Biography bourke margaret white

Summary of Margaret Bourke-White

Following a highly successful early career in architectural and industrial photography, Bourke-White gained international recognition, not so much for her commercial work and/or her art photography, but more for her Photojournalism which came to the public's attention through her long association with LIFE magazine. Emerging as one of, if not the, most respected news photographer of her generation, Bourke-White was an intrepid adventurer who placed herself at the very center of some of the twentieth century's most significant and challenging historical events. She helped chronical the effects of the Great Depression, became the only Western photographer to witness the German invasion of Russia, and claimed the honor of being the first accredited female American WWII photographer. As part of the General Patton cavalcade, meanwhile, she witnessed the liberation of Nazi death camps, including Buchenwald, before attending the creation of Pakistan and the dawning of apartheid in South Africa. Finally, she undertook an end-of-career expedition into the then unknown territories of South Korea. Complementing her early art photography, Bourke-White proved adept at capturing more human moments in the lives of the powerful and the meek in a body of work that ranged from the most uncompromising to the most personal.

Accomplishments

• In her early career, Bourke-White was associated with the emergence of Precisionism. Taking its influence from Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, Precisionism (and though not a manifesto-led movement as such) was drawn to skylines, buildings, factories, machinery and industrial landscapes. As the name suggests, Precisionism tended to approach the world with a precise objectivity, though much of Bourke-White's early work drew praise for creative framing techniques that brought out the inherent beauty in industrial and architectural structures.
• Bourke-White's international success coincided with the rise of the

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) The photographer and photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White was born June 14, 1904 in Bronx, New York, U.S.A. and grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Her father, Joseph White, was an engineer-designer for the printing industry and her mother, Minnie Bourke White, worked in publishing. She was encouraged early by her parents to set high standards for herself. In 1922, she began studying herpetology (the study of reptiles and amphibians) at Columbia University in New York. She then developed an interest in photography after studying with Clarence White, a leader in pictorial school of photography and switched colleges several times before graduating from Cornell University in 1927. In 1925, she married Everett Chapman, a graduate student in engineering, but they divorced a year later. Before graduating from Cornell, she made a photographic study of the rural campus for the Cornell Alumni News. Following her graduation, she moved to Cleveland, Ohio to embark on a career in photography. In 1929, she accepted a job with the new Fortune magazine as an associate editor. She was talented, took risks and was becoming more successful than some of her male colleagues. Beginning in 1930, she was sent to the Soviet Union on assignment, becoming the first Western photographer allowed into that country. In 1931, she published Eyes on Russia. In the mid-thirties, she photographed drought victims of the Dust Bowl. In 1935, she joined the newly created Life magazine. Bourke-White's photograph of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on Life's first cover. She then traveled the American South with a writer, Erskine Caldwell, to document living conditions of poor tenant farmers. In 1937, they published a book You Have Seen Their Faces. That same year, one of her most famous photographs was published in Life. It featured black victims of a flood in Louisville, Kentucky standing in a breadline beneath a billboard of smi

American photographer and documentary photographer.(1904–1971)

For other people named Margaret White, see Margaret White.

Margaret Bourke-White (; June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She was the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviets' first five-year plan, was the first American female war photojournalist, and took the photograph (of the construction of Fort Peck Dam) that became the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.

Early life

Margaret Bourke-White, born Margaret White in the Bronx, New York, was the daughter of Joseph White, a non-practicing Jew whose father came from Poland, and Minnie Bourke, who was of Irish Catholic descent. She grew up in Middlesex, New Jersey (the Joseph and Minnie White House in Middlesex), and graduated from Plainfield High School in Union County. From her naturalist father, an engineer and inventor, she claimed to have learned perfectionism; from her "resourceful homemaker" mother, she claimed to have developed “an unapologetic desire for self-improvement." Her younger brother, Roger Bourke White, became a prominent Cleveland businessman and high-tech industry founder, and her older sister, Ruth White, became well known for her work at the American Bar Association in Chicago, Ill. Roger Bourke White described their parents as "Free thinkers who were intensely interested in advancing themselves and humanity through personal achievement", attributing the success of their children in part to this quality. He was not surprised at his sister Margaret's success, saying "[she] was not unfriendly or aloof".

Margaret's interest in photography began as a hobby in her youth, supported by her father's enthusiasm for cameras. D

Biography

Margaret Bourke-White was born in New York City and attended the Clarence H. White School of Photography in 1921-22. After graduating from college in 1927, she pursued a career in photography and opened a photography studio in Cleveland. The industrial photography she did there brought her work to the attention of Henry Luce, the publisher of Fortune, who hired her in 1929, and the next year sent her to the Soviet Union, where she was the first foreign photographer to make pictures of Soviet industry. She photographed the Dust Bowl for Fortune in 1934; this project led to the publication of You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), which documented the human aspects of the Depression and featured text by Erskine Caldwell. In the fall of 1936, Henry Luce again offered Bourke-White a job, this time as a staff photographer for his newly conceived Life magazine. Bourke-White was one of the first four photographers hired, and her photograph Fort Peck Dam was reproduced on the first cover. Over the next several years and throughout World War II, Bourke-White produced a number of photo essays on the turmoil in Europe. She was the only Western photographer to witness the German invasion of Moscow in 1941, she was the first woman to accompany Air Corps crews on bombing missions in 1942, and she traveled with Patton's army through Germany in 1945 as it liberated several concentration camps. During the next twelve years, she photographed major international events and stories, including Gandhi's fight for Indian independence, the unrest in South Africa, and the Korean War. Bourke-White contracted Parkinson's disease in 1953 and made her last photo essay for Life, "Megalopolis," in 1957.
Margaret Bourke-White's photojournalism demonstrated her singular ability to communicate the intensity of major world events while respecting formal relationships and aesthetic considerations. She was one of the most respected photojournalists in the country during the 1930s and 40s,