In the 1940s, there were a few women’s names (besides those of movie stars and singers and Eleanor Roosevelt) well-known to the general public: Sonja Henie, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and Margaret Bourke-White. While Sonja twirled on ice, and the “Babe” smashed tennis and golf balls, Margaret Bourke-White hung out of airplanes with a camera in her hands. That kind of life, like the open cockpit airplane and the Speed Graphic, is now an artifact of American culture, but parts of the myth are still with us.

Vicki Goldberg, in Margaret Bourke-White, A Biography, did not set out to write cultural or photographic criticism, and that was probably a wise choice. The facts and fantasies of Bourke-White’s life provide Ms. Goldberg with more than enough material for this one volume. Biographers inevitably face questions of selection, and with Bourke-White as subject these problems are enormous. The gossip and rumors about Bourke-White were and are as numerous as the reports that exist in print and manuscript. All these sources, plus Bourke-While’s many contemporaries who are still alive and very talkative, no doubt made Goldberg’s task most complex.

The book straddles two biographical worlds: the mass market world of such books as Sara Davidson’s Rock Hudson, and academic biographies like Arthur and Barbara Gelb’s O’Neill or Leon Edel’s work on Henry James. While Margaret Bourke-White contains too much scholarship and detail to make it a supermarket check-out rack favorite, the intended audience is clearly a general rather than an academic one. Whether this decision was Goldberg’s or her publisher’s is not clear, but her presentation of serious scholarship in a popular format and style is often disconcerting.

Goldberg presents her materials in a narrative format. She works at making Bourke-White’s story interesting, which is odd since Margaret Bourke­White was already a most interesting person. Goldberg holds back bits of information and reveals them later as  surprises. For example, following several chapters on Bourke-White’s rise to fame and, presumably, fortune, Goldberg tells us that she was broke. The author also avoids the frequent use of dates (several times I found myself trying to figure out when something happened). The book deserves a detailed chronology and, given the complexities of Bourke­White’s life, this is a serious omission.

In a biography one searches for reasons and explanations, but the complexities of Margaret Bourke-White’s personality are not easily solved. She was regarded by many people as an unpleasant person: arrogant, self-centered and careerist. Goldberg hypothesizes that her unconventional and idiosyncratic upbringing left her deficient in the everyday social graces. Kindness and generosity were not normal responses for her. As an adult, Bourke-White consciously taught herself to be charming and kind, if the situation demanded. Colleagues complained of the disjunction between her demanding perfectionism during the working day and her ability to tum on the charm at night.

Much of this is explained by her upbringing. Joseph White, her father, was an inventor in the printing industry, obsessed with his work. Both parents were dedicated to a life of reason and self-­improvement. As a child, Margaret was expected to achieve. Goldberg tells of the very young Margaret being trained to overcome her fear of the dark. Her mother initiated an after-dark game in which she and the child would run around the outside of the house in different directions to finally meet each other. The first night her mother ran quickly around three sides of the house, meeting the tiny Margaret after she had haltingly completed only one side. Each night Margaret’s distance was lengthened until, eventually, she was happy to play outside alone after dark and, later, to remain in the house with her slightly older sister after bedtime while her parents took evening walks. Margaret’s parents felt this regimen taught independence and fearlessness, and Goldberg suggests it accounts for Bourke-White’s love of solitude and her courage. But most psychological thinking today would say such “training” is bound to leave scars. Indeed, Bourke-White’s many years in and out of analysis suggest that her upbringing of rigorous perfectionism had its negative as well as positive effects.

While few of us pass through our teens and twenties with grace and wisdom, this period was especially hard for Bourke-White. She was more awkward than the typical adolescent, and attempted to make friends with attention-getting performances such as wearing pet snakes around her neck.

Her father died while she was in college, and she married early. After two miserable years, she separated from her husband, finished college, and began her photographic career. Goldberg sees this failed early marriage as central to Margaret BourkeWhite’s need to achieve personal success and her reluctance to make longstanding personal commitments to men. But while this marriage no doubt shook Bourke-White’s self-confidence deeply, my own feeling is that her relationship to her father and mother, her unusual upbringing, and her status as a middle child are probably more accountable for these deep-seated needs.

During her early years as a professional photographer in Cleveland, Margaret Bourke-White was not yet the worldly adult we associate with the image she (and Fortune and Life magazine) had created by the mid-1930s and ’40s. She dressed for work in color coordinated suits, hats, high heels, gloves and photographic dark-cloths. Her presentation of self was completely thought out, but she knew that to earn  a living she had to make good photographs as well. She over-shot extravagantly, as she continued to do throughout her career, and she began producing the work which would eventually make her a success and, later, a “star.”

During her twenties she was influenced by whatever social circles surrounded her at a given time. While photographing for the captains of industry, they were “the people that counted.” At this time also, she rarely read newspapers and didn’t follow current events at all. She was photographing the interior of a Boston bank during the evening after Black Thursday, October, 1929, and couldn’t figure out why all the staff had stayed late at the bank, thus interfering with her work.

Bourke-White does not seem a very sympathetic heroine or a genuine person until she begins to travel and gain some cultural and political sophistication. It is interesting to speculate what sort of person might have emerged had she not come under the influence of, among others, Maurice Hindus, “a foremost Russian expert, a famous, even a heroic liberal.” Would she have made her crucial first trip to Russia? Would her political education have had its leftist bias?

But a person of considerable substance and very real dedication and ability does emerge from this youthful superficiality. Her life illustrates the human potential for growth and change. She never gave up trying to improve her work, even during her twenty-year struggle with Parkinson’s syndrome. And she never gave up trying to improve herself either. But an element remains, throughout her life, of that young girl over-willing to please, trying too hard to please.

In the early fifties she was attacked by the red-baiting newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler for her history of leftist alliances (the Film and Photo League, the League of Women Shoppers, the American Youth Congress, etc.), for her marriage to a playwright with leftist alliances, Erskine Caldwell, and for her books and films about Russia. In the midst of the HUAC frenzy it seemed as if her career might be ruined. But Margaret Bourke-White asked Life to let her cover the Korean conflict, and she produced a photo essay about a Communist guerrilla’s defection to the government forces and his reunion with his family. After the publication of the photo essay, and a year-long lecture tour which followed it, her loyalty could hardly be questioned. But what can be questioned here is the depth of her political thinking and commitments.

Whether Margaret Bourke-White became a more likable person as she matured is hard to say. People’s reactions to her continued to be strongly positive or negative throughout her life. Whole factories, from workers to executives, apparently “fell in love” with her. But others were quick to say, “everyone was her messenger boy.”

Bourke-White was also frequently criticised for behavior that would go unnoticed in a male. In her twenties, she consciously flaunted the double standard, presuming that doing a man’s work allowed her a man’s sexual prerogatives:

Early in Margaret’s career she was so successful she was rumored to be a front for a man; now [during World War II] men gave her credit solely for being female, and around Life she was soon labelled ‘the general’s mattress…: The world being what it is, some women certainly used sex for advancement, but whether they did or not many of the women who went to war as correspondents were accused of it. 

While Margaret Bourke-White was hardly a conscious feminist, and while Vicki Goldberg’s presentation is not ideologically feminist, there is much illuminating material about the contradictions, difficulties and ambiguities of Bourke-White’s trek through the male dominated world of photography and news reporting. The question of how a woman ought to achieve success in a male dominated culture is one which feminists continue to debate. So, while Margaret Bourke-White’s life is fascinating and possibly instructive, there are many women for whom she could hardly be a role model.

The attitudes Bourke-White was most frequently criticized for– aggressiveness, determination, perfectionism, ruthlessness, strong sexuality– were seen as virtues in her male colleagues. Nobody demanded that men be ‘nice” and successful as well. But the mature Margaret Bourke-White seems to have been fairly immune to gossip and basically unaware of how much she was disliked around Life. For her, the work counted most.

Opting for work, and not family and personal life, is a choice few women have made on so conscious a level. While both men and women may question this choice, Bourke-White’s honesty in this area (particularly her decision not to bear children) spared her much of the painful dilemma of family versus career. (Dorothea Lange boarded out her two sons at an early age to concentrate on her photography, and there was a great deal of suffering by all three.)

For all the information concerning Bourke-White’s life that Vicki Goldberg provides, many interesting questions about that life remain unanswered. Why did America elevate Margaret Bourke-White to star status? Was it part of the Life magazine phenomenon and orchestrated by Time-Life or something deeper in the culture? What role did photography and femaleness play in her star status? Did she create the myth of the crusading photojournalist or merely bring it to its zenith? What has been the legacy from the tens of thousands of women she lectured to in the forties and fifties and the many women who emulated her?

And what about the work that Margaret Bourke-White valued above all else? Only a thorough critical assessment will guarantee her photography its place (or lack of it), in photographic history. While this sort of evaluation is beginning on the photographic work which has come out of the 1930s and 1940s, much remains to be done in analysing the area of cultural iconography– why did her images speak to the American public with such immediacy? What dreams, fantasies, and realities did her photographs fulfill?

An artist’s production must necessarily be seen in terms of his or her social reality. To separate Bourke-White’s photographs from the context of the times and approach them from a formal or aesthetic perspective would surely be a mistake. One study that comes to mind as a possible model for future work is Karin Becker Ohm’s Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition. Indeed, Bourke-White’s situation is interesting for studying the questions which pertain to photographing for mass media distribution and for the questions of personal versus professional expression and ethics-questions which seem to be very much in the air given the proliferation of such films as Salvador, Under Fire, and The Year of Living Dangerously. 

That Vicki Goldberg hasn’t given us all of the answers only suggests the breadth and complexity of the questions Margaret Bourke-White’s life and work raise. But, obtaining the biographical facts is always the first step, and Vicki Goldberg has done substantial ground work for future students and critics.

 

This review appeared in the Winter 1987 edition of Exposure magazine, Vol. 25, No.5, the Journal of the Society for Photographic Education and is copyrighted © by the SPE.