Margaret Bourke-White
1904–1971

Margaret Bourke-White was among the most significant photographers and photojournalists of the twentieth century. She began her career as a commercial photographer, and her early photographs of steel manufacture demonstrated that modern industry could be a fertile subject for artists. In 1929 the publishing magnate Henry Luce hired her as associate editor and staff photographer for his forthcoming venture, Fortune magazine. The publication’s expanded interpretation of “modern business” gave Bourke-White an opportunity to travel around the world, recording a diverse array of industrial subjects. Bourke- White’s romantic vision of the Machine Age evolved in the mid-1930s into an engagement with more humanistic concerns when she was commissioned to shoot photo essays for Luce’s next endeavor, LIFE magazine. She pioneered this form with an eye for contemporary social issues, collaborating with the author Erskine Caldwell to document the plight of sharecroppers in the South in the 1937 book You Have Seen Their Faces. That same year, Bourke-White was assigned to document the devastation wrought by the massive flooding of the Ohio River valley. The Louisville Flood, published in the February 15, 1937, issue of LIFE, depicts African American flood victims standing in a relief line with baskets and pails in hand. Behind them looms a massive billboard that portrays a carefree Caucasian family motoring across a pastoral landscape as bold graphics proclaim, “World’s Highest Standard of Living” and “There’s no way like the American Way.” Removed from its original photojournalistic context, this most recognizable of Bourke-White’s images has come to represent the nation’s racial inequalities and, for many, the inaccessibility of the American Dream the billboard presents.