Margaret Bourke-White Essays - Margaret Bourke-White,

Margaret Bourke-White 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