Tickets

Margaret Bourke-White. At the Time of the Louisville Flood. 1937. Gelatin silver print, 9 3/4 × 13 1/8" (24.7 × 33.4 cm). Gift of the artist. © 2021 Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

“The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.”

Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White was a pioneering photojournalist whose insightful pictures of 1930s Russia, German industry, and the impact of the Depression and drought in the American midwest established her reputation. She took some of the first photographs inside German concentration camps at Erla and Buchenwald following the end of World War II and captured the last pictures of Mahatma Gandhi, in India.

Bourke-White entered Columbia University in 1921 to study herpetology; however, the following year a photography course taught by Clarence H. White at the Clarence H. White School of Photography left a lasting impression. For the course Bourke-White received her first camera, a secondhand 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ inch ICA Reflex with a cracked lens, taking her first photographs on glass plates. Though she continued to study zoology at the University of Michigan, from then on she never left the darkroom. In 1927 she graduated from Cornell University with a degree in biology, but she spent most of her time establishing herself as a professional photographer. Bourke-White opened her first studio in her apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. With photographs of architecture and industry, she earned commissions and caught the eye of Henry Luce, founder of Time and Fortune magazines, who, in 1929, invited her to become Fortune’s first staff photographer. She returned to New York and, in 1930, established a photographic studio in the Chrysler Building. When Luce launched Life magazine in 1936, Bourke-White joined the staff, and her picture Fort Peck Dam, Montana appeared on the first cover.

Note: Opening quote is from Margaret Bourke-White, “Chapter 28: Guerilla Warfare in Korea,” in Portrait of Myself.(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 333, https://archive.org/details/portraitofmyself006601mbp/page/n11/mode/2up.

Mitra Abbaspour, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, 2014

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Margaret Bourke-White (; June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist. She was known as an architectural and commercial photographer for the first half of her career, representing corporate clients and highlighting the success of industrial capitalism with black and white images of steel factories and skyscrapers. In 1930, she became the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of the Soviet Union. In 1933, NBC commissioned her to create a monumental photo mural about radio for its rotunda at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, then considered the largest photo mural in the world. The success of her corporate commissions led her to work at Fortune magazine in the 1930s. She took the photograph of the construction of Fort Peck Dam that became the cover of the first issue of Life magazine. The second half of her career represents her transition from corporate photography to photojournalism, beginning with her work during the Great Depression documenting the people of the Dust Bowl. Her collaboration with novelist Erskine Caldwell in You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) resulted in seventy-five photos depicting the lives of poor, rural sharecroppers, and was both a commercial success and one of several major documentary works at the time to bring attention to the needs of the Southern United States. She was the first American female war photojournalist, photographed the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, and was with Patton's Third Army in the spring of 1945 when she famously documented the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1949, she was one of the first Americans to bring attention to the injustices of the South African apartheid regime with her unique photographs, and covered the Korean War for Life magazine in the early 1950s.
Wikidata
Q238364
View or edit the full Wikipedia entry
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Born 14 June 1904; died 27 August 1971. Photojournalist for Time, Fortune, and Life magazines. American photographer.
Nationality
American
Gender
Female
Roles
Artist, Photojournalist, Photographer
Names
Margaret Bourke-White, Margaret Bourke-White Caldwell, Margaret White, Margaret Bourke White, Margaret Bourke- White, Margaret née White, Margaret Bourke
Ulan
500023145
View the full Getty record
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

64 works online

Exhibitions

View all 33 exhibitions

Publications

  • Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists Edited by Roxana Marcoci, 2022 Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 152 pages
  • The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 Edited by Martino Stierli, Anoma Pieris, and Sean Anderson, 2022 Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 248 pages
  • Among Others: Blackness at MoMA Charlotte Barat and Darby English, 2019 Hardcover, 488 pages
  • Photography at MoMA: 1920 to 1960 Edited by Quentin Bajac, Lucy Gallun, Roxana Marcoci, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, 2016 Hardcover, 416 pages
Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].