The Photographs of Margaret Bourke White

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Summary: 200 photographs by Margaret Bourke-White
Review: I am quite sure it was the film "Gandhi" that had me thinking Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) was essentially a portrait photographer, but this impressive collection of her life's work amply proves otherwise. Bourke-White was originally an industrial photographer, who was hired by Henry Robinson Luce to do assignments for his new magazine "Fortune," for which she did extensive photographic essays on everything from meat packing plants in Chicago and glass blowers in upstate New York to workers in Indiana quarries and the steel industry in Germany's Ruhr valley.

On her first trip to Russia in 1930 she photographed not only the industrial expansion of the Soviet Union but the lifestyle of the people and it is from this point in her career that she made the clear shift to being a photo journalist. During the Great Depression she documented the plight of migrant farm workers and sharecroppers. When Luce launched "Life" in 1936 Bourke-White formed the magazine's original photographic staff (along with Alfred Eisenstaedt, Peter Stackpole, and Thomas McAvoy) and her photo of the construction of Fort Peck Dam in Montana was the cover and lead article in the first issue. During World War II Bourke-White covered everything from the German attack on Moscow to Patton's push into Germany to the horrors of Buchenwald.

Bourke-White's work represents the height of the era in which photography was a recognized art form, by which I mean a time when photographs were hung on walls in the same manner as paintings. Her work, like the best of that period by her contemporaries, has a poster-like design. It is fascinating to read how her use of multiple flashbulbs helped her create a more realistic effect. "The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White," edited by Sean Callahan, provides 200 examples of her photographic art. Whether you consider yourself an aspiring photographic artist or are simply an interested neophyte such as myself, you will have a greater appreciation for both the artist and her art after devouring this book, which contains reproductions of her best and most famous monochrome images.