VOICE ONE:
During World War Two, she became an official photographer with the United States Army. Her photographs were to be used jointly by the military and by Life magazine. She was the first woman to be permitted to work in combat areas during World War Two.
Bourke-White flew with American bomber planes in England as they prepared to attack enemy targets on the European continent. She wanted to fly with the Army to North Africa, where the allies were fighting German troops in the desert.
But the commanding general told her it would be too dangerous. So she sailed for North Africa instead. Before she reached the African coast, enemy bombs hit the ship and sank it. An allied warship rescued Bourke-White and the other survivors and took them to Algeria.
VOICE TWO:
The incident did not stop Bourke-White from reporting on the war. She flew in an allied bombing attack on a German airfield at El Aouina in Tunisia. She flew over the terrible fighting in the Cassino Valley in Italy. And she moved along the Rhine River with the United States Third Army, under the command of General George Patton. At the end of the war, she was with American troops when they entered and freed several Nazi death camps. She took photographs of the prisoners in the Buchenwald death camp in Germany in nineteen forty-five.
Later, she wrote about the war. She said she sometimes pulled an imaginary cloth across her eyes as she worked. In the death camps, she said, the cloth was so thick that she did not really know what she was photographing until she saw the finished pictures. In addition to her stories for Life magazine, Bourke-White published books on the allied campaign in Italy and on the fall of Nazi Germany.
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VOICE ONE:
After the war, Life magazine sent Margaret Bourke-White to India. She stayed for three years as India prepared for its independence from Britain. She photographed the battles between Muslims and Hindus. And she met with the leader of India’s non-violent campaign for independence, Mohandas Gandhi. She made a famous photograph of him called “Gandhi at His Spinning Wheel.” She was the last person to photograph Gandhi before he was murdered in nineteen forty-eight.
"The Spinner" (Margaret Bourke-White)
VOICE TWO:
After that, Bourke-White traveled to South Africa. Her job was to tell the story of the black people who worked in the country’s gold mines. To get the pictures she wanted, she followed the workers deep into the mine tunnels.
In the early nineteen fifties, she went to Korea to photograph the effects of war on the Korean people. She took a famous photograph of a returning soldier reunited with his mother in South Korea in nineteen fifty-two. The mother had believed that her son had been killed several months earlier in the Korean War.
VOICE ONE:
Margaret Bourke-White tried to make her pictures perfect. Often, she was not satisfied with what she had done. She would look at her pictures and see something she had failed to do, or something she had not done right. Reaching perfection was not easy. Many things got in the way of her work. She said: “There is only one moment when a picture is there. And a moment later, it is gone forever. My memory is full of those pictures that were lost.”
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VOICE TWO:
More of Margaret Bourke-White’s beautiful pictures were to be lost, sooner than anyone expected. In the middle nineteen fifties, she began to suffer from the effects of Parkinson’s disease.
Her hands shook so badly that she could not hold a camera. She wrote a book about her life, called “Portrait of Myself.” And, even though she was unable to take photographs, she continued to work for Life magazine until nineteen sixty-nine. She died in nineteen seventy-one at the age of sixty-seven.
Margaret Bourke-White was a woman doing what had been a man’s job. Her work took her around the world, from factories to battlefields. Her life was full of adventure. She was one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century.
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VOICE ONE:
This program was written by Shelley Gollust. It was produced by Lawan Davis. I’m Barbara Klein.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Steve Ember. Join us again next week for People in America in VOA Special English.
