The Blog of Awesome Women/ Margaret Bourke-White: The Mirror’s Eye

I wonder what Margaret Bourke-White would think of her hauntingly beautiful photograph of Mohandas Gandhi at his spinning wheel being used in the Apple ad captioned “Think Different.” As if the grammatical issue weren’t irritating enough, it seems tragic for a work meant to preserve the memory and honor of a man dedicated to peace and simplicity (he’s spinning his own cloth so as to not wear manufactured foreign goods) now being used to market computers.

Born in the Bronx in 1904, Margaret Bourke-White “dared to become an industrial photographer and a photojournalist at a time when men thought they had exclusive rights to those titles, then rose with startling speed to the top of both professions,” writes her biographer Vicki Goldberg. Indeed, her abilities did much to contribute to the rise of photojournalism and many of our memories of important twentieth-century history are thanks to her effort to document them for posterity. Although the Gandhi photograph may end up being the most famous thanks to some fairly insidious marketing, others are seared onto our memory: the Indian holocaust that took place during the partition when all Hindus were forced to leave the new northern state of Pakistan and all Muslims traveled north to the new state. The dead are still unnumbered in this trail of tears, estimates are as high as three million. She also photographed the Moslem massacre in Calcutta, horrendous and powerful pictures of dead Hindus being devoured by vultures.

As a Life staff photographer, she traveled the globe. In Moscow, she caught on film the Nazi air invasion of the Russian city. In South Africa, she photographed apartheid-beleaguered blacks slaving in diamond and gold mines for the gain of their oppressors. In Korea, she photographed guerilla warfare. She covered the war fronts in Africa, Italy, and Germany, and was with the Allied force that entered the death camp of Buchenwald, where she shot some of her most painful and important work. “I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons.”

In America, the 1934 draught and Dust Bowl migration were her subjects, as well as an unvarnished view of the abject poverty in Appalachia and other parts of the rural South. She and her husband, writer Erskine Caldwell, collaborated on several photo essay books, including You Have Seen Their Faces, reminding an insular America about her own forgotten people. During World War II, she was the first Army Air Force woman photographer in action in Italy and North Africa.

Margaret Bourke-White’s sheroic dedication to telling the truth with pictures has left us with a fascinating chronicle of the twentieth century. In her pursuit of visual verity, she often put herself in danger, walking on steel beams to get the height for the best shot, going deep into dangerous mines, flying with a bomb squad in Tunisia, and even going down in a shipwreck in World War II. She died in 1971 of Parkinson’s disease. In her lifetime, Margaret Bourke-White returned to us our own history and gave us the opportunity to learn from it.

“The impersonality of modern war has become stupendous, grotesque.”—Margaret Bourke-White, who put a face on the horrors