Margaret Bourke-White: A Fearless News Reporter Who Told Her Stories With a Camera
Written by Shelley Gollust
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VOICE ONE:
I’m Barbara Klein.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we tell about photographer Margaret Bourke-White, (burk-white) one of the leading news reporters of the twentieth century.
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VOICE ONE:
A young woman is sitting on her knees on top of a large metal statue. She is not in a park. She is outside an office building high above New York City. The young woman reached the statue by climbing through a window on the sixty-first floor. She wanted to get a better picture of the city below.
The woman is Margaret Bourke-White.She was one of the leading news reporters of the twentieth century. But she did not write the news. She told her stories with a camera. She was a fearless woman of great energy and skill. Her work took her from America’s Midwest to the Soviet Union. From Europe during World War Two to India, South Africa and Korea. Through her work, she helped create the modern art of photojournalism.
Margaret Bourke-White
In some ways, Bourke-White was a woman ahead of her time. She often did things long before they became accepted in society. She was divorced. She worked in a world of influential men, and earned their praise and support. She wore trousers and colored her hair. Yet, in more important ways, she was a woman of and for her times. She became involved in the world around her and recorded it in pictures for the future.
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Margaret Bourke-White was born in New York City in nineteen-oh-four. When Margaret was very young, the family moved to New Jersey. Her mother, Minnie Bourke, worked on publications for the blind. Her father, Joseph White, was an engineer and designer in the printing industry. He also liked to take pictures. Their home was filled with his photographs. Soon young Margaret was helping him take and develop his photographs. When she was eight years old, her father took her inside a factory to watch the manufacture of printing presses. In the foundry, she saw hot liquid iron being poured to make the machines. She remembered this for years to come.
Margaret attended several universities before completing her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in nineteen twenty-seven. She studied engineering, biology and photography. She married while she was still a student. But the marriage only lasted one year.
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Margaret took the name Bourke-White, the last names of her mother and father. In nineteen twenty-eight, she began working in the midwestern city of Cleveland, Ohio. It was then one of the centers of American industry. She became an industrial photographer at the Otis Steel Company. In the hot, noisy factories where steel was made, she saw beauty and a subject for her pictures.
She said: “Industry is alive. The beauty of industry lies in its truth and simpleness. Every line has a purpose, and so is beautiful. Whatever art will come out of this industrial age will come from the subjects of industry themselves…which are close to the heart of the people.”
Throughout America and Europe, engineers and building designers found beauty in technology. Their machines and buildings had artistic forms. In New York, the Museum of Modern Art opened in nineteen twenty-nine. One of its goals was to study the use of art in industry. Bourke-White’s photographic experiments began with the use of industry in art.
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Bourke-White’s first pictures inside the steel factory in Cleveland were a failure. The difference between the bright burning metal and the black factory walls was too extreme for her camera. She could not solve the problem until she got new equipment and discovered new techniques of photography. Then she was able to capture the sharp difference between light and dark. The movement and power of machines. The importance of industry.
Sometimes her pictures made you feel you were looking down from a great height, or up from far below. Sometimes they led you directly into the heart of the activity.
"The Spinner"; Mahatma Ghandi (photo by Margaret Bourke-White)
VOICE ONE:
In New York, a wealthy and influential publisher named Henry Luce saw Bourke-White’s pictures. Luce published a magazine called Time. He wanted to start a new magazine. It would be called Fortune, and would report about developments in industry. Luce sent a telegram to Bourke-White, asking her to come to New York immediately. She accepted a job as photographer for Fortune magazine. She worked there from nineteen twenty-nine to nineteen thirty-three.
