Moments in history by La Fábrica

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE MOMENTS IN HISTORY

OLIVA MARÍA RUBIO MOMENTS IN HISTORY page 4 SEAN M. QUIMBY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE’S SELF PORTRAIT page 12 AMERICA, 1930-1951 page 22 GERMANY, 1930/1932 page 58 SOVIET UNION, 1930-1932 page 76 CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1938 page 108 SOVIET UNION, 1941 page 134 WORLD WAR II, 1939-1945 page 150 CHRONOLOGY page 186 WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION page 188

Man on a turbine shell, Dnieperstroi, Soviet Union, 1930

OLIVA MARÍA RUBIO MOMENTS IN HISTORY “Nothing attracts me like a closed door.” Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White is considered to be one of the first photojournalists in the history of photography. She was a woman ahead of her time who sought to break the mold, and whose career became a struggle to achieve what was difficult for women of that era to attain—not to mention where women encountered the greatest resistance. Beginning with her early days in Cleveland (1927-1929) where she photographed the steel mills of the city at a time when photographic techniques were not yet advanced enough to capture images of smoking chimneys and blazing furnaces, with their extreme contrasts of light and shadow her career became a struggle to get where she wanted to be, and to document the most important events of her time with a camera. Neither her life nor her career was a result of chance, as she pointed out in an interview that took place in 1960: “It was thoroughly thought out.”1 She was the first woman to photograph the steel mills; the first to belong to the team of photographers for Fortune and Life magazines2; the first foreigner to photograph the Soviet Union in 1930; the first female photographer to work for the U.S. Air Force (the first uniform for a female war correspondent was designed for her); the only foreign photographer—man or woman—present in Moscow when the first German bombs fell on the city on July 19, 1941, right after the war between Russia and Germany began; and the first woman to go along on a 1943 bombing mission, at a time when women were not allowed in combat zones.3 Like other women photographers, writers, artists and editors who revolutionized Paris by breaking into the professional world and lighting the way for women’s liberation—Lee Miller, Gertrude Stein, Claude Cahun, Djuna Barnes and even the booksellers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier—Bourke-White, along with Dorothea Lange, Georgia O’Keefe and Imogen Cunningham, were also ahead of their time and blazed the trail for the women’s revolution that would take place decades later in the United States. Bourke-White wanted to be the “eye” of her time, and the images that she left us provide ample evidence of that “insatiable desire to be on the scene where history is being made,”4 as she herself pointed out. Whenever there was something going on or something new, there she was with her camera. Whether it was the steel mills in Cleveland that were evidence of the change in her country’s economy, the Soviet Union of the First Five-Year Plan, the droughts that devastated her country in 1934, her presence in the city of Moscow during the German invasion of 1941, her participation in a bombing mission, her entrance into the Buchenwald concentration camp with the Allies during World War II or her work in India during the most significant years of the struggle for independence, Bourke-White was always at the front lines of what was happening—and her images traveled around the world, often appearing on the covers of Fortune and Life magazines, both of which she worked at for many years. She not only knew how to be where things were happening, but she also knew how to capture the spirit of her time. Thus we can say that Bourke-White was profoundly modern given that, as Vicki Goldberg5 pointed out, she was able to capture and deal with the ideas, the ethos and the hopes and the failures and anxieties that the

word “modern” implies and that are associated with the spirit of that era. As a result, her images are representative of her time, as much in style as in the subjects that she took on. During the 1920s, the machine expressed that spirit, as much in art as in life, and the art and photography movements dealt with it accordingly. Precisely at that moment, Bourke-White, who had been introduced to machinery by her engineer and inventor father, devoted herself to photographing the steel mills in Cleveland in perfect harmony with the interests of her nation and with that of contemporary utopia, which saw in technology a means to cure the ills of the world. “There is a power and vitality in industry that makes it a magnificent subject for photography, that it reflects the age in which we live,”6 wrote Bourke-White. She felt that the industrial world had developed an unconscious beauty—a hidden beauty waiting to be discovered and photographed. Her images of the steel mills of Cleveland, with their monumentality and grandeur, stand as representatives of that utopia—a song to the machine in which the belittled man remains in the background or does not appear at all. However, in contrast to other images of chimneys, industrial elements and objects that she also photographed in the style of New Objectivity, these photographs of the steel mills—with their extreme contrasts of light and shadow, and clouds of smoke that envelop everything and give the images a ghostly air, which brings to mind the expressionist film movement of the 1920s—acquire a romantic tonality that separates them significantly from the sharp, cold and objective images of the American photographers of the New Vision, as well as from those taken by the New Objectivity photographers in Europe. This attraction to the industrial world, and the changes that it entailed, would be one of the main draws for Bourke-White’s first trip to the Soviet Union in 1930. It was a time in which the country, as a result of its First FiveYear Plan (1929-1933), was in transition between a medieval past and an industrialized future obsessed with technology, as Walter Benjamin had already noted on his trip to Moscow between December 6, 1926, and the end of January 1927: “Everything technical is sacred here, nothing is taken more earnestly than technique.” Electrification, construction of canals and the creation of industries had become the government’s priorities. In the photographs taken in the Soviet Union—even those of the great factories, which were the first to be taken by a foreign photographer and published outside of the Soviet Union—we already observe a more central role played by the men, who stand alongside their machines. On her three trips to the country in 1930, 1931 and 1932, Bourke-White not only visited and photographed the great factories and works of civil engineering, like the famous Dnieprostroi Dam, but she also explored each region of the country and each aspect of life: the youth, the working men and women, the countryside with its peasants, the schools, the children, the clothing designers, etc. She also went to Didi-Lilo and Gori, two towns that claimed to be the birthplace of Stalin, where she thought that she would find his mother. She only located his great aunt, whom she photographed in profile with a handkerchief covering part of her face, since his mother had moved to Tbilisi.7 Bourke-White traveled to that city, where she took a portrait of Stalin’s mother from the front, wearing her round glasses and the typical attire of Georgian women. These two portraits, especially the one of his great aunt, reveal the extreme poverty in which they lived.

Bourke-White’s conviction that she was photographing the spirit of her time endured through the years and the changes that occurred—along with her desire to be where things were happening in order to document them. She also knew how to be sensitive to the difficult times that her country was experiencing and, consequently, her way of seeing and her attitude were affected by those circumstances. As a result, in the mid-1930s, when problems related to the Great Depression and the effects of the drought that her country was suffering affected her conscience and her concerns, her interest shifted from the beauty of the machines to the difficulties faced by the men behind them, and her focus and subject matters also changed. For her, photography was also a way to learn not only how to best use a camera and utilize the possibilities it offered her—but, above all, how to see unfamiliar situations, and open herself up to and understand others. Since Fortune gave her the assignment to photograph the ravages of the great drought and the dust storms that devastated the American Midwest in 1934, Bourke-White became conscious of the existence of worlds that she barely knew existed in her own country: “The drought had been a powerful eye-opener and had shown me that right here in my own country there were worlds about which I knew almost nothing.” Faced with the need to know more about her country and to better understand her American compatriots, she abandoned advertising photography, and contemplated the need to publish a book with images and text about what was going on in the U.S.—a book in which the images didn’t only illustrate the text nor one in which the text acted as an explanation of the images, but a book in which both would complement each other and merge into a unified whole. It was a book that she would create together with the writer Erskine Caldwell, which she published with great success in 1937 under the title You Have Seen Their Faces. The title sought to express what its authors wanted to say, with faces that conveyed what they wanted to denounce—not simple faces that were out of the ordinary or striking, but rather the face that would express the message from the printed page. This was an experience that produced a true change in Bourke-White’s attitude towards photography and life, since it made her confront social contradictions and human pain. Bourke-White recognized that the farmers affected by the drought contributed to her education by humanizing her, and she learned from the sharecroppers that, in order to understand another human being, it is necessary to acquire a certain perspective on the conditions that make him who he is. As a result, she began to observe how what was happening to human beings affected them: “I was awakening to the need of probing and learning, discovering and interpreting. I realized that any photographer who tries to portray human beings in a penetrating way must put more heart and mind into his preparation than will ever show in any photograph.” On other occasions, during other assignments, Bourke-White is conscious of the need to learn about and observe human behavior. One experience that had a profound impact on her “understanding and feeling toward other human beings” occurred on a voyage through Mediterranean waters on a flagship en route to North Africa, which was headed towards Gibraltar during a ferocious storm. On December 22, 1942, the ship was hit by a torpedo and seriously damaged. The passengers had to be evacuated on lifeboats. BourkeWhite’s photos and text appeared in an article, Women in Lifeboats, that was published in the February 22, 1943 issue of Life. The image of the lifeboat packed with survivors, waving at the British airplane that rescued them, served as the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 movie Lifeboat. The humanitarian and brave behavior of Bourke-White’s companions on that voyage moved her greatly and the memory of it would never leave her. In the spring of 1938, before the outbreak of World War II, Life sent Bourke-White to Europe to cover the zones of conflict. It was a time of great upheaval, due to the expansionist ambitions of the Nazi Party, which had been in power following the elections of 1933. She covered the Sudeten Crisis for Life, and traveled

Women carrying dirt, Novorossiysk, Soviet Union, 1931 People in a lifeboat off the coast of northern Africa, 1942

Gypsy mother, Uzhgorod, Czechoslovakia, 1938 Margaret Bourke-White in a U.S. Air Force uniform with Col. Frank Armstrong and Gene Raymond, c. 1942

through Czechoslovakia for five months by train, accompanied by Caldwell, to gather material for a new book: North of the Danube, which would be published the following year. The book featured Caldwell’s text, which recounted instances of anti-Semitism that they had both observed, as well as Bourke-White’s photographs of young Nazis, mass Nazi rallies, munitions factories and young Orthodox Jews studying. On another assignment for Life, Bourke-White covered World War II. Her photographs were also used by the Pentagon after she was accredited as a war photographer who was directly assigned to the U.S. Air Force. She was sent to England, where her arrival coincided with that of the first 13 heavy bombers—the B-17s— that had been sent from the United States to bomb German troops and war factories. While there, she photographed Winston Churchill, whose photo appeared on the cover of Life on April 29, 1940, as well as Haile Selassie, “King of Kings of Ethiopia,” who was exiled in London. In 1941, she traveled to the Soviet Union with Caldwell to observe the changes that had taken place there since her previous visits in the early 1930s. At the beginning of June 1941, she embarked on an extensive trip with Caldwell to visit the wheat fields of the Ukraine, the factories of Kharkov, Rostov, the Donbas Coal Region, the Caucasus and the Black Sea. One month after her arrival, the war between Germany and the Soviet Union broke out, and Bourke-White photographed the German bombing of Moscow on July 19, 1941 from the roof of the U.S. Embassy, as well as from the hotel in front of the Red Square and the Kremlin. Her photographs of the bombings, such as German air raid over Moscow, 1941, show the flashes of light produced by the bombs over the black sky of Moscow, with the silhouette of the Kremlin in the foreground. On this occasion, she also had the opportunity to photograph Stalin. This portrait was later reproduced on the cover of Life magazine on March 29, 1943. Bourke-White traveled to North Africa, where another front opened, and she went along on a bombing mission on January 22, 1943, the objective of which was to destroy the airfield of El Aouina, Tunisia—the main airbase used by the Germans to transport troops from Sicily. The airfield was full of German troops and planes. It was a key attack in the war, the objective of which was to drive the Luftwaffe out of North Africa, and it succeeded. On this occasion, Bourke-White herself was the news. Her photographs were published in the March 1943 issue of Life under the title “Life’s Bourke-White Goes Bombing.” In the article, Bourke-White appeared in a photo dressed in the uniform of a war correspondent of the U.S. Air Force. It was the first time that a woman was allowed to accompany the air force on a bombing mission. Six months after her return to the United States, after covering the aerial bombing in North Africa, BourkeWhite asked to be sent to cover the ground campaign in Italy. After having seen the war from the skies, with the distance that it implies, she wanted to see it up close. The assignment to go to Italy came directly from the Pentagon to Wilson Hicks, the then editor of photography for Life. She went to Italy in 1943, and on this occasion, the proximity of the Italian conflict sharpened Bourke-White’s conscience regarding the human beings around her, arousing in her the need to listen. She realized that “much as I love cameras, they can’t do everything,” and because of that, she became determined to try “whenever possible to capture the special flavor of a situation in words as well as pictures.” As a result, she began to make notes of the comments and observations made by those around her. The Allied Forces had driven the Germans out of North Africa and invaded Italy, which was under the control of the Nazi forces. Bourke-White photographed the Italian campaign, the Cassino Valley battlefield in January of 1944 and the Medical Corps while she was stationed near the front line with the nurses and doctors who were working in the most difficult conditions. Unfortunately, the Pentagon, to which all of the photographs were sent in order to be developed and censored before publication, lost one of the two packages—the better one, according to Bourke-White, which captured the entire sequence of the heroic surgeons and nurses working under fire. When she returned, Bourke-White

worked on the book, They Called It “Purple Heart Valley”: A Combat Chronicle of the War in Italy (1944), a name that was given to the battlefield she photographed and one that reflects her experience on the mission. Right after landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day, the Allied troops made their way to Germany through France. The war was about to end, and Bourke-White obtained permission to fly to Frankfurt in March of 1945, where she photographed General George S. Patton, who was in command of the United States Third Army. On April 11, General Patton’s troops entered Buchenwald after the Germans had withdrawn. It was the first concentration camp liberated by the Americans. Bourke-White was with General Patton’s Third Army when they entered the Buchenwald concentration camp, close to Weimar. Upon seeing the horror, General Patton ordered that 1,000 citizens be brought from the suburbs of Weimar, so that they could see with their own eyes the atrocities that their Nazi leaders had perpetrated. The horrified people repeated, “We didn’t know, we didn’t know.” Bourke-White’s photographs capture the stunned expressions of those people, which evoke the words of Spanish writer Jorge Semprún, who was detained at the camp: “The women—a good number of them—could not contain their tears; they begged forgiveness with dramatic gestures. Some of them took their acting as far as to feign illness. The adolescents locked themselves in a desperate silence. The elderly looked the other way, blatantly refusing to hear anything.” Bourke-White also photographed the piles of naked and lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in the crematoriums, the living skeletons and the pieces of tattooed skin used to make lampshades. Like Bourke-White, the photographer Lee Miller went to the Buchenwald concentration camp, as well as the one in Dachau. Her photographs and text about both concentration camps were published in Vogue. Both were a step forward towards the women’s liberation movement that would occur three decades later. The shocking account of the end of the war captured in Bourke-White’s book, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, published in 1946, was used at the Nuremberg Trials, which took place in Germany after the war ended. They began on November 21, 1945, and continued for 10 months. World War II would not be Bourke-White’s last assignment. Until Parkinson s disease impeded her, she continued to be wherever the news was. This included India in 1946 and 1947, while on assignment for Life to photograph Mahatma Gandhi and the struggle for independence. She also traveled to South Africa in 1950, where, among other things, she photographed the difficult conditions for the workers in the gold and diamond mines in Johannesburg and the Orange Free State. In 1952, she headed to Korea, where she photographed the war and the guerillas. With the same enterprising and fighting spirit that had characterized her work, Bourke-White would cope with Parkinson’s disease, which afflicted her during the last 10 years of her life. During that time, her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, became a motivation for her throughout her illness and the surgeries that she underwent, and gave her life a certain sense of continuity. Oliva María Rubio is curator of the exhibition Margaret Bourke-White: Moments in History

Notes 1. From the introduction to Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer by Sean Callahan. Rome: Contrasto, 1998, p. 7. 2. Only three other photographers were hired: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Peter Stackpole and Thomas McAvoy. Together, they were known as “the four founders.” From the beginning, Margaret Bourke-White was treated in a special way: She was the only one to have her own office, secretary, darkroom and printer. 3. Bourke-White was not the only woman of her time to photograph the war. Before her, German photographer Gerda Taro (1910, Stuttgart—1937, Brunete, Madrid) and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna (1912, Hungary—2000, Mexico) documented the Spanish Civil War. Taro, Robert Capa’s partner, died when she was crushed by a tank in 1937. Likewise, the American artist Lee Miller photographed and wrote about World War II for British Vogue, capturing the advance of the Allied Forces from Omaha Beach in Normandy in July 1944 to the burning of Hitler’s alpine home in Bavaria right after the end of the war on May 8, 1945. 4. Bourke-White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963, p. 272. 5. Goldberg, Vicki. Margaret Bourke-White: A Retrospective. United Technologies Corporation, 1988, p. 7. 6. Bourke-White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself, p. 49. 7. Benjamin, Walter. Moscow Diary, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 55. 8. The fruit of these journeys appeared in a series of articles about the Soviet Union that The New York Times Magazine published in 1932: Sunday, February 14, pp. 4-5; March 13, pp. 8-9; March 27, pp. 8-9, 23; May 22, pp. 8-9; Sept. 11, pp. 7, 16. 9. Important engineering work that was the subject of an issue of the magazine USSR in Construction, no. 10, October 1932, designed by El Lissitsky. 10. Tbilisi is the current name for the city that used to be known as Tiflis before 1936. 11. Bourke-White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself, pp. 112-113. 12. Erskine Caldwell, a Georgia native, had published two very successful novels about rural life in the South: Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933). Caldwell conceived the idea of a photography book “to demonstrate that what he wrote as fiction was faithfully based on contemporary life in the South.” 13. The book preceded the one that Dorothea Lange, along with Paul Schuster Taylor, would later publish on the same topic: An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939). 14. Bourke-White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself, p. 136. 15. Op. cit., p. 209. 16. Bourke-White worked, with a few interruptions, for Life magazine from its launch in 1936 until 1956, when she retired. The first issue of the magazine (November 23, 1936) opened with a photograph of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana on the cover— the fruit of Bourke-White’s first assignment for the magazine. 17. See note no. 3. 18. Right after her first trip to the Soviet Union, Bourke-White published Eyes on Russia in 1931, which is composed of mostly text and very few images. In her 1942 book, Shooting the Russian War, a product of her journey to the Soviet Union during the war, the images and text are more evenly balanced, as is the case with You Have Seen Their Faces, which she created with Erskine Caldwell and published in 1937. 19. At the end of the spring of 1942, right after Bourke-White was accredited as a war correspondent and appointed to the U.S. Air Force, the first uniform for a female war correspondent was designed, using the official uniform as a basic model; Bourke-White was the first woman to wear it. 20. Bourke-White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself, Op. cit., p. 234. 21. There were so many American casualties that the battlefield received the nickname “Purple Heart Valley” in reference to the medal that is awarded to Americans who are wounded or die in action. 22. Semprún, Jorge. La escritura o la vida, Barcelona: Tusquets, 1995, p. 99. Quote translated into English by Carolina Valencia.

SEAN M. QUIMBY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE’S SELF PORTRAIT

For most of her life, Margaret Bourke-White never stopped moving. From the heights of Manhattan’s skyscrapers to the depths of the Great Depression, the rural poverty of the Deep South to the industrial might of a young Soviet Union, Bourke-White witnessed a startling array of world events as a documentarian and photojournalist. Her life was a globetrotting blur, and she loved every minute of it. Her drive, bravado—and photographs—made her a celebrity. Then, quite suddenly, illness cut her lifestyle short. What had manifested itself as numbness in her extremities was diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease in the mid-1950s. The illness imposed physical stillness and inspired reflection. It was during this period that she wrote her memoirs.1 Simon & Schuster published Portrait of Myself in 1963.2 The 383 page book spent three weeks on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. At the time, very few contemporary photographers published their memoirs, a notable exception being Yousuf Karsh, whose autobiography, In Search of Greatness: Reflections of Yousuf Karsh, was published one year earlier.3 Correspondence with Karsh in Bourke-White’s papers at Syracuse University reveal that she read In Search of Greatness with interest. In October 1963, she wrote to him: I found it utterly delightful—and the title is excellent. Reading the book, it is easily understandable that your photographs have led the way in portraiture. It is possible to do considerable reading through the lines and this shows you—a person of depth and human understanding. The book is a rich and glowing document of a fruitful life, with fascinating glimpses into the lives of others.4 Defined by the very celebrity that she had so aggressively pursued, Bourke-White hoped that her self-portrait would show her to be “a person of depth and human understanding” too. She began writing Portrait of Myself in the mid-1950s, exchanging letters on the topic with Simon & Schuster co-founder Richard Simon until his death in 1960. She worked closely with the editor Bill Clifford from 1958 until 1962, when he left the publishing house, and then with Henry Simon in the year leading up to the book’s publication. Sitting poolside at her home in Darien, Connecticut, Bourke-White focused her flagging constitution on writing, and corresponding with her publisher. Then, in the spring of 1962, she issued a curious request: “I very much want this to be a word book rather than a picture book.”5 She agreed that Portrait of Myself should include photographs, but only those in which she was the subject, not the photographer. True to her nature, she listed nine candidates, each of which illustrated her glamour, bravado and derring-do. There were, however, to be no photographs taken by her. Simon disagreed vehemently: After reading the manuscript, I feel very strongly that this would be a mistake. Not that there shouldn’t be a few pictures of yourself at various times of your life, but these are of less importance than are samples of your work. The book so strongly projects your development as a photographer and your attitude toward

photography that to omit all examples of it would be just as remiss as to publish a critical work on a modern artist with no reproductions of his work—worse even, for with a painter, the reproductions are bound to be, if in black and white, very feeble representations of his art, while your own art has always been originally designed to appear, eventually in printed reproduction.6 As an executive at a major publishing house, Simon was most likely concerned first and foremost about sales. Who, after all, would want to buy a book written by Bourke-White that did not include any of her iconic photographs? She discussed the matter with her literary agent, Herb Jaffe, who offered to defend her position.7 Eventually, however, she relented. When the first edition of Portrait of Myself appeared, the interior included 45 photographs taken by Bourke-White, and 24 featuring her as the subject, including a series taken by Alfred Eisenstadt while she was undergoing treatment for Parkinson’s disease. She did not appear on the cover. (Subsequent editions included Ralph Steiner’s picture of her perched atop a Cleveland rooftop.) Rather, she and the editors selected an abstracted aerial shot that she took of the Sierra Madre Range (southern Wyoming and northern Colorado). Undulating, fog-covered hills recede into the background, with the book’s title and the author displayed prominently in the foreground. It is one of only a few Bourke-White photographs that cannot be fixed very easily in time and space. What might have prompted Bourke-White’s request? The fact that she was comfortable with photographs of her, but not by her, suggests that she felt that photography was limited in its capacity to express the thoughts and feelings of the photographer. That she wanted the book to be a “word book” suggests that she felt text was capable of transmitting those thoughts and feelings more effectively than her photographs, and that she had something to say. But what exactly was it that she hoped to express in her memoirs? These questions have important implications for how we read Portrait of Myself. Never content to remain behind the camera, BourkeWhite wrote a memoir that functions as both a commentary on the limits of the medium that made her famous, as well as an exercise in transcending those limits. The first part of Portrait of Myself chronicles her maturation as a documentary photographer. In the 1920s, she studied under the noted Photo-Secessionist Clarence Hudson White (along with Dorothea Lange) at Columbia University. Led by Alfred Stieglitz, the Photo-Secession movement sought to establish photography as a fine art form that expressed the feelings of the photographer.8 Bourke-White soon grew frustrated with it, however, and credited Ralph Steiner with “caustically talking me into a fierce reversal of the viewpoint that a photograph should imitate a painting.”9 In her early days at Fortune magazine, Bourke-White photographed heavy industry—dams, slaughterhouses, logging operations—with an adoring eye for the technological sublime, attempting to capture what she felt was the inherent beauty of machinery: “There is a power and vitality in industry that makes it a magnificent subject for photography.”10

As a commercial photographer during the Great Depression, she earned enough money to live with her pet alligators on the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building in New York City. In Portrait of Myself, she claims to have grown disillusioned with the artifice required to make “soup look soupier,” and after an especially disturbing nightmare involving carnivorous versions of the very cars that she was trying to sell, she experienced an epiphany: “It was less the magazine approach and more the book approach I was after. It was based on a great need to understand my fellow Americans better.”11 With that, she claims to have closed the door on commercial photography, and opened the door to documentary photography. To better understand her fellow Americans, however, she had to do more than simply photograph them. Her 1937 collaboration with writer Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces, was both popular and pioneering.12 Notably, it was not her first effort to wed images with text. Her profile of the Fort Peck Dam (Montana) in the first issue of Life magazine had appeared the previous year. Earlier still, Simon & Schuster published her first book, Eyes on Russia, in 1931,13 which was a narrative documenting her trip to the Soviet Union the previous year, and subordinates images to text. The 135 page book includes just 10 photographs. Strangely, Maurice Hindus’s preface extolls Bourke-White’s photographs, while more soberly offering that her apolitical narrative merely “adds to the enjoyment of the book.” By contrast, You Have Seen Their Faces balances text with images. Her photographs depicting Southern poverty dominate the page, while Caldwell’s fabricated quotations aim to give voice to the subjects, who we are led to believe, would otherwise be silent. In Bourke-White’s autobiography, her collaboration with Caldwell (and indeed much of her career) exists in a sort of professional vacuum. She makes little effort to position her work in relation to that of fellow photographers. In fact, Have You Seen Their Faces predated Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s critically acclaimed photo-essay on Southern sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by four years. While Agee maintained that his text and Evans’s photographs be regarded as “coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative,” the text captions in You Have Seen Their Faces aspire to enhance the images—a concession, perhaps, to what the authors saw as the intrinsic limitations of photography.14 Evans and Bourke-White helped to pioneer a documentary style.15 However, while Evans’s photographs literally stand alone on the page, Caldwell’s captions are both fabricated and impossible to ignore. (It is more difficult, in other words, to separate Bourke-White’s photographs from Caldwell’s text.) This may also help to explain why subsequent critics, equipped with a clear sense of what the documentary photobook should look like, have been less kind to You Have Seen Their Faces than they have been to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Ironically, perhaps, it was Evans who objected to the label “documentarian,” fashioning himself instead as an artist who simply worked in the “documentary style.”16 By contrast, Bourke-White made no such lofty claims about her photographs, and credited Caldwell with teaching her the skills required to document human subjects: Whether he was aware of it or not, Erskine Caldwell was introducing me to a whole new way of working. He had a very quiet, completely receptive approach. He was interested not only in the words a person spoke, but in the mood in which they were spoken. He would wait patiently until the subject had revealed his personality, rather than impose his own personality on the subject, which many of us have a way of doing.17 While she admires Caldwell’s emotional distance from his subjects, Portrait of Myself reveals that she did not always exhibit that quality in the course of her career. The book exudes the same frenetic energy that characterized its writer’s constant perambulations. Not only is Bourke-White hopping from one continent to another, but she is also behind and in front of the camera all at once. The selection of photographs (of her and

by her) in Portrait of Myself amplifies this effect. The images are interspersed throughout the text, and placed alongside corresponding narrative and evidence that perhaps she really was there. There she is on an airfield in North Africa, camera in hand—encapsulated in a furry, leather flight suit—and posed in front of a B-17 bomber. Then, in the next chapter, there is an aerial shot of bombs exploding above Italy’s Cassino Valley far below. Caldwell may have taught her the value of patience, but for Bourke-White, the essence of photography was opportunism, which made reflection, and ultimately personal expression, impossible. She observes: As photographers, we live through things so swiftly. All our experience and training is focused toward snatching off the highlights—and necessarily so. That all-significant perfect moment, so essential to capture, is often perishable. There is little opportunity to probe deeper.18 She contrasted the work of the photographer with that of the journalist, who: …can write a wonderful story built around what he hears. The photographer has to push his lens into focusing range somehow, and at just the right time. Nothing counts except the image he carries away on his fragments of film.19 For Bourke-White, writing was a means of “digesting” the experience that she captured in her photographs, and over the course of her life, she wrote or co-wrote 11 books.20 After Eyes on Russia and You Have Seen Their Faces came North of Danube (1939), Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941), Shooting the Russian War (1942), Purple Heart Valley (1944), Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly (1946), Halfway to Freedom (1949), Interview with India (1950), A Report on the American Jesuits (1956) and finally in 1963, Portrait of Myself. Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, which bears the subtitle A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s “Thousand Years,” was a means not just of digesting her experience documenting the liberation of Buchenwald, but also a way to purge it. In the foreword, she wrote, “This book is a description of the Germany as I saw it in defeat and collapse. Perhaps because I am primarily a photographer, I have tried to give a candid picture rather than to suggest solutions to the problems I found there.”21 The book is divided into 20 textual chapters and seven photographic sections. The photographic sections, and the captions for the individual images, serve both to identify and to editorialize on the subject. In spite of her claim that Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly offered a “candid picture” of Germany, she devotes an entire section to Alfried Krupp, whom she casts as an arch-villain, and to Krupp factories, which powered the Nazi war machine, and that apparently tempered her pre-war enthusiasm for industry. The images, many of which appeared in Life magazine, are more powerful and persuasive than her vitriolic text: “This, then, was the Germany after the whirlwind had been reaped, a bottomless pit of malevolence and malignance.” Nevertheless, in Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White takes special pride in the fact that Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly was used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials—not the grisly photo-sequences depicting the charred remains and empty expression of dead and dying Jews, but rather it was that “the haughty Herr Krupp was required to stand before a military tribunal while the chapters concerning him were read aloud, and he testified to the truthfulness of the statements.”22 In this instance, she felt that prose better captured the atrocities of the Holocaust than her images, even when used as evidence in a trial. When Portrait of Myself was published in Germany in 1964 as Licht und Schatten (Light and Shadow), the publisher, Droemer Knaur, removed the photograph “The living dead of Buchenwald, April 1945,” and eliminated the section on Krupp altogether. She refers to this bitterly as the “grand omission” in later correspondence with colleagues.23 15

Bourke-White believed that her photographs, and perhaps all photographs, required textual accompaniment in order to achieve their expressive potential. In Portrait of Myself, and most of her books, she provided that accompaniment herself. But was she able to transcend the limitations of photography and more effectively express her thoughts and feelings in her memoirs? Put another way, does Portrait of Myself follow the example of Karsh’s autobiography, showing her to be “a person of depth and human understanding”? Commercially, it was a success. The book enjoyed a brief stint on the bestseller list, saw multiple printings and was released in the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan soon after it was published in the United States. Reviews were generally warm and only mildly critical. Homer Bigart of The New York Times felt: “If Maggie cannot always find words to equal the pictures in eloquence and perception, her story is most exciting in simple, straightforward prose.”24 Indeed, the chapters that focus on her personal life are stilted. If her prose flows as she describes professional successes, it sputters as she writes about love, divorce and death. The section on her first, two-year marriage to Everett “Chappie” Chapman is a curt eight pages long, culminating in the story of how her overbearing motherin-law helped to strengthen her resolve and independence. While the book was still in manuscript form, a Simon & Schuster editor commented: The section must be reconsidered on the basis of taste and psychological truth. Margaret is not helpless, and we feel instinctively that she never was. Here she presents herself as a victim. Again, the scene with Chappie’s mother may be true, but it is not the whole truth. Margaret’s comment on her mother-in-law’s role is sufficiently chilly: [quote] I owe a particular debt to my mother-in-law. What she did left me strong, knowing I could deal with a difficult experience, learn from it and leave it behind without bitterness—in a neat, closed room [end quote]. Perhaps. But it seems to me that the very relation of events, all so carefully selected, display a lingering bitterness and the desire to write off her husband as a fool and the mother as an advanced neuropath.25 Bourke-White’s account of her second marriage to Erskine Caldwell is equally short, if somewhat less disingenuous. In the space of two pages, she points to Caldwell’s “frozen moods” and jealousy as the cause of her divorce. Then, glibly, she writes, “Now I could put personal problems behind me and get back to work.”26 There is no indication whatsoever that she too might bear responsibility for the failed marriage. Later, she lists other men she admired, and in the case of an aviator named Jerry, she purports to have loved him. Ultimately, however, she reaches the conclusion that “a woman who lives a roving life must be able to stand alone.”27 Bourke-White writes about death and mortality in similarly aloof terms. She characterizes her father as introspective and, ultimately, underappreciated, and her mother as rigid and relentlessly self-improving. Her parents, especially her father, serve the narrative purpose of explaining her own personality traits. However, while she refers to the death of her mother as “a great personal loss,” and devotes a two-page chapter to her mother’s final days, there is little sense of the shape of her grief. In the final chapters, she details her struggle with Parkinson’s disease, the affliction that likely prompted her to write an autobiography in the first place. She says little about her feelings on the “mysterious malady,” other than that she was embarrassed by the loss of dexterity. Given that Life magazine had already covered her treatment (an experimental brain surgery) in June 1959, her silence on the matter of her own mortality is particularly noticeable. If Portrait of Myself fails in its attempt to depict in believable terms the inner workings of a complex individual, it does tell us about what Bourke-White felt that photography could and could not do. It could capture, even enhance, the powerful essence of industry or the glittery appeal of the marketplace. It could also document

Ukranian school, Uzok, Czechoslovakia, 1938 Worshippers, Soviet Union, 1941

Boys at lunch at Eton College during wartime, England, 1940 Nationalist Party meeting with chairman Oom Loo Vosloo, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1950

social inequity and wartime catastrophe. It could not, however, explore the emotional and intellectual space between the photographer and her subject—or within the photographer herself. In the 1960s, when Portrait of Myself hit bookstores, this understanding of how photography functioned would have distanced Bourke-White from the establishment. By that time, there was little question that photography was a form of art.28 When Edward Steichen, then serving as the director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, convened a symposium on modern photography in 1951, he avowed: “I stress the importance of photography as an art, as a vital modern means of giving form to ideas.”29 The photographer—now regarded as an artist— relied on the medium as a means of personal expression. In this context, critics might elect to view Bourke-White’s reliance on text for the purposes of expression as evidence of her limitations as a photographer, not as evidence of the limitations of her medium. However, we might remember that Bourke-White’s photographs were almost always surrounded by, or adjoined to, text. After all, how many viewers encountered her photographs on their own terms, on the walls of a gallery like MoMA, sanctified, in other words, as art?30 The millions of people who adored her generally saw them in the pages of Life magazine. Ironically, given how she relished celebrity and individualism, she also saw her work as part of a complex creative process that included teams of editors. Further, when she shot a photograph, she did so with the expectation that it would be paired with text—her own or that of a writer or editor. The first question that any retrospective of her career must ask is: What is the best way of exhibiting—and evaluating—her considerable corpus? Answering that question requires us to reflect on Margaret Bourke-White through many different lenses. Sean M. Quimby is Senior Director of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library

Notes 1. For an alternative to Portrait of Myself, and a thorough account of Margaret Bourke-White’s life, see Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography, New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 2. Bourke-White, Margaret. Portrait of Myself, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. 3. Karsh, Yousuf. In Search of Greatness: Reflections of Yousuf Karsh, New York: Knopf, 1962. 4. Margaret Bourke-White to Yousuf Karsh (October 22, 1963), Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 5. Margaret Bourke-White to Herb Jaffe (May 29, 1962), Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 6. Henry Simon to Margaret Bourke-White (July 30, 1962), Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 7. Herb Jaffe to Margaret Bourke-White (August 8, 1962), Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 8. Warner Marien, Mary. Photography: A Cultural History, Upper River Saddle, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002, p. 183. 9. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 30. 10. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 49. 11. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 113. 12. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White. You Have Seen Their Faces, New York: Viking Press, 1937. 13. Bourke-White, Margaret. Eyes on Russia, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931. 14. James Agee and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941, p. xlvii. On the controversy surrounding You Have Seen Their Faces, see Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, p. 288. 15. Corwin, Sharon et al. American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010. 16. Katz, Leslie, “Interview with Walker Evans,” Art in America, March/April 1971, p. 85. 17. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 125. 18. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 300. 19. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 349. 20. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 300. 21. Bourke-White, Margaret. Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s “Thousand Years”, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946, p. 174. 22. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 270. 23. Margaret Bourke-White to Edward Stanley (September 18, 1964), Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 24. Homer Bigart, The New York Times, July 7, 1963. 25. Undated comments by Simon & Schuster editor, Brockway, Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 26. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, 197. 27. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p. 309. 28. Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October, vol. 22 (Autumn 1982), pp. 27-63. 29. Edward Steichen, American Photography 45, no. 3 (1951), p. 146. 30. On the importance of “re-inscribing” the photograph, see Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

AMERICA,1930-1951 GERMANY,1930/1932 SOVIET UNION,1930-1932 CZECHOSLOVAKIA,1938 SOVIET UNION,1941 WORLD WAR II,1939-1945

1. AMERICA, 1930-1951

Astronomer Walter Adams with the Mt. Wilson telescope, c. 1937

Men with machinery, American Can Company, c. 1930

Coffee cans, American Can Company, c. 1930

Steam jacketed kettles, Aluminum Company of America, c. 1930

Stacking rods, Aluminum Company of America, c. 1930

Aluminum rods, Aluminum Company of America, c. 1930

Generators in an electric plant, c. 1937

Steel mill in Pittsburgh, PA, 1936

Steaming hot steel slag being poured into huge, funnel-shaped freight cars for transport to a slag pile outside the city, Pittsburgh, PA, c. 1936

Steel plant, Pittsburgh, PA, 1936

Men working on framework of tunnels, Washington, D.C., c. 1937

Barking machines at Union Bag and Paper, Savannah, GA, 1939

Paper mill, Savannah, GA, 1939

Electric generators, c. 1939

Lower section of a spinning frame, Industrial Rayon Corp. Factory, Painesville, Ohio, 1939

Close-up of a reel spinning rayon yarn at the Industrial Rayon Corp. Factory, Painesville, Ohio, c. 1939

Aluminum lingots at the blooming mill at the Aluminum Company of America, 1942

Aluminum Company of America stranding machine, 1939

Telephones donning famous faces on a police chiefâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desk, 1938

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1934

President Franklin D. Roosevelt with his wife, Eleanor, driving a specially configured car with hand controls on the grounds of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Little White House,â&#x20AC;? in Warm Springs, Georgia, 1938

Sergei Eisenstein being shaved, New York, NY, 1932