Margaret Bourke-White

The story of a renowned woman photographer, her travels, and her triumph over a crippling disease

Portrait of Myself

Jonathan Silverman

A portrait of the life and career of the distinguished American photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, is accompanied by examples of her photographs

The Life of Margaret Bourke-White

For the World to See

This is the story of the internationally acclaimed American woman Margaret Bourke-White, who for over thirty years made photographic history: as the first photographer to see the artistic and storytelling possibilities in American industry, as the first to write social criticism with a lens, and as the most distinguished and venturesome foreign correspondent-with-a-camera to report wars, politics and social and political revolution on three continents. In this poignant autobiography, Bourke-White details her fight against Parkinson’s disease, and recounts tales of her struggles to master her art and craft, of photographing Stalin, Gandhi and many other notables, of being torpedoed off North Africa while reporting World War II, of flying combat missions, of photographing the dread murder camps of Nazi Germany, of touring Tobacco Road to produce the book You Have Seen Their Faces with Erskine Caldwell (whom she later married), of adventures—and wonderful picture-taking—in the mines of South Africa, in the frozen North, in war-torn Korea. Illustrated throughout with over 70 of Margaret Bourke-White’s fine photographs, this is the great life story of a great American, greatly yet modestly told.

Ronald Elroy Ostman

Harry Littell

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) was one of the leading photojournalists of her time, a mainstay of the Luce empire whose signature work for Fortune celebrated the machine age and whose later work for Life featured the human face and a "progressive" humanitarian sensibility. In this brief collection of her earliest work, two art historians present the "unknown" Bourke-White, the young amateur aged eighteen to twenty-six. The eighty photographs reproduced here have seldom been seen outside the archives of Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and the Syracuse University Library. They will interest anyone in the life and work of Margaret Bourke-White and the early history of American photojournalism.

The Early Work, 1922-1930

Vicki Goldberg

International Center of Photography

Bourke-White

THIS IS the story of the search for “Faceless Fritz”—the most difficult and frightening camera-hunt ever undertaken by ace photographer-reporter Margaret Bourke-White. “Fearless Fritz” was cable shorthand for one of several LIFE assignments that brought Miss Bourke-White and her camera to Germany some months before its fall. She was to pin down the private German citizens—to find out what kind of human being it was who, multiplied by millions, made up the Nazi terror. Was he cruel? Was he a villain? Or was he a jolly, gemutlich, beer-drinking, music-loving sentimentalist so many of us remembered, who had really been helpless in the power of a small gang of madmen? By the time Margaret Bourke-White arrived in Germany on this mission, she had seen much death and danger. She had been in Moscow during its fiercest bombings. In Italy she had come closer to the enemy lines than any American woman before her. But it was in Germany that cold horror overtook her. The Germany that Miss Bourke-White saw and recorded in this book puts to shame Dali’s most grotesque nightmares. It is a physical and spiritual chamber of horrors, a cuckoo-cloud land whose inhabitants live in a lost dream. They are the people whose faces are as usual and recognizable as neighbors’, but whose reactions do not seem to make sense. “Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly,” which was first published in 1946, takes its title from the words of the anthem, “Die Wacht am Rhein,” to which German soldiers have marched three times in the memory of many now living. It brings new light to bear on the German people—in the hope that through a more immediate understanding of them, a fourth march may be averted... Richly illustrated throughout with 128 of her photographs, with detailed captions, forming an integral part of Margaret Bourke-White’s important report on conquered Germany.

Margaret Bourke-White

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