Margaret Bourke-White

Why We Chose Margaret Bourke-White


The reason Candace M. Kinney and Ben J. Thompson chose Margaret Bourke-white was because her photographs capture both influential people as well as architecture and shapes. Margaret Bourke-White was one of the last photographers to photograph Gandhi hours before he was assassinated. Margaret also took shots of Jawaharlal Nehru who was a senior political leader of the Indian National Congress.

Margaret takes amazing architectural pictures that deal with many different shapes. As shown in the picture of Diversion Tunnels, the shapes of the tunnels work well to make this picture so amazing. In this photography she uses visual paths to pull you from the left of the photograph to the right with the decrease in size of the tunnels. She has another photograph of the one of these tunnels with a man walking it that shows the size and majesty of it. Also, in other work of hers, she usually puts building and other architectural structures in weird positions to help enhance the photograph to make the shot more interesting.

For the most part, we chose to pick Margaret Bourke-White because we had heard a lot about her photography before in earlier classes and we noticed her amazing range of photography when we search for her name. Margaret is just an all around amazing photographer with amazing talents for picture taking.

Biography
Margaret Bourke-White was a very influential photographer of her time because she captured a variety of images including people, structures, and many more. She was born June 14th, 1904 into a world that was very close-minded about women in the work force. Margaret was shielded from the outside world by her mother who raised and taught her and her sister at an early age. One day her father took her to the foundry he worked at and what she saw changed her life forever. She followed her father around and everything he liked, she was interesting also. Pretending to take photographs, she used an old cigar box and took great notes when she saw him take pictures.

She went to college at Rutgers, and her freshman year she started taking pictures for the yearbook and eventually was offered a seat as the photography editor. She declined and decided she wanted to focus on her new married life and give up photography. The marriage did not work out and she went back to school to pursue photography once again. She tried taking photography and putting together a grand portfolio trying to catch the attention of the well known. There was a time she was working out of her one room apartment but when she took pictures of the Otis Steel Mill, it won her a small fortune and allowed her to move her studio to the Terminal Tower Skyscraper.

Henry R. Luce, a publisher of a new magazine contacted her via telegram wanting her to take pictures. She had no idea how well it would work out, but decided to take a chance at this new magazine called Time magazine. She was not very happy and the publisher told her that they were working on a new magazine that was up her alley with industrial related photographs, and they decided to publish the magazine called Fortune. It did not work out very well, so she went out on her own.

After many failed attempts, she went back to Luce who had started up a magazine where it was mainly pictures, and Bourke-White was one of them. She had many cover pictures on this magazine. After many years of photography she found out she had Parkinson's Disease and had surgery twice and both times were successful, but she hurt herself and she was forced to stay in a hospital bed. She died not long after at the age of 67. She was great at what she did, especially since it was "no place for a woman" at that time.