Photographer Margaret Bourke-White Helped Create the Modern Art of Photojournalism
Written by Shelley Gollust
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VOICE ONE:
I’m Barbara Klein.
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And I’m Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we complete our report about photographer Margaret Bourke-White. She helped create the modern art of photojournalism.
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VOICE ONE:
Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White began her career as an industrial photographer in the early nineteen thirties. Her pictures captured the beauty and power of machines. They told a story – one image at a time. The technique became know as the photographic essay. In nineteen thirty-six, American publisher Henry Luce started a new magazine, called Life, based on the photographic essay. In this magazine, the pictures told the story. Bourke-White had worked as a photographer for one of Luce’s other magazines, called Fortune. Luce chose her to work on his new magazine.
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Margaret Bourke-White took the picture that appeared on the first cover of Life magazine. It was a picture of a new dam being built in the western state of Montana. The light on the rounded supports showed the dam’s great strength. The small shapes of two men at the bottom showed the dam’s huge size. Bourke-White was no longer satisfied just to show the products of industry in her pictures, as she had in the past. She wanted to tell the story of the people behind the industry: In this case, the people who were building the dam.
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The dam in Montana was a federal project. Ten thousand people worked on it. Bourke-White took pictures of those people – at the dam, in the rooms where they lived, and in the places where they had fun. With her pictures in Life magazine, she told a story about America’s “Wild West” in the twentieth century.
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Margaret Bourke-White was a social activist. She was a member of the American Artists Congress. These artists supported state financial aid for the arts. They fought discrimination against African-American artists. And they supported artists fighting against fascism in Europe.
In the nineteen thirties, Bourke-White met the American writer Erskine Caldwell. Caldwell was known for his stories about people in the American South. The photographer and the writer decided to produce a book to tell Americans about some of those poor country people of the South. They traveled through eight states, from South Carolina to Louisiana. Their book, “You Have Seen Their Faces,” was published in nineteen thirty-seven. It was a great success.
Caldwell’s words were beautiful. But Bourke-White’s pictures could have told the story by themselves. They showed the faces of people in a land that still wore the mask of defeat in America’s Civil War.
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In nineteen thirty-eight, some countries in Europe were close to war. Bourke-White and Caldwell went there to report on these events. They produced another book together, this time about Czechoslovakia. It was called “North of the Danube.” The next year Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell were married. They continued to work together.
By the spring of nineteen forty-one, Europe had been at war for a year and a half. Bourke-White and Caldwell went to the Soviet Union. They were the only foreign reporters there. For six weeks, Bourke-White took pictures of the Soviet people preparing for war. Then, one night in July, Soviet officials announced that German bomber planes were flying toward Moscow. No civilians were permitted to stay above ground because of the coming attacks.
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As others were hurrying to safety, Bourke-White placed several cameras in the window of her hotel room. She set the cameras so they would remain open to the light of the night sky. Then she joined the others in rooms under the hotel. While she waited for the bombing attack to end, her cameras recorded the explosions, which lit up the rooftops of the city.
Before leaving the country, Bourke-White received permission to meet with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. She returned home with his picture and a series of other photographic essays for Life magazine. She also had enough material for a book on the war in the Soviet Union. Margaret Bourke-White’s marriage to Erskine Caldwell ended in divorce in nineteen forty-two.
