Margaret Bourke-White Essay

Margaret Bourke-White: Photography as Social Commentary
Born in the Bronx, New York in 1904, Margaret Bourke-White was one of the best-known photographers of the twentieth century who was known for her fearless and dramatic photographs. She graduated from Cornell University and started her career as an industrial photographer at a steel company in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1929 she got hired by Fortune Magazine and traveled to the Soviet Union to photograph its industrial development. Bourke-White then got hired at Life Magazine as the first female photojournalist. She was also the first female accredited as a war correspondent by the US Air Force during World War II. She traveled all over the world with US Armed Forces capturing the horrors
of combat zones. At the end of the war, Bourke-White was one of the first on scene with General George Patton at the freeing of the German concentration camp in Buchenwald.
Margaret Bourke-White had a reputation as being ruthless when it came to her photography. While heading to North Africa, her transport ship was struck by a torpedo and sank. After eight hours on a lifeboat, she and the other passengers were rescued by a British destroyer. She even continued to photograph as she came under fire in Germany when traveling with the US Army. Bourke-White sacrificed her life and traveled to places where most would never dream of going. She doesn’t do it just for herself, but she does it to send a message to the public. In Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs, she discovers the desolation this world can have by capturing moving moments to provide social commentary on World War ll.
On April 11, 1945, American troops liberated one of the largest concentration camps during World War II called Buchenwald. On that day, soldiers freed 21,000 prisoners. Several days before the invasion, Germany evacuated 28,000 people from the camp. About 250,000 people from Europe were imprisoned, and 56,000 were murdered. Margaret Bourke-White traveled with the US Army through Germany right after the war ended. She entered Buchenwald with the troops and documented the terror that occurred there for the purpose of promoting change. This is where she captured the graphic photos of the prisoners who were lucky enough to survive. One of the photos taken by Bourke-White is of a prisoner of Buchenwald (see Figure 1). The young man leans against his bunk after trying to walk. Like most imprisoned slave laborers, he probably worked in a Nazi factory until he was too weak to stand or walk without a struggle. The man's facial expression is dull, which gives the viewer a sense of the emptiness and sadness this man carries with him. When people asked Bourke-White how it was possible to photograph such horrible things, she responded with “I have to work with a veil over my mind. In photographing murder camps, the protective veil was so tightly drawn that I hardly knew what I had taken until I saw prints of my photographs. It was as though I was seeing these horrors for the first time” (White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself). Even though this man is the focal point of the photograph, there is still importance to what is captured around him. The wooden bunks behind the man are where the prisoners slept whenever they had the chance. The only thing they have to sleep with are blankets. This allows the viewer to realize what the living conditions were like for the poorly treated prisoners of concentration camps.
Another photograph taken by Bourke-White at the Buchenwald concentration camp is a pile of dead bodies that were killed by the Nazis (see Figure 2). America American troops force the German civilians to walk by the pile of corpses so they could witness with their own eyes what their leaders had done. The pile of half naked bodies are all males. They are nothing but skin and bones as the ribs prominently stick out. The civilians walking by can’t handle seeing the pile of corpse, so they look in the opposite direction. It was even hard for Bourke-White to handle. Whenever she was asked about it afterwards, she said “I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons who would die the next day… and tattoed skin for lampshades. Using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.”(White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself). Like most photos taken by Bourke-White, this photograph has a strong meaning behind it. By capturing this disturbing scene of what it was like for the prisoners in the concentration camps, Bourke-White promotes change. She hopes that capturing these photos will open the eyes to the public and prevent acts of violence like the holocaust from occurring again.
In 1947, the Muslim leader of India, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, insisted on a separate Pakistan for Muslims, so he started a campaign in favor of an independent Muslim state. Jinnah announced what he called a Direct Action Day and said “We will have either a divided India or destroyed India” (White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself). After months of negotiating, The official who ran India agreed to the formation of two separate states and now had to make a border. The border was drawn down the middle of the province that mixed religions together. This called for an ethnic cleansing, and over 500,000 people were killed in the region of the Punjab. This is known as the Partition of India. Margaret Bourke-White happened to be in India at the time. So she documented this disaster in hope that this level of brutality against civilians would not take place again.
Bourke-White photographed graphic images of streets scattered with hundreds of dead bodies (see Figure 3). Stone houses and buildings are on each side of the small narrow streets, and vultures stand on the rooftops surrounding the corpses. Bourke-White said “I flew there from Bombay and found a scene that looked like Buchenwald. The streets were literally strewn with dead bodies, an officially estimated six thousand, but I myself saw many more. Scattered between bodies of men were the bodies of their animals. Countless cows, swollen with heat, were as dead as their masters. She goes on to say “In Calcutta, a city no larger than Detroit, vast areas were dark with ruins and black with the wings of vultures that hovered impartially over the Hindu and Muslim dead. Like Germany’s concentration camps, this was the ultimate result of racial and religious prejudice” (White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself). Bourke-White describes what she saw in such detail that it made the viewer feel like they are there themselves. This event not only affected Bourke-White, but it also had a dramatic affect on the country of India. Shortly after, Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated and to this day, there is still tension in India. This photograph is exceptionally disturbing and is something that the human eye shouldn’t have to witness. But it sends a strong message to the viewers. Seeing such a graphic photo of so many humans laying dead in the street strikes fear and discomfort into the viewers. It puts the horrific tragedies that occur in different parts of the world on display for everyone to see. Bourke-White informs the public of the deadly acts of violence that occurred in India, in hope that nothing to this extent will happen again.
In July of 1941 during World War II, the Germans planned on attacking the city of Moscow hoping to overtake it. A couple weeks later, German bombers raided Moscow and damaged the Kremlin, which is a historic fortified complex in the middle of the city. Bourke-White was in Moscow on the day the bombardment of the Kremlin happened. She documented this event to let the viewers in other countries realize the traumatic effects that come with war. Even though the Soviet soldiers said they would shoot anyone seen with a camera, Bourke-White was given an exception. During that night, Bourke-White was in a hotel suite with a balcony that faced the Kremlin. This was when she captured the stunning photo of Kremlin getting bombed (see Figure 4). The photograph was shot in complete darkness. The flare from the bombs light up the sky and outlines the spires of Kremlin. The light is also reflecting off the river which makes it brighter outside. While taking these photos, Bourke-White sacrificed her life not once, but twice.
The first time Bourke-White began taking photos of the bombing, she was in the Ambassadors house that was located near the Kremlin. A bomb landing right by the house and blew out all the windows. She was forced to go into the basement until hte bombings stopped. The second time, Bourke-White was in her hotel suite where she captured the photo (Figure 4). In her book Bourke-White says " Then the loudest bomb scream I have ever heard sent me running back to an inside closet, while the bomb executed its interminable descent” (White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself). Her cameras were blown into another room by the blast, and an enormous plume began rising into the air. She also said “There is something unearthly about being on an open roof or balcony during a raid. The sky is so startlingly big, with it’s probing spears of searchlights and lines of fire, that man seems too small to count all. In the first look at war one feels immune; the spectacle is so strange, so remote, that it has no reality in terms of death or danger. But how quickly this feeling of immunity vanishes when one sees people killed!” (White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself). This photo is another scene depicting war and the aggressive nature of humans. Bourke-White documents the bombing of Moscow to simply inform the public of what is occurring in other parts of the world and letting them see how bad things really are in other countries.
Margaret Bourke-White did not have an ordinary life to say the least.
She traveled all over the globe and captured moving pictures that impacted the way people viewed the world. She was the eyes for the American public, and her photographs allowed the viewers to see what was actually happening in this world in which we live in. To this day, the photographs taken by Bourke-White tell a story of the suffering and pain that innocent people were forced to endure. Through her photos, Bourke-White hoped to bring people a new perspective. She takes this photos to communicate to those who weren’t able to see the aftermath of these horrendous tragedies in person. They allow her with the opportunity to see the impact that war and violent occurrences have on humans. While documenting Buchenwald, Margaret Bourke-White said “Difficult as theses things may be to report or to photograph, it is something we war correspondents must do, We are in a privileged and sometimes unhappy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others” (White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself). Bourke-White knew what her purpose was a photographer. She had the skill to communicate a message through a camera lens and use photography as both an art and a social commentary. In Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs, she discovers the desolation this world can have by capturing moving moments to provide social commentary on World War
ll.
Works Cited
White, Margaret, and Ronald Elroy Ostman. Margaret Bourke-White: The Early Work, 1922-1930. 1st ed. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. Print.
Bourke-White, Margaret. Moments of History / Margaret Bourke-White. Madrid: La Fábrica, 2013. Print.
Phillips, Stephen. "Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936." Woman's Art Journal 24.2 (2003): 51-52. 1 Jan. 2003. Web. 16 Sept. 2014.
Brown, Theodore. "Margaret Bourke-White, Photojournalist." Technology and Culture 14.4: 669-70. Web.
White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963. Print.