Fortunate Life Margaret Bourke-White

By Paul Gray

Unlike most photographers, she was as famous as her pictures. The images she captured are memorable enough on their own: a line of flood victims in Kentucky stretched in front of a billboard braying prosperity; the German bombardment of the Kremlin by night during World War II; Mohandas Gandhi reading newspaper clippings near a spinning wheel, the primitive tool he used to forge a subcontinent's independence. Millions of people saw these photographs and others equally striking in LIFE; the big news to many was that they had been taken by a woman.

Margaret Bourke-White's position behind her camera attracted attention that often rivaled the interest commanded by her subjects. She made headlines almost from the moment her career took off: THIS DARING CAMERA GIRL SCALES SKYSCRAPERS FOR ART. In the early 1940s, Hollywood issued a number of films based roughly on Bourke-White's character or exploits and starring the likes of Tallulah Bankhead, Claudette Colbert and Ann Sheridan. When, in the 1950s, she contracted Parkinson's disease and underwent an experimental operation to arrest her deterioration, she shared her experience with LIFE readers and inspired a TV drama called The Margaret Bourke-White Story.

Such brilliant success, according to popular wisdom, must have left dark and dreadful shadows. Biographer Vicki Goldberg, an art and photography critic, has indeed dug behind the Bourke-White legend to find some details that the daring camera girl chose not to develop in her autobiography Portrait of Myself (1963). But these snippets hardly amount to the negative image of a triumphant life. Bourke-White did not outdistance her wildest dreams; she plotted her course to the top, assessed the costs along the way and willingly paid them all.

She learned to love machinery from her father Joseph, a printer and sometime inventor. A practical, progressive thinker, he dismissed his Jewish background; his wife Minnie Bourke was an equally forward-looking daughter of British immigrants. They taught Margaret the redemptive power of work and accomplishment and gave her the motto "You can." Joseph died during her freshman year in college, leaving her grief and a mixed legacy. She spent the rest of her life trying to match his vision of her possibilities--and the world's--in photographs.

After a college marriage that lasted only two years, she fetched up in Cleveland, eking out a living out of the photography that had turned from hobby to vocation. Here she learned the values of being young, attractive and hardworking. Soon some of the city's wealthiest and most powerful men were hiring her to take pictures of their factories and commercial buildings. "What a lucky lady I am," she told her diary. "I can do anything I want to with these men, and through it all I like them." She saw the faults of her businessmen clients, but she also sincerely admired the new temples of commerce and industry that they were throwing against the sky. She was not the first industrial photographer, but she found exquisite geometries and arabesques in landscapes that others thought blighted or inhuman.

Her Cleveland pictures caught the eye of Editor and Publisher Henry Luce, who was planning a magazine that would rigorously and sumptuously chronicle the world of U.S. business and economy. Bourke-White offered just the photographic skills that FORTUNE needed. Working together on one early assignment, Luce toted her cameras and equipment. Bourke-White's success at FORTUNE helped create the concept of photojournalism, the grouping of artful but newsworthy pictures into a narrative that made words subordinate or unnecessary. When Luce began LIFE in 1936, the magazine's first cover picture, of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana, was by Margaret Bourke-White.

Advertisers soon began to employ her face and name to endorse products like coffee, phonograph records and wine. Such favored treatment did not always sit well with her colleagues and competitors, especially when she ordered them about. While covering World War II, she had the habit of showing up on the arm of the C.O. at the local theater of operations. One LIFE photographer, queried by the home office as to why Bourke-White was ahead of him on a story both had been assigned, replied that she "had one piece of equipment he didn't have."

Such charges have inevitably followed successful women and probably will until female bosses outnumber males. Goldberg makes a halfhearted attempt to portray Bourke-White as a feminist heroine, but concedes "she often acted in ways no self-respecting feminist could approve." Indeed. Impediments to her work regularly aroused hysterics and tears. When Author Erskine Caldwell decided that he did not want to continue collaborating with her on a book about the South, she "raped him," according to Caldwell's agent. (The collaborators were later married and divorced.) One of Bourke-White's long- suffering secretaries came to regard her boss as "the kind of woman I didn't want to be . . . lacking in human relationships."

The unappealing side of Bourke-White's character is clear and a little beside the point. After all, she never set out to be a beloved, nurturing soul. She wanted to be "famous and wealthy," as she wrote when young. It is possible to quibble with her goals but not, as this biography makes clear, the determination and courage she brought to their attainment.