Dead Photographer of the Moment:
Margaret "Maggie" Bourke-White
The world is full of photographers, and it's not unusual to be asked, "Have you heard of this-or-that photographer?" and the answer is, many times, "No." There are lots of great photographers out there, and it's always a wonderful surprise to discover someone whose work you really like, but whose name you've never heard before.
In the quest to get your work out there, living photographers have one great advantage, namely that we're still around to promote ourselves. Build that Website, use paid search advertising. Tweet away!
But what of those who've made the trip to the ultimate darkroom? Some have work that that's made it onto gallery walls, or into the history of photography books. But there are a lot of great photographers — some famous and many not — who have passed away, but whose work deserves to be remembered, studied, and showcased.
Dead Photographer of the Moment is designed to do exactly that: Bring to our readers' attention the life and work of an interesting photographer whose picture-taking days are over. In the coming months, we'll profile the work of photographers of note, both the famous and the not-so-famous, whose work we think merits the attention of all photographers.
In this installment we turn from Alfred Stieglitz, whose life in photography straddled the 19th and 20th Centuries, to one of the great photographers of the 20th, Margaret Bourke-White. Bourke-White racked up many "firsts" in her celebrated career, among them "the first woman" to do many, many things. In addition to links to some of her photographs, at the bottom of this article we've supplied books by and about Bourke-White for further reading. What can we learn from this life in photography? For one thing, follow what interests you, and trust that the photographs you make will be of interest to others.
Margaret "Maggie" Bourke-White
by NYI Associate Dean Jerry Rice
Much of what we know about modern photography has come to us via the illustrated magazines. We have seen the gamut run from Vogue to Hustler, from Cat Fancy to Architectural Digest, from Road and Track to the National Geographic. But none has had more influence on our seeing and appreciation of photography than the magazines emanating from Henry Luce's publishing empire — Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and, above all, Life. The famed weekly versions of Life have long since departed, replaced (sadly) by occasional special editions. The old Life, the Life we of a certain age cherished every Thursday, is no more — the victim of rising costs, changing tastes, and television. Web sites and Internet communication had not even been invented when Life gave up the ghost.
In its heyday, though, it was a major force in shaping our thinking; there is no magazine in existence today that can equal the influence that Life once had. It was created in 1936, and its first cover showed the massive monumental Ft. Peck Dam in Montana. The photographer was the famous Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), one of the first four photographers hired by Life Magazine. The others were Tom McAvoy, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Peter Stackpole.
Bourke-White, commonly known to most people in the world of photojournalism as Maggie, was no stranger to industrial photography. She started photographing steel mills in Cleveland, was later hired by publisher Henry Luce to photograph similar subjects for his other publications Time and Fortune, and was an obvious choice when Luce launched the new Life Magazine.
 Before joining Life in 1936 she photographed throughout the rural South in collaboration with Erskine Caldwell, author of "God's Little Acre." The rural South, especially hard hit by the ravages of the Great Depression, provided Maggie and Caldwell with a graphic study, words and pictures of the area — its title "You Have Seen Their Faces," one of the most powerful documentaries of its time.
Maggie photographed the rise of Fascism and the steady increase of Communist power in Europe and became the first foreign woman to photograph Marshal Josef Stalin. When America entered World War II in 1941 Bourke-White got credentials as a war correspondent, photographed from a nose turret of a bomber in raids over Germany, photographed combat troops on the ground, and was one of the first photographers (certainly the first female photographer) to photograph the devastation, degradation, and horror of the Nazi concentration camps. Her photographs of surviving inmates shocked the civilized world.
 Maggie was in India and frequently photographed Gandhi very shortly before his assassination, and she was the first female photographer in Korea when war broke out there. In that particular case she did not concentrate on direct military action but instead chose to focus her attention on the terrible effects the war on civilian refugees.
She had a vibrant, vivacious personality. The stories about Maggie were legion including one involving a romantic liaison with a famous American general.
Supposedly, one of the laboratory chiefs at Time-Life said that she never did learn anything about correct exposure of film. Instead, she exposed at every conceivable exposure in the hope that something would turn out. In Maggie's case, the rate of her success was high, as you can well imagine.
In her later life she was afflicted with Parkinson's Disease, the same dread illness that took Edward Weston. She eventually died from the illness. Bourke-White was portrayed in motion pictures by the late Farah Fawcett, by Candice Bergen, and on television by Teresa Wright.
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