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.
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 identifier
Q238364
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 21, 2025.
Introduction
Born 14 June 1904; died 27 August 1971. Photojournalist for Time, Fortune, and Life magazines. American photographer.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, photographer, photojournalist
ULAN identifier
500023145
Names
Margaret Bourke-White, Margaret Bourke, Margaret Bourke-White Caldwell, Margaret White, Margaret Bourke White, Margaret Bourke- White, Margaret née White
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 21, 2025.
