Margaret BourkeWhite Essay Research Paper Margaret BourkeWhite

Margaret Bourke-White Essay, Research Paper

Margaret Bourke-White was born on June 14th, 1904, in the Bronx, New York. Her

father, Joseph White, was an inventor and engineer, and her mother, Minnie Bourke, was

forward thinking woman, especially for the early 1900’s. When Margaret was very young, the

family moved to a rural suburb in New Jersey, so that Joseph could be closer to his job.

Margaret, along with her sister Ruth, were taught from an early age by their mother. Her

mother was strict in monitoring their outside influences, limiting everything from fried

foods to funny papers. When Margaret was eight, her father took her inside a foundry to

watch the manufacture of printing presses. While in the foundry, she saw some molten iron

poured. This event filled Margaret with joy, and this memory would be burned in her mind for

years to come. Joseph White’s chief recreation activity suited his scientific mind; her was

an amateur photographer. The White’s home was filled with his photographs. If something

interested Margaret’s father, it also interested her. She pretended as a girl to take

photographs with an empty cigar box. Although she claimed that she never took a photograph

until after her father’s death. Her cousin Florence remembers her helping her father to

develop prints in his bathtub. In 1917, her father suffered a stroke. By 1919, he had

recovered enough for the family to take a trip to Niagara Falls and Canada. While there, she

began to make notes on his photographs, and helped him set up shots on several occasions.

In 1921, she began college at Rutgers, then moved to the University of Michigan, then

to

Cornell University, from which she graduated in 1927. As a freshman at Michigan, she began

taking pictures for the yearbook, and within a year was offered the seat of photography

editor. Instead of taking the position, she married a engineering graduate student, Everett

Chapman, and abandoned photography to pursue married life. When the marriage fell apart two

years later, she moved to Cornell, where she again took up photography. After she graduated

in 1927, she moved to Cleveland, where her family was living, to start her career with a

portfolio full of architecture pictures she had taken while at Cornell. She called upon

several architects who were Cornell alumni for jobs. After the success of her first job, she

founded the Bourke-White studio in her one room apartment. Then, money she made from

shooting elegant home and gardens by day was spent on photographing steel mills at night and

on the weekends. The circulation of her portfolio brought her to the attention of

Cleveland’s biggest industrial tycoons. After a few failures, she was successful at

capturing the Otis Steel mill. From this, she made enough money to move her studio to the

Terminal Tower skyscraper. In the spring of 1929, she received a telegram from Henry R.

Luce, a publisher who was planning a new weekly magazine called Time. Luce invited her to

come to New York so they could meet, and so Bourke-White could see what Time was to

accomplish. She was unimpressed, but Luce and his editor Parker Lloyd- Smith were also

planning a new business magazine that would make use of dramatic industrial photographs.

This was perfect for Bourke-White. She accepted their offer as a staff photographer. In July

1929, the decision was made to publish the magazine, called Fortune. Bourke-White began

working on stories for the premier issue, eight months away. The first lead story was to

feature Swift & Co., a hog processing plant. She worked with Lloyd-Smith until he became too

sick from the stench to continue. After Bourke-White was finished photographing the hogs,

she left most of her camera equipment to be burned. Her documentation of this was a step in

the development of the photo essay, and Bourke-White’s style.

In 1930, Russia was in the midst of an industrial and cultural revolution. It’s doors

were

all but closed to westerners, especially photographers. Bourke-White was attracted to

Russia, but her editors at Fortune doubted that she would gain access. They instead sent her

to Germany to photograph the emerging industry there. She decided that she would go on her

own, and after six weeks of waiting, her visa cleared the Soviet bureaucracy. She loaded up

her cameras along with trunks of food, and set off on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Russia was

full of red tape for Bourke-White. Fortunately for her, an official was so impressed with

her portfolio that he granted her a permit requiring all Soviet citizens to aid and assist

Bourke-White whenever she needed it. Over the next five weeks, she traveled all over Russia,

capturing dams, factories, farms, and their workers. She had taken nearly three thousand

negatives of Russia, the first complete documentary of the newly emerging Soviet Russia. In

the summer of 1931, she was invited back to Russia by the government. This t

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