I haven't posted in awhile - but I have been writing...End of semester papers. I thought I'd share this one- It's for Black and White Photography. We were given a list of photographers to choose from and instructed to write about the artists' life, the time period they lived, and how those things influenced their work; as well as to critique an image, or series of images. I've taken out the Turabian referencing, but source material came from Margaret Bourke-White: Photojournalist by Theodore M. Brown and class lectures and films. This is my first draft, and I banged it out in a few short hours. I have left out two of the photos references because of their graphic nature. If you want to see them and don't have a queasy stomach, you can view them here, and here. I'll give it a few tweeks and hand it in next week.
You might want to have your camera near by before you begin reading... You're gonna want to take it outside in a few minutes.
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Margaret Bourke-White |
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Adventures with Peggy |
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By |
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Iz Holidae |
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From Machines to Depression, America- Around the World, Life and Death- The Photojournalism Legend of Margaret Bourke-White |
Margaret Bourke-White has been “lauded as one of the most accomplished photojournalists in the world.” As her exact birth year was never determined, she began life with an air of enigma that she carried with her throughout her career. Legend has it that she started in photography when she lost a waitressing job that was supporting her through college at Cornell. With her only equipment being a single camera with a cracked lens, she sold photographs of Cornell’s campus and buildings to make ends meet. Within three years it was reported she was earning between $25,000 and $50,000 annually- at the beginning of the Great Depression. Her elusive character is described as “aristocratic, yet humble; self-centered, while world oriented; subtle but direct; intelligent, but not an intellectual; prolific in ideas, but unconcerned with ideology; tough, tender, and glamorous.” She led a life of “adventure and danger” and remained undeniably feminine the whole way.
Fearlessly innovative and daring to her core, Bourke-White was at the right place at the right time for a stunning amount of “firsts” in photography and in history. Other modernist photographers of her day made beautiful pictures of machines and parts, but hers were something more- she was the first photographer to make industrial machinery sexy. She fearlessly crawled out onto a gargoyle high atop the Chrysler Building in Manhattan to take a photo of the NY skyline from a new angle. In the course of her career she was arrested in a Muslim mosque for taking photos during a service, torpedoed off the coast of Africa, ambushed by guerillas in Korea , rode camels in Syria, was stranded in the Arctic, was the first-and only- woman to fly a combat mission, was the first female war photographer, survived a helicopter crash at sea, and was accused of being a spy and forced to do time in a German jail. She was the first woman to fly in a B-47 bomber, was in Moscow when Germany invaded and bombed the city, and was with General Patton when the Allies liberated Auschwitz. She made portraits of FDR, Pope Pius XII, General George Patton, President Eisenhower, Josef Stalin -and his mother, Winston Churchill, and was with Gandhi just before his assassination. She was the first photographer to take aerial photos hanging out of a helicopter, and she traveled more than a million miles through forty-five countries during her career. Battleships, jets, helicopters, camels, planes, trains, and automobiles… Margaret Bourke-White captured the world! Working even after Parkinson’s disease left her unable to hold a camera; she paid assistants to do exactly as she directed them. And this is only a partial list of her daring accomplishments!
As the first photographer hired for a new magazine called “Life” in 1936, she took pictures of more than just her assigned subject- and inadvertently created the first photojournalist essay. A long career with “Life” followed, and they sent her on many exciting –and often life-threatening- journeys to find and document … life.
In May of 1941 her editor ordered her to end a world tour and sent her to Russia. At a time when foreign photographers were not allowed into the country, she brazenly arrived with 600 pounds of equipment and not only got in, she managed to get a sitting with Josef Stalin – who ended up carrying her camera for her. She was in Moscow when Germany broke their truce and began bombing raids on the city. Bourke-White snuck out of the subways, where people were held for their protection, and set up her cameras on the roof of the American Embassy- hiding when soldiers made rounds to make sure civilians were not in the building. She added to her legend by developing her negatives in the basement during an air raid. In 1942, “she received accreditation as an official Air Force photographer.” Denied permission to fly to a conflict in Tunis because of the danger, she was sent on a supply ship for her safety. It was torpedoed off the coast of North Africa and sank. Surviving, with cameras intact, she was given permission to fly a mission into war; thus, she became the first woman to fly into combat.
In 1945, Bourke-White was with General Patton’s Third Army when they liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. Three of the photographs taken on this journey are the subject of this paper. The horrors that she witnessed during those few weeks would have been more than most people could take. But she not only witnessed the horrible atrocities- wading past mass graves and bodies rotting on the ground- she took the time to take light meter readings and set up compositions. She photographed burned remains, piles of corpses on wagons, and the crematoriums with bodies still in them. She captured the expressions of the emaciated survivors who were so far beyond hope in their living hell that they were incapable of emotion at their sudden freedom. When asked about how she was able to capture such horrors on film, she stated that it was a relief to have her camera as a buffer between herself and what she was seeing. Much later, when looking at the images back in the States, she sobbed.
In the first photograph of this paper, Bourke-White is actually the subject. I could not find accreditation for who took this photo of her. In it, we see her, ever lady-like and beautiful; yet you can almost feel the weight of the sorrow and pain at the reality around her. She is taking a meter reading in front of a wagon load of corpses. The shot she was setting up was very similar to the next photograph of this paper.
General Patton, being outraged that the people in the nearby town had allowed this camp to exist and did nothing to stop the atrocities happening inside, ordered his men to “round up 1,000 people” and force them to walk past the corpses and see what they had allowed to happen. His men brought back more than 2,000 townspeople. Bourke-White captured their faces as they were forced to look upon the horror of what Nazi Germany had done in this camp-just outside their doorsteps. Everything in the photo is in focus; the woman crying and covering her eyes, the man seeming to stroll with his cigarette, the soldiers who had forced them to come witness it all, and the pile of emaciated corpses- all in perfect focus and detail. It seems to be broad daylight of possible early afternoon; the shadows on the ground indicate the lighting was quite bright. Yet her exposure is not blown out or overexposed. She has captured every important detail in crisp focus. The composition itself, with the woman on the left and corpses on the right, with others further back, draw your eye in- into the horror of reality- so that you see the whole picture. There is also juxtaposition of movement in the people walking and the terrible stillness of the corpses that also draw your eye into the photo. It is a brilliant, yet terrible photo- Beautifully photographed with horrific subject matter.
The third photo of this paper is of Nuremburg just after the war. It too, is a well-focused composition. Everything is in perfect detail; the bombed out buildings, the rubble, and the women coming and going to market- even the sky on that bright day. Nothing in the city is intact; nothing was left standing whole. Everything had been destroyed- Yet life goes on. Bourke-White captured the realities of war.
It is no wonder she was enigmatic and legendary - and hailed accolades from her peers. Brilliant, innovative, ground breaking, and fearless… Margaret Bourke-White was a photographic genius of her time and praised with international fame. But by far, my favorite quote about her is this: “The World’s Most Famous Photographer was a Girl”.
