Margaret Bourke-White
From Philosopedia.org
Bourke-White, Margaret (14 June 1904 - 27 August 1971)
Bourke-White, an American photo-journalist, was one of the original staff photographers at Fortune, Life, and Time magazines. She was noted for her coverage of the invasion of Russia, her coverage of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the liberation of Italy, and the horrors she found and photographed in German concentration camps. She also had a series on the rural South during the Depression, mining in South Africa (perspiration beaded on the men’s bodies), Korean guerrilla warfare, and portraits of world leaders.
Margaret was the daughter of Joseph White (who came from an orthodox Jewish family) and Minnie Bourke (a Protestant whose father was an Irish ship's carpenter and a mother who was an English cook). After growing up in Bound Brook, New Jersey, she studied herpetology in 1922 at Columbia University. She then studied at the University of Michigan, Purdue, and Western Reserve, graduating in 1927 from Cornell University. In 1928 she became an industrial photographer for the Ohio Steel Company.
Bourke-White’s parents became Ethical Culturists, married in New York City by Felix Adler [[1]].
Margaret's marriage in 1925 to Everett Chapman lasted one year. She also married writer Erskine Caldwell, from 1929 to 1941, and the two wrote You Have Seen Their Faces (1937).
The progressive Bourke-White met Gandhi several times, taking a photograph of him spinning just hours before he was assassinated. Her unforgettable photographs of South Africa informed the world of the injustice of apartheid.
Her books include Eyes on Russia (1931), Shooting the Russian War (1942), Purple Heart Valley: A Combat Chronicle of the War in Italy (1944), Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly - A Report on the Collapse of Hitler's 'Thousand Years' (1946), Halfway to Freedom, A Report on the New India (1949) and Portrait of Myself, an autobiography (1963). In the latter she wrote about people who had amused her,
- It was a strange little scene. Women were careening about in their cotton print dresses, and several times they nearly threw me off my feet and all but knocked my camera out of my hands as they waved their Bibles and shrieked their "praise be's."
Bourke-White had surgery in 1956 for Parkinson's disease, and more surgery in 1961, which left her with impaired speech. For fourteen years she suffered from Parkinson’s disease. The writer Norman Cousins once found her on her back, unable to get up. “Look, I’m just like a turtle,” she joked.
Warren Allen Smith, invited for a dinner of soufflé one night, arrived at her Darien, Connecticut, home to find the cook - his student, Shigeko Sasamori, one of the Hiroshima Maidens - absent and Ms. Bourke-White in the kitchen, unable to break an egg because of the Parkinson's disease. Mrs. Norman Cousins arrived just in time to start the dinner, which Smith later served. Ms. Bourke-White served such large martinis that neither could remember much about the dinner. Asked which of her photos he most liked, Smith mentioned the one of the South African miners, vainly hoping she might give him a signed copy. She conversed about the various awards she had received and which adorned her house’s walls, reported how far she walks daily to maintain her health, told of her being attracted almost more to cameras than to men, spoke openly about the joys of being sexually liberated, and expressed no interest whatsoever in the various organized religions.
Bourke-White never recovered from a fall she had in 1971.
