flew overhead. As the Russians retreated before the German onslaught, Margaret saw them
put into effect their "scorched earth" policy. They burned
everything in the path of the enemy that they could not cart
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT
WOMEN NEVER
DO'
90
away
— homes, barns, electrical
installations. Factories
were
dismantled and, with the workers and their families,
re-
remote sites. The great dam at the Dnieper River,
which Margaret had seen the Russians build ten years before, was blown up.
More than ever, with a camera in her hand and pressured by Life to send more of her exclusive pictures, Margaret became blind to danger and death. She broke every rule
for safety. In Moscow she hid under the bed in her hotel
rooms to elude blackout wardens rushing everyone into
shelters; or she sneaked out to the open balcony or onto the
rooftop as bombs fell. She missed by one second the bomb
that fell on Spazzo House. That time, when she heard the
telltale whizz overhead, she scrambled down from the roof
into the house and flattened herself on the floor. The windows crashed in around her, cutting her fingers, but she escaped a heavy ventilator blown in from the windowsill. She
drove herself so mercilessly that she began to feel like a different person, unreal, emptied of feelings
"strange, remote, immune," she would say. She shot pictures of the horrors of war
mass destruction and the innocent dead
huddled in doorways. "War is war," she said, "and it has to
moved
to
—
—
be recorded."
At
a later date she
would describe more fully how she
protecting screen draws itself across
though a
the technique
my mind and makes it possible to consider
of photography ... as though I were making an abstract
while
composition. This blind lasts as long as it is needed
I am actually operating the camera. Days later, when I develop the negatives, I [am] surprised to find I cannot bring
felt.
"It
is
as
.
.
.
.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
.
.
91
myself to look
at the films. I
have to have someone else han-
and sort them for me."
Bourke-White and Caldwell returned to the United
States in the late fall aboard a cargo ship, part of a convoy,
that made its way over the Arctic Ocean and the North Sea.
They arrived home in time to fulfill lecture engagements.
People everywhere wanted to hear Margaret's eyewitness
account of the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the
Soviet counterattacks. She spent time in her Connecticut
home to write the book Shooting the Russian War.
In December, 1941, the United States entered World
War II. And Bourke-White, with few to equal her in courage and skill, became the first woman photographer accredited to the U.S. Air Force. She was stationed in England,
where U.S. bombers were preparing their attack on the
Continent. During short trips into London, she did a portrait of Winston Churchill, the English prime minister and
head of the war effort, that Life featured on a cover.
In England, Margaret learned of Allied plans to open
another war front in North Africa. Determined to be at the
center of action, she had herself transferred to Africa and
was assigned passage on a transport carrying troops, includdle
ing women in the armed forces called WACS (Women's
Army Corps), as well as medical personnel.
The
night before the ship was scheduled to reach
its
was torpedoed by a German submarine. Margaret, dumped out of her bunk by the jolt, quickly dressed,
grabbed a small knapsack in which she kept a camera and
film, and fought her way through corridors and up the
stairs. While thousands were filing to their lifeboat stations,
destination,
it
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT
WOMEN NEVER DO"
92
Margaret stood on the deck shooting photographs. Only
when she heard "Abandon ship!" did she rush to her assigned place and step into a lifeboat. The lifeboat was half
flooded and had a broken rudder, but Margaret, along with
the other passengers, used their helmets to scoop out the water. When she could, she helped row the boat. Never had
Margaret been so touched by an experience. Warmth and
understanding for people surged through her as she
watched these men and women draw on deep inner strength
in the face of catastrophe. They showed concern for one another and handled their fears by telling jokes, laughing, and
singing. After twenty hours of barely keeping afloat on a
navy destroyer picked them up. Margaret had
seen other lifeboats vanish from view.
For six months Margaret remained in Algeria, where
the survivors were taken. During that time she became the
rough
only
sea, a
woman
to fly in a
bombing
raid.
To
ensure her safety,
she went through rigorous drilling in rules and regulations
governing
such
missions.
Her bomber and
thirty-two
others, called Flying Fortresses, flew over an airfield near
Tunis and dropped
planes,
blasting
their
them
off
bombs on German troops and
the field. The successful raid
helped to make the African front an Allied stronghold.
From
Africa, Margaret returned to the United States.
Her marriage
had already broken up. She admitted she was unable to compromise with her work. "Mine
is a life into which marriage does not fit very well/' she said.
She again returned to the war front, this time to Italy.
In recognition of her skill in industrial and engineering
photography, the U.S. Department of Defense requested
to Caldwell
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
With two army photographers; North Africa, 1943
that she
make
a
photographic record of the Services of Sup-
This little-known branch of the army managed the
transportation of supplies to the front. Margaret's photos
would bring recognition to the vital work of the Engineers,
Signal, and Medical Corps.
In Italy, Margaret found her way into the Cassino Valley, where one of the grimmest battles of the war was taking
place. U.S. forces were trying to dislodge the enemy entrenched in surrounding hills. For five months Margaret
stayed with the Allied forces, covering the heavy fighting on
the ground and in the air. She flew in a light plane called a
ply.
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT
WOMEN NEVER DO"
94
Cub on
dangerous missions to spot enemy positions. On one flight, she was busy taking pictures of the
shell-pocked earth beneath her and did not notice four German fighter planes in pursuit. Only the extreme skill of the
American pilot, who quickly took a steep dive and flew the
plane beneath treetops and over a streambed, brought the
Cub safely back to base.
Piper
its
As World War
II
came
to a close in the bitter spring of
Margaret Bourke-White entered Germany with the
victorious U.S. armies under General George C. Patton. In
the war's aftermath, she saw the burned-out cities. Far
1945,
A
survivor of the Holocaust; Leipzig- Mochau concentration camp; Germany,
1945
+
95
worse, she bore witness to the
human wreckage
that result-
ed from the Nazi policy of political repression and genocide
against the Jews. In concentration camps,
where millions
had been put to death, she found hollow-eyed survivors.
Outside the camps were fields piled high with human bones.
How could she take photographs of such atrocities? She was
in a stupor, she said, as if she had a veil over her mind. "Correspondents," she explained, "are in a privileged and someThey have an obligation to pass
times unhappy position.
on what they see to others." Her awesome photographs of
.
the
.
.
we now call the German atrocities,
world. They have become permanent docu-
Holocaust,
as
stunned the
ments of that period.
"DOING ALL THE THINGS THAT
WOMEN NEVER
DO'
1
(
*=«
I
...
eyes like
the eagle*
**
"Do you know how to spin?" Margaret was
asked when she arrived in India in the
spring of 1946.
"Oh, I didn't come to spin. ... I came to
photograph the Mahatma spinning," she re-
!
ma
unless you
plied.
"How
know how
Margaret persisted,
can you understand the Mahat-
came the question.
but no amount of charm and
to spin?"
per-
suasion would get her past secretaries and aides to photo-
graph Mahatma Gandhi of India unless she learned how to
use the charkha, the spinning wheel. It had become the symbol of the nonviolent struggle for India's independence
from England.
Margaret, an aerial photographer, dangling by cable from a whirlybird, 1951
97
98
Gandhi's granddaughter taught Margaret how to spin.
She showed her how to sit on the floor with her legs crossed
before her in front of the old-fashioned wooden wheel and
work its simple mechanism. Margaret, the photographer of
the machine age, was amazed at her clumsiness. She entangled herself in the thread, breaking
it,
and was unable
to
spin out a continuous piece of yarn. But she finally learned
how
to spin.
She learned more; she learned how
to
slow her
pace. In India she could not charge around pushing people
and things out of her way. Here a monumental struggle was
being waged by a different set of rules.
The
been in
leader of the struggle,
jail
many
Mohandas K. Gandhi, had
times for his beliefs. Millions of people
him and became his devoted followers, calling him
Mahatma, meaning "Great Soul." He led the people in acts
loved
of civil disobedience, such as the refusal to pay taxes and the
all English goods. The Indian people began to
produce their own cloth, and the spinning wheel in every
home symbolized their strength and independence. With
the eyes of the world on him, Gandhi often went into a "fast
unto death" to win concessions from England and reforms
from the corrupt and powerful Indian princes.
Margaret had read books and articles on India for background material, but only when she was in India did she
fully understand the profound nature of the country's many
problems. She was subdued and nervous when she was finally ushered into Gandhi's presence. It was Monday, his
day of silence. She saw before her a man of seventy-six years
of age, gaunt, brown-skinned, wearing spectacles, sitting
cross-legged on the floor, his spinning wheel at his side.
boycott of
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
Mahatma Gandhi
on his day of silence; next
to
him
his cbarka,
a simple spin-
ning wheel; India, 1946
Dressed only in a homespun white loincloth, he was deeply
immersed in reading piles of newspaper clippings. In order
not to shatter the silence in the room, Margaret was permitted to use only three small, or peanut, flashbulbs for lighting. She fumbled with two of them, spoiling them. With the
third, she took the now famous photograph of a relaxed, vital Gandhi sitting beside his spinning wheel, reading.
To carry out her Life assignment to do an in-depth
study of conditions in India, Bourke-White spent most of
1946 there and returned for lengthy visits in 1947 and 1948.
She traveled extensively over the country making a record
EYES LIKE THE EAGLE
—
100
of the lavish,
wanton luxury of
India's princes
and the fam-
ine and disease that plagued millions of the poor. In the tanneries in the south, she found
young children working
in
lime pits that corroded their flesh. In Calcutta she took pho-
tographs of decaying bodies over which vultures were
—
swooping scenes from which tough journalists fled.
Independence could only improve conditions, Margaret
thought. And when the great day came in 1946 that India
won its independence from England and could form its own
government, Margaret was there. But with freedom came
new chaos. Within India lived two strong and warring religious forces, the Hindus and the Moslems. To accommodate
them, and to end their historic violence, India was partitioned into two nations and became Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan. When the actual division of the land took
place, Margaret traveled down to the small border villages
and there witnessed epic scenes that made her think of the
Old Testament. She saw the exodus of millions of people
from their ancestral homelands, forced to seek new refuges.
They formed an endless line of humanity on the march
men, women, and children, old and young, on foot, in
bullock carts, the weak on the backs of the strong. Only in
postwar Germany had Margaret beheld such agony and
despair. Thousands died from hunger, disease, and the brutal attacks of marauding bands and hostile religious groups.
Despite her observations, Margaret remained hopeful
that India would find its way to a more democratic society.
Sensitive to the progress of Indian
women, she reported
that
they were entering the educational system and breaking
with age-old tradition by removing the
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
veils
from
their
7fo dispossessed
—# young boy at a
refugee camp, near
New Delhi;
India,
1947
She also learned that the peasants were demanding
the breakup of feudal estates and that mill workers were organizing to improve their conditions.
Before her departure from India on January 30, 1948,
Margaret paid Gandhi a visit. She had become fond of him,
and he of her, though he called her "the torturer" because of
her persistence in taking his picture. She spent twenty minutes with Gandhi while he worked on the charkha. She
faces.
EYES LIKE THE EAGLE
102
found him less optimistic about peace in the world. Strongly
opposed to the manufacture and explosion of the atom
bomb, he said he would meet the bomb with prayer and
nonviolence rather than with shelters. "I no longer want to
live in a world of darkness and madness," he told Margaret.
As she left him, Margaret turned for a last look and
wished him good-bye.
A few hours later, Gandhi was struck down by an assassin's bullet while addressing a prayer meeting in New
Delhi. Margaret had been the last foreign journalist to see
him
alive.
Deeply shocked over
his death, yet ever the essential
photojournalism she stayed on in India to photograph the funeral procession. She stationed herself
on the cornice of
a
roof and watched the funeral bier pass by. Gandhi's body,
covered with rose petals, was on a flag-draped weapons car-
was on a five-mile course to the shores of the sacred
river Jumna. There, in keeping with Hindu tradition, it
would be set aflame. A million grieving people formed a
mighty procession behind the funeral cortege.
Helped by friends, Margaret was taken along back
roads to the site of the funeral pyre. She fought for space on
bridges and ramparts, pushing her way through the surging
mass of people, shooting pictures. For a few minutes she
saw all her work wasted when her camera equipment fell
from her hands and packets of film broke open. Someone
in the crowd rescued her material. Finally, with only a
Rolleiflex around her neck and set in focus, she fought her
way through the crowd to a truck and climbed up on the hood.
She held her camera up to photograph the moment when
rier that
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
103
the flames of the simple, sandalwood pyre roared
upward
and she realized that she was being pushed off the truck. She
clung to the windshield, determined to hold on, when two
men, the truck's owners, forcibly removed her. She pleaded
with them, but nothing worked until voices from the crowd
she does not stop her
shouted out, "Let the woman stay!
Let her stay." Another woman,
work. What a woman!
clinging to the truck, called to Margaret's persecutors, "She
.
.
.
.
.
.
has the agility of a snake, hair like
flax, a face like
the sun,
and eyes like the eagle. You should learn from her zeal."
Margaret stayed on the truck and took her pictures.
Gandhi's assassination sent shock waves through the
world. Life sent other photographers to India to record the
funeral procession and the profound grief of the Indian people at the loss of their great apostle of peace.
The magazine
featured Bourke-White's photographs and those of Cartier-
Bresson.
Upon
her return to the United States, Margaret stayed
in her Connecticut
home
to
complete work on her book
about India, Halfway to Freedom.
Though at the peak of her career, each assignment was
and the conditions of their lives,
continued to draw Margaret as intensely as machines did
when she was younger. Though she had compassion for suffering, her work remained restrained, reflecting objective
reality rather than an emotional response. But this restraint
cracked when she saw the human suffering during a visit to
South Africa in March, 1950.
Margaret knew, as the whole world knew, that apartheid, or apartness, was the legal policy of the South African
still
a challenge. People,
"EYES LIKE THE EAGLE"
104
government
white people.
while
it
to
It
keep black African people separated from
enabled the white minority to stay in power
deprived the black majority of every
human
right.
Black people in South Africa could not learn to read and
write; they could not train for decent jobs or vote or express
their opinions.
They were
barricaded in shantytowns, the
victims of police and government brutality.
Margaret rushed through her schedule, taking traditional photographs of government officials, their sports, and
social scenes. She shot pictures of the magnificent countryside with its cloudless blue sky. Then, typically, she probed
beneath the surface. She made her way, one Sunday, to a
gold mine. Gold and diamond mines, worked by black men,
formed the backbone of the country's wealth. At this particular compound she found miners putting on a show of
traditional dances. It was a way of expressing loneliness for
families and villages many had left behind more than a
year before to seek livelihood in the mines.
Two
of the dan-
were so beautiful and so graceful that Margaret decided
to base her photo essay on them and show where they
worked, lived, and slept.
She discovered, on inquiring for their names, that they
had no names, only numbers. They worked two miles down
a mine shaft in a "remnant" area where cave-ins were frequent. To do a full story, according to Margaret's way of
thinking, she had to go down into the mine. Officials were
shocked at her suggestion, but she fought them off and
showed up at the mine entrance on a prearranged day in
warm clothes, a crash helmet on her head, and a whistle
around her neck in case of an accident. Attended by reluc-
cers
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
105
mine foremen, she stepped into a mine cage for the
slow descent below sea level, into the steamy darkness of the
earth. The cage came to rest in a damp, dark pit. A system of
tant
made it possible to breathe.
She found the two miners curled up in a cramped pocket of space, chipping away at rock with pickaxes. She did
not recognize them as the dancers of a few nights before.
air circulation
She saw
down
and bodies. In their eyes, which would haunt her forever, she saw
their deep pain and scarred spirits. In the midst of taking
their pictures, she almost fainted from the heat and was relieved to be brought back to the surface of the mine. But she
knew that these black men spent most of their lives down in
the pit and that many collapsed and died from work and
Gold
miners
graphed
two
while
miles
y
rivers of sweat
photoworking
underground;
Johannesburg, South Africa,
1950
pouring
their faces
106
photo story, showed the way miners
were forced to live in windowless concrete barracks where
they slept "rolled up like sausages on the floor."
The photograph of the two black miners became one of
Margaret's favorites. She saw the "sorrow of all mankind in
the miners' eyes," she would say. She ended the lengthy essay with the picture of a three-year-old black child standing
behind barbed wire.
heat. Margaret, in her
At the mad pace at which she worked, Margaret moved
from one daring feat to another. Often she asked for the
most dangerous assignment, or she thought one up.
In 1950 she had gone into the bowels of the earth for
her South African photographs.
A
year later she hung sus-
pended by cable from a helicopter high above the United
States and its bordering seas to get a view of the country
from the top down. She had become Life's aerial photographer. To prepare for this assignment, she had consulted
navy helicopter pilots. And for months she barnstormed the
country with traffic patrols and pipeline inspectors, flying
so low over bridges and mountains that she could almost
stretch out her hand and touch them.
She felt perfectly safe hanging from a helicopter, or
"whirlybird," as it was called. It became another angle, or
photographic platform, from which Margaret took pictures.
The whirlybird hovered over a scene while Margaret recorded, for Life, such views as sightseers poking their heads
out of the crown of the Statue of Liberty and crowds of people at a Coney Island beach. A memorable photograph taken
this way was of snow geese flying over a Virginia bay.
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
107
A
three-year-old behind the barbed wire
of her shanty town home; Johannesburg,
South Africa, IPSO
On
this road she chose, of ever-escalating external ex-
went to Korea in 1952. A war between North
and South Korea, in which the United States and the United Nations played roles, had been in progress for a couple of
citement, she
"EYES LIKE THE EAGLE"
108
Tokyo on her way and was in a station wagon shooting pictures of a May Day demonstration
when her car was stoned. She was caught in the midst of a
violent outbreak between police and students. Only when
years.
She stopped off
in
she could no longer see out of eyes streaming with tear gas
did she give
up shooting her
pictures.
In an automobile which was stoned during a demonstration; Tokyo, Japan,
1952
109
From Tokyo
she flew to Korea and worked on her story
about the Korean people and, in particular, about
commu-
behind U.S. lines.
But something was happening to Margaret, something
she would not admit to herself. She was having trouble getting in and out of jeeps, and her hands were stiffening on
the camera. There was also a dull ache in her left leg and
arm.
nist guerrilla strongholds
44
EYES LIKE THE EAGLE'
THE TOUGHEST
ASSIGNMENT
She had called herself "Maggie the Indehad never been seriously
sick in her life. She had taken for granted
her excellent health and agile body that responded to her needs like a perfectly tuned
instrument. The sudden stiffening of her
structible," for she
joints
made her
stagger.
To
cover up her
awkwardness, because it embarrassed her, she thought up
devices to gain time. She would pretend she had dropped
something, perhaps a pencil, and would bend down to retrieve it. This gave her a few extra minutes during which
she would regain her ability to walk.
For
a
while she continued with her work. But col-
leagues noticed her difficulties.
of a car, and
when
Someone had
to help her out
she framed a picture in her camera, some-
Margarets daily workout,
stretching
ill
and
exercising to keep limber
112
had to snap the shutter. Within a year her joints became increasingly stiff and her hands began to tremble.
The medical diagnosis of Margaret's symptoms was
Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's is crippling and incurable,
leading to increased stiffening of muscles and joints, tremor,
and garbled speech. When Margaret learned the diagnosis,
her life underwent swift and dramatic changes. She put every bit of her energy, ingenuity, and perseverance into conquering the illness.
She had made her home in Connecticut a haven. Even
in her busiest years, she had restored her psychic energy
and inner peace in the quiet countryside. Often she had
spread a blanket outdoors on a bed of leaves and fallen
one
else
In retirement at her Connecticut home during the 1960's
113
asleep looking through
Now,
too,
tall
trees at star-filled patches of sky.
during the early years of
illness,
sleep outdoors in good weather. She
fortable
on
a
she preferred to
would be made com-
lounge near the pool and doze off to the sounds
of insects and small animals scurrying through the grass.
With her cat, Sita, keeping vigil, she was never lonely.
To combat the disease, Margaret twice underwent
gery.
The
procedures,
still
in
the
experimental
sur-
stage,
brought her moderate relief. She gained temporary control
over her trembling hands, as well as some facility in movement. But only the most taxing, disciplined regimen of
physical therapy kept her mobile.
She converted an open porch of her home into a miniature gymnasium where, with the help of a therapist, she did
daily prescribed exercises. To keep her fingers flexible, she
crumpled paper by the hour or wrung water out of towels.
She did knee bends, played ball, and lifted weights. She
danced the tango to maintain muscle coordination. Neighborhood children taught her how to play jacks and badminton and how to jump rope. Each day she walked one to three
miles down the lanes and roads near her home, stopping to
weed the ground around a cluster of wild columbine and
jack-in-the-pulpit. Or she would stop to admire the mountain laurel and dogwood trees that filled the woods each
spring with their delicate blossoms.
When she could no longer hold a pen in her hand, she
learned to tap out words on a typewriter. That is how she
worked on her autobiography, Portrait of Myself When she
could no longer sit at a typewriter, she had a tall table built
and did her writing standing up. Though her last story for
.
THE TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT
114
appeared in 1956, the editors kept her name on the
masthead until 1969 and promised Margaret the assignment
to photograph the moon. Margaret had every hope that she
Life
would have recovered sufficiently
will could overcome her illness.
Her
to
do
spirit in fighting Parkinson's
so, as if
won
her force of
her as
many
lau-
had her extraordinary life as a photographer. "If I
ill," she remarked, "I was glad it was an illness I
could do something about. I researched it as if it were another photographic assignment." She addressed groups of
people with the same illness to encourage them by her example. She attended social functions, traveled, and went to
dances. She always looked beautiful, whether her white hair
was shorn down to her scalp, as it was after surgery, or
whether she wore it long and full. Even when her body was
rels as
had
to be
beginning to stoop, she wore fetching gowns. But more than
physical beauty enhanced her. Her excitement about life
never wavered and her eyes, to the very end, mirrored her
enthusiasm for every scene. Outside her windows she would
see the daily
panorama of nature unfold. At
stiffness in her fingers eased, she took
cats,
times,
when
the
photographs of her
her friends, and neighborhood children. She had an-
other weapon: "If you banish fear nothing terribly bad can
happen to you," she told a newspaper interviewer.
Honors and awards multiplied. They had come her way
from her first years as a photographer when, in 1928, one of
her steel pictures won first prize in a Cleveland Museum of
Art photography show. She was also celebrated for her daring exploits. Even the comic books made her a heroine.
"The World's Most Famous Photographer Was a Girl," fea-
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
US
tured an issue of Real Facts Comics.
handed her
a citation;
won
The War Department
she picked up honorary degrees from
American
Woman
Achievement
Award, and was elected to the Woman's Hall of Fame. In
1959, the Overseas Press Club held a dinner dance called
"Peggy's Night" to celebrate her recovery from surgery. In
1960, a television movie based on her life featured movie star
Theresa Wright in the lead role. Millions of viewers learned
universities,
an
about Margaret's battle against her
Colleagues and friends,
who
illness.
brought
along packages of her favorite food and prepared special
dishes for her. Margaret looked forward especially to visits
by Alfred Eisenstaedt and Carl Mydans, Life colleagues. She
missed her sister, Ruth, who died in 1964 (their mother had
died many years before). Ruth, always loving and warm, had
helped her with her books, reading the manuscripts and
visited
often,
making valuable editorial suggestions. Her brother, Roger,
and his family came from the Midwest where they lived to
see her, and her cousin Robert Connolly and his family visited from New Jersey. "What a beautiful person she was,"
said her cousin sometime later. "She never complained."
In June, 1971, Margaret attended the fiftieth reunion of
class. Accompanied by her companion of many years, Mrs. Marge Russell, she was driven
to the country club in Plainfield, New Jersey. She was
helped from the car into a wheelchair. By then she could
talk only in a loud whisper. She greeted each classmate by
name. "Hello, Jack," she said to her old co-editor of the high
school magazine, John Daniel, whom she had not seen in fifty years. She spoke to him about his work in the ministry.
her high school graduation
THE TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT
116
She fondly inquired about
all
those absent from the gather-
ing.
Two
She
and
months
left
later, in
behind
telling, so filled
a
August, 1971, she died.
monumental body
with her visual
of work, so alive
artistry, that
it
rein-
woman. The camera, which had become
an extension of her, led her on great adventures. At the
same time, she stretched the scope of the camera and made it
more meaningful, more responsive to her vision.
Even at the peak of her artistry, said photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White was as willing and
eager as any person on a first assignment. "She would get
up at the crack of daybreak to photograph a bread crumb
if necessary." For millions of people she documented and illuminated the historic events of twenty-five years: U.S. invokes the brilliant
dustry, the Great Depression, Soviet industrialization, wars
and revolutions, and the human condition. She
left
not only
a visual record of history but a written record as well.
Edward A.
Steichen,
Her
photographer and friend, with Margaret at an earlier time
117
books, illustrated with her compelling photographs,
still
convey the drama of major events.
She had love and appreciation not only for the big
things of the age. She maintained, until the end, her love for
everything in nature.
Her friend Sean Callahan visited her in
ward the end of her life. On the way in, he
He
the hospital to-
noticed a pray-
up and put it into an
empty bottle. At Margaret's bedside, he held up the bottle
for her to see his gift. She was by then almost completely
paralyzed and had lost all power of speech. But Callahan
had worked out with Margaret a form of communication
ing mantis on a bush.
picked
it
through the blinking of her eyes. After a brief visit Callahan
prepared to leave and bid her good-bye, leaving the praying
mantis behind on her night table. He noticed that Margaret
seemed fretful, and through the activity of her eyes he understood what she wanted him to do. Her last message was
that he take the praying mantis outdoors and release it
so
that it could be free.
—
Praying mantis by Margaret Bourke-White
THE TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT
SELECTED
ElELICGRAPHy
BOOKS BY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE
Eyes on Russia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931.
U.S.S.R. Photographs. Albany, New York: The Argus Press, 1934.
(with Erskine Caldwell) You Have Seen Their Faces. New York: The Viking Press,
1937.
(with Erskine Caldwell) North of the Danube. New York: The Viking Press, 1939.
(with Erskine Caldwell) Say, Is This the U.S.A.? New York: Duell, Sloan and
Pearce, 1941.
Shooting the Russian War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942.
They Called It "Purple Heart Valley. " New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944.
"Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly. " New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946.
Halfway to Freedom. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949.
(with John La Farge) A Report of the American Jesuits. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Cudahy,
1956.
Portrait of Myself.
New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
PUBLISHED PHOTOGRAPHS
The Cornell Alumni News,
May
IN:
December
23, 1926;
June 2 and 23; September 29,
Fortune, February 1930 to October 1937.
19;
January
13
and
20;
February
10;
1927.
November 1936 to May 1956.
P.M. June 1940 to December 1940.
Life,
ALSO:
Brown, Theodore M. Margaret Bourke-White,
White,
Photojournalist,
Andrew Dickson
Museum
of Art, Cornell University, 1972.
Callahan, Sean, ed. The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White,
New
York Graphic
Society, 1972.
Margaret Bourke-White, The Cleveland Years 1927-1930.
temporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, 1976.
I
The New Gallery
found these materials invaluable to my research. They are for
might want to look them over in the library.
terested reader
B.S.
118
of Con-
adults, but an in-
INDEX
marriage to Chapman, 24-25
name change from White, 32
parents' influence on, 9-13
advertising photos, 57
aerial
photography, 106
Africa
North, in
WWII, 91-92
South, gold mines
in,
Air Force, accreditation
Algeria, in
WWII,
Parkinson's disease, 109, 111-114, 117
104-106
to,
qualities
and work
style,
73-76
school years, 13-17
91
social awareness,
92
66-67
studio in Cleveland, 32, 39-40
American Bar Association, 31
American Woman Achievement Award,
studio in Chrysler Building, 50-52
butterflies
115
childhood interest in, 3-4
photos of, 76, 77-79
American Writers' Congress, 66-67
apartheid, in South Africa, 103-104
Aquitania, S.S., 81
architectural photography, 27-28, 32-33
Calcutta, photos of, 100
Architecture magazine, 33
Caldwell, Erskine
Arctic Ocean photos, 79-80
book collaborations with
Art Deco, 36
assassination of Gandhi, 102-103
marriage to
WWII
Bel Geddes,
Norman,
76, 79,
81-82, 92
Union, 85-91
childhood interest in, 3, 8, 13
bombers, raid in, 92
Buick cars, 57
Bound Brook, N.J., childhood home,
Bourke, Grandparents, 5
Bourke-White, Margaret
as camp counselor, 21-22
early childhood, 7-9
college years, 19-28
death, 116-117
honors, 114-115
love of nature, 3-4
cameras
and college photography
birds,
trip,
marriage to Caldwell,
MB-W,
in Soviet
Callahan, Sean, 118
67
Bemis, Alfred, 38-39
marooned on Arctic
MB-W,
63-66, 81, 82
and
7
camp
pictorial magazines, 70
counselor, job
as,
21-22
Canada photos, 76-79
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 67, 103
Cassino Valley photos, 92
caterpillars,
childhood interest
3-4
charkha (spinning wheel), 97-99, 101
Chicago stockyards, photo essay on,
47^8
81-82, 92
in,
Chapman, Everett (Chappie), 24-25
Chapman, Mrs., 25
80
76, 79,
class, 20
early familiarity with, 17
Chrysler Building, 50-52
119
5
120
work
Churchill, Winston, 91
Cleveland, studio
Cleveland
in, 32,
Museum
39-40
for,
Frog Book,
45-46, 48-49,
58,
69
1
of Art, 114
WWII, 94-95
Connolly, Robert, 115
Gandhi, Mohandas K. (Mahatma), and
dian independence, 97-103
contrast, in photography, 35
Germany
concentration camps, in
postwar, 94-95
Cooper Union, 6
Cornell Alumni News,
27
in
Cornell University, 26-28
of,
of,
gold mine photos, 104-106
Goodyear, 57
Graubner, Oscar, 74
Great Depression, 57-58, 63
81
dams, photos
WWII, 86-94
Gilpin, Laura, 20
German annexation
Czechoslovakia,
In-
67-69
dancing, at school, 15
Daniel, John,
16,
115
Darien, Conn., house
dark, childhood fear
in, 82,
112-113
Hague, Mayor, 76
Halfway to Freedom (Bourke-White), 103
handwriting, 12-15
of, 12
Defense Department, Services of Supply,
92-93
Head, Henry R., 27
Hindus, and Indian independence, 100
degrees, honorary, 115
Hine, Lewis, 67
diaries, 13
Hitler, Adolf, 81
"Hogs," photo essay, 48
Holocaust photos, 94-95
House and Garden, 33
Distributor, S.S., 77
dust bowl, photos
of,
61-63
"Dust Changes America," 66
Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 115, 116
India, independence, 97-103
Eisenstein, Sergei, 53
industrial design, 36
Ethical Culture Society,
industry photos, 33-43
5
Evans, Walker, 66
Ingersoll, Ralph, 82
Eyes on Russia (Bourke-White), 56
Italy, in
The Family Medical Book, 13
Karas, George, 74
Five-Year Plan, Soviet Union, 52
Korean War, 107-109
fears,
childhood, 12
Flying Fortress, 92
Fort Peck, Montana,
WWII, 93-94
Kulas, ElroyJ., 37, 39
dam
photos, 67-69
Fortune magazine
Lange, Dorothea,
Chrysler building construction photos,
50
drought photos, 61-62
stockyard photos, 47-48
Lake Bantam, photos
lecture circuit, 56
Leiter, Earl,
Life
38-39
magazine
aerial photos, 106
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
of, 21
20, 66,
67
121
Arctic photos, 79-80
Nazis, 81,95
Canada photos, 76-79
New
dam
North of
photos, 67-70
York Times Magazine, 56
Danube (Bourke-White and
the
Caldwell), 81
Churchill cover, 91
India assignment, 98-103
last
Oracle, 16
story for, 114
Otis Steel Co. photos, 36- 39
South Africa photos, 103-107
Soviet photos, 86-90
Overseas Press Club, 115
Lloyd-Smith, Parker, 47, 48
Look magazine, 70
Pakistan, and Indian independence, 100
Luce, Henry, 43,45, 46, 67, 71
Parkinson's disease, 109, 111-114, 117
Patton,
Luf, Charlotte, 16
George C, 94
Peek magazine, 70
machine age, 36
machine esthetic,
machines
photos
of,
3
36,
photo essay, 47-49,
photography
43
architectural, 27-28, 32-33
Teachers College, 20
commercial, 57
at Cornell, 26-28
class at
magazines, pictorial, 70
Fortune; Life
Manship, Paul, 67
meat-packing industry, photo essay on,
47-48
Michigan, University of, 23-25
mines, gold, photos of, 104-106
modernism, 36
Moscow, bombing of, 85-89
Moscowitz, Benjamin, 28
Moslems, and Indian independence, 100
Moth Book,
Museum
MB-W's
life,
of Natural History,
115
New
first jobs,
news, 49, 70-71
Photo League, 67
photomurals, 57
physical therapy, 113
Pic magazine, 70
Piper Cub,
Plainfield
York,
WWII
mission
High School,
16,
in,
93-94
115-116
popularity
28
Mydans,
21-23
industrial, 33-43
P.M. newspaper, 82
poems, 16-17
15
movie, based on
69-70
aerial, 106
3-43
Soviet, 55-56
see also
67,
at
Carl, 65, 115
high school, 15-16
at college, 23
Portrait o//Wjw//(Bourke-Wriite), 113
Nation, 66
Pratt Institute, 6
National Broadcasting Company, photo-
praying mantis, photos
mural
Purdue University,
for, 57
National Hotel, Moscow, 85
Natural History Museum, Cleveland, 25
nature, love
of, 4,
8-9, 17
radio broadcast from
Rankin, Art,
INDEX
79,
80
of, 64, 65,
25
Moscow,
87
117
5
122
Teachers College, Columbia University,
Real Facts Comics, 114-115
Reptile Book,
19
1
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 76
Time magazine, 43
Rothstein, Arthur, 66
Time
Russell,
Marge, 115
Inc., 82
toads, childhood interest in, 4
Tobacco Road (Caldwell), 63
Tokyo, photos of May Day demonstra-
Rutgers University, 19
Ruthven, Alexander, 23
tion, 108
"Trade Routes across the Great Lakes,"
Sargent, Peggy, 74
48
Say, Is This the t/.S.^..?
(Bourke-White and
Caldwell), 82
Trapping
the
Magical Waves of Sound (pho-
tomural), 57
magazine, 73
School of Photography, 20, 46
Services of Supply, 92-93
Scholastic
Tweedsmuir, Lord, 77-78
unemployment, Great Depression,
Shahn, Ben, 66
58
sharecroppers, book on, 63-66
ships, torpedoed,
91-92
Shooting the Russian
War (Bourke-White),
Vassos, John, 50
91
snakes, childhood
interest in,
4,
9,
21,
in, 63-66
South Africa, photos of gold miners in,
South, book on sharecroppers
103-107
spinning wheel, Gandhi and, 97-99, 101
Soviet
Union
in 1930s,
in
WACs
(Women's Army Corps),
War Department,
23
52-56
Steichen,
photos
Edward
White, Clarence H., 20, 46
White, Grandparents, 5
White, Joseph (father), 4-7
20-21
factory, 17
Spazzo House, Moscow,
Stalin, Josef, 88-89
steel mills,
Western Reserve University, 25
Weston, Edward, 67
dies,
WWII, 85-91
91
citation from, 115
of,
87,
love of nature, 8-9
90
personality, 9-10
33-43
A., 20, 67, 116
White, Lazarus (uncle), 21
White, Minnie Bourke (mother), 4-7, 115
Steiner, Ralph, 20, 46, 67
on dancing partners,
Stieglitz, Alfred, 20
influence of, 10-13
stockyard photos, 47-48
White, Roger (brother),
stoning of car, in Japanese demonstra-
White, Ruth
tion, 108
The Story of Steel, 39
Strand, Paul, 67
15
4, 7,
115
Woman's
Hall of Fame,
women
Sudetenland, 81
and career,
surgery, 113
in India, 100
AN EYE ON THE WORLD
1
15
(sister), 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 31,
71
1
15
123
World War
II, 81,
82
Holocaust, 94-95
in
England, 91
92-94
in Italy,
in
North
Africa, 91-92
in Soviet Union, 85-91
Wright, Teresa, 115
You Have Seen Their Faces (Bourke- White
and Caldwell), 66
INDEX
PHCTCGEADH CREDITS
The
estate of
24, 54, 62, 83,
Margaret Bourke-White: jacket (Oscar Graubner), pp.
The George Arents Research Library
Syracuse University,
Roger
7, 8, 9,
11,
89
B. White): pp.
ii,
2, 5, 6, 34,
(by permission of
41 (Ralph Steiner), 42, 44, 47, 72, 77, 96, 108,
110, 112
LIFE magazine, Time
Incorporated:
sole agent for the following
78,84,88,94,99,
The Time-LIFE Syndication
photographs appearing
is
the
101, 105, 107, 117
Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson
Magnum
Service
in this book. pp. 60, 65, 69,
Museum
of Art: pp. 18
Prints, Incorporated: pp. 116
The Museum
of
Modern Art
Collection (by permission of Roger B. White):
pp. 51, 55
The National
Archives: pp. 40
The New Gallery
of
Contemporary
Art, Cleveland,
Ohio (by permission of Rog-
er B. White): pp. 30
US Army:
pp. 93
The Witkin
Gallery, Incorporated: pp. 75
Courtesy of Bernard Hayden, Bound Brook,
New Jersey:
pp. 14
The photographs on the following pages were taken by Margaret Bourke-White: pp.
30, 34, 40, 47, 51, 54, 55, 60, 62, 69, 77, 78, 84, 88, 94, 99, 101, 105, 107,
124
117
18,
cffsy^,
