21st Day of Women's History Month: Margaret Bourke-White

I am a visual person--I love to read, I love t-shirts with messages, and bumper stickers.  I'm drawn to paintings, but my favorite art form is the photograph.  There can be so much conveyed in a photo--more than words can describe.
So today, I write about Margaret Bourke-White; a photographer whose work seems to be lost in history. 
When I googled Bourke-White's name, the official LIFE Magazine website came up.  I encourage you to take a minute or two to look at Bourke-White's work.  But what really struck me was how few women were listed among the photographers for LIFE.
Bourke-White was a photographer for Fortune Magazine in 1934 when she was sent cover the effects of the drought in the West.  She was appalled by the conditions she found, and soon realized the power of the images she was capturing, and realized the difference she could make by documenting the conditions.  As one source wrote, "Her photographs of the disaster--dubbed the Dust Bowl--not only changed her aesthetic focus, they changed the nature of photojournalism itself."  And, as Bourke-White later wrote, "[the Dust Bowl marked] the beginning of my awareness of people in a human, sympathetic sense as subject for the camera."
Bourke-White's photographs appeared in the first issue of LIFE on November 23, 1936.  When World War II began, she became a war correspondent.  Just think of that--she was a war correspondent.  As one friend said, "Generals rushed to tote her cameras.  Even Stalin insisted on carrying her bags."

She was with Patton's Third Army when they liberated the Nazi death camp in Buchenwald.  Her images provided visual proof to Americans of the depth of suffering and the horrors inflicted by the Nazis--seeing these images was verification the Holocaust did indeed happen.













Bourke-White died in 1971 from the effects of Parkinson's Disease.  But her images have been preserved--in the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress.  I'll let her images close this blog...the first two are the first Bourke-White photographs I remember seeing...