Margaret Bourke-White and the Communist Witch Hunt

Abstract

Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) has been called “the most famous woman photographer” and “the finest woman photographer of our times.” Indeed, in a photographic career that spanned nearly five decades, Bourke-White demonstrated great professional versatility, registered many photographic firsts, and in a male-dominated field set standards by which others were measured. During the 1920s, Bourke-White carved out her first reputation in architectural and industrial photography. Her pictures of steel mills, shipyards, packing houses, logging camps, quarries, auto plants, skyscrapers, banks, and terminals captured the atmosphere of the industry and the dynamics of the capitalist system. Her industrial photography was of such outstanding quality that, as one critic observed, it “transformed the American factory into a Gothic cathedral.”Henry Luce was so impressed by her early work that he hired her as the first photographer for his business magazine Fortune. Under a unique arrangement she was allowed six months out of the year to pursue her own private studio practice for advertising agencies and corporations. When Henry Luce added the pictorial magazine Life to his growing publishing empire in the 1930s, he selected Margaret Bourke-White to become one of the four original staff photographers. At Life she established the tradition of negatives printed full frame and proved by black borders, and pioneered the synchronized multiple flash picture. Bourke-White revealed the range of her photographic talents in photo essays, murals, and documentary travelogues. “As a result of her twelve- and fourteen-page essays,” Carl Mydans noted, “her monumental work became known throughout the world — beyond that of any other photographer.”