♪Whimsicle bitch♪

sorry to be a complainer about the kids today and school, this is my version of hiking up and down 2 miles in the snow backwards to school or whatever~

this is a paper i had to write for my darkroom photography class in my junior year of high school before there was Ai and we were not even allowed to use WIKIPEDIA as a credible source to site. I had to come up with all these sentences by myself and write them by hand and then upload to a computer. My teacher made me reformat it, because it was originally 5 pages and one paragraph. My reasoning was that a paragraph is when there is a new idea, and the entire paper was about this one lady, therefore, i needed no paragraphs. My AP english and photo classes were across the hallway from eachother,and my photo teacher called out my english teacher and was like “is this how their english papers are??? this is like trying to read Jack Kerouac’s version of this paper!!!” and my english teacher confirmed “yes”
so, here is a paper that i wrote about one of my still favourite photographers, Margaret Bourke-White:

“Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx, New York, on June 14th, 1904, to Joseph and Minnie White. When Margaret was a young girl, she was described as silent and strange by others. She would take snakes that she found in the woods near her house to school. She liked being different. She always pictured herself, “doing all the things that women never do.”

Margaret had a young brother and sister, and she was a good sister to them. Her father worked as a mechanical engineer who worked at a printing company. Margaret’s father was a big influence in her life, always helping her with her problems, setting a good example and advising her how to be a good person. At the age of eight, Margaret’s father took her on a tour to a factory where iron and other materials are melted into steel. This whole process fascinated Margaret, and later, during her photography career, her first and favorite subjects were of factories and machines.

One of my favorite factory/machinery inspired photographs of hers is “Ford Hearth Mill,” taken in 1929, near the beginning of her photo career. I like it very much because you can see someone in the steam, but not well, it’s just a silhouette, with tons of big dangerous machinery. It’s very dark and creepy. I wish that we had a big factory that I could go and photograph in, because I like the contrast of the print and how it is impersonal and industrial-like. This was one of the first photos I had seen by Margaret Bourke-White, and I was immediately fascinated with her, and wanted to see more of her works.

Susan Stamberg is quoted as saying” Margaret Bourke-White was in love with the shapes of industrial design — the mechanical muscle and sheen of it. She took extreme close-ups of the inner workings of production.” (Quote taken from  HYPERLINK “http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1175402”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1175402) I think this accurately describes Margaret’s interest in the objects she first photographed. Margaret’s father was an amateur photographer, whom she helped in his darkroom. Margaret’s father died in her first year of college at Columbia University in New York City, but she pursued photography on her own. Anything that interested Margaret’s father also interested her, which is probably why she continued photography on her own in school.

When Margaret Bourke-White met another student at Columbia, Everett Chapman, he shared an interest in her photography. In 1924, they were married. Everett and Margaret both loved machines and photography; they got along wonderfully, for a few years. In 1928, they were divorced.

Margaret re-enrolled in college, this time to study science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. To help pay for her living expenses and her tuition, she took photographs of the university’s buildings, and then sold them to students, faculty members, and the alumni magazine. Margaret then realized that she loved taking pictures and her photographs sold very well. Soon after, she decided to pursue photography as a career instead of as a hobby.
When Bourke-White was twenty-three, she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, hopefully to get a job as an architectural photographer. As Cleveland was a growing city, it was the perfect spot for anyone who loved buildings and factory machinery. She took many pictures of those subjects, including the insides of busy factories.

People were amazed by her brave and daring nature, and she was becoming somewhat of a celebrity. The publisher of Time Magazine, Henry Luce, offered Margaret a job at Fortune and she accepted. Quickly, Bourke-White was known for taking pictures no woman, and few men, have ever taken before. When the Chrysler Building was being constructed, she climbed up a scaffold 800 feet above the ground; she took pictures of it with her heavy old camera as the building wiggled in the big winds. When the Chrysler Building was fully constructed, Margaret rented a studio behind the gargoyle, which she liked to climb out on and take pictures of the city below. Reporters wrote about Bourke-Whites daring nature, about her photographs, and about her.

In the 1930’s, Bourke-White asked Fortune Magazine if she would photograph buildings being constructed in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union didn’t want people traipsing around taking photos, and this made Margaret all the more determined to go. “Nothing attracts me like a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open,” she once said. Finally, she persuaded Soviet Union officials into letting her photograph wherever she wanted to. With these images she showed Americans the growing industry of the Soviet Union.

During the 1930’s and 1940’s, Americans learned about world events from the radio, newspapers, and magazines. As one of the main photographers for America’s best photographic magazine, Bourke-White helped people see what was going on in the rest of the world around them. Being one of the most tough and talented photographers in this time, Margaret would always get the photo that she wanted, no matter what. The people at Fortune decided that it was so popular and they needed to start another magazine, Life. Life was to have even more photographs and hardly any writings, being dubbed a “photographic essay” type magazine. In 1936, Bourke-White became the only woman photographer working for Life, and only four photographers were working for Life at that time.

The first-ever publication of Life had one of Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs on the cover, called “Fort Peck Dam.” This photo is very important, for a few reasons. First, it was on the first-ever publication of Life, plus that a woman photographer that got to have the first photo on the magazine. I also especially like this photograph because of how huge the concrete forms against the tiny people in the picture way at the bottom. It is amazing to me that there are things that big. Also, I really like contrast and sharpness of the image. Margaret Bourke-White worked for Life for twenty-one years. In 1936, Margaret Bourke-White met Erskine Caldwell, a well-known novelist from America who wrote about poverty and racial tension. They liked each others works, and published a book between the two of them in 1937 featuring Margaret’s pictures and Erskine’s writings called You Have Seen Their Faces. During this time period, they became deeply attracted to each other and got married in 1939. While spending time together, Margaret and Erskine created many books together, with subjects such as accounting their travels to Czechoslovakia, and everyday life in America, titled North of the Danube, and Say, is this the U.S.A.

Shortly after Say, is this the U.S.A., was published, War World II broke out. During this time, Margaret went to the Soviet Union with Erskine, and the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany from the west while they were there. Less than a month later, Margaret was the only foreign photographer in Moscow. She went on a rooftop when the Germans were attacking and took marvelous pictures of shells exploding in mid-air. Margaret was not worried about herself, only if her photos would turn out correctly because of the lighting. She wanted to capture the blinding white of the explosion against the night sky, and where would she point her camera next in order to get these photos?

After their trip to the Soviet Union, Margaret and Erskine grew apart and were eventually divorced in 1942. Once again, Margaret became lost in her work and photographed war scenes throughout Europe, then gave them to Life to show the American public. In early 1945, Bourke-White followed American troops to Buchenwald, where she also took pictures to show horrified Americans. She took photographs of hundreds of dead bodies stacked in a pile. Bodies of Jews who starved to death and were forced to watch others die. Still other prisoners were mostly starved and barely alive. This would be difficult to photograph, no matter how many times one would have seen it. I think that taking a picture like that would take a tremendous amount of effort, along with courage. It would be very hard to see all that pain and still be able to photograph it for other people to see and feel the horrible things the photographer would have felt when they shot the photo.

It would have been difficult to take these photos, but Bourke-White was afraid that without photos, no one would believe her. I admire her for doing this even though it was very difficult.
After the war ended, Margaret was sent to document India and their struggle to break free from Britain. Another mission Margaret was sent out to do was in South Africa, to photograph racial injustice that was committed by whites in South Africa, who were the minority.

Some of the last of Margaret’s photographs that she took were in the early 1950’s of the Korean War; shortly afterwards she contracted Parkinson’s disease, which she fought for fourteen years before she finally died at the age of sixty-six, on August 27th, 1971, in Connecticut. Margaret died from complications of her illness, which she endured bravely during the whole awful experience. Margaret Bourke-White broke many boundaries that many women and even men hadn’t broken before, such as the new career of photojournalism, and contributing many new views to the world. Also she opened many people’s eyes through Life with her photographs. I admire her bravery and courage, always getting the photo that she wanted, no matter what she had to do.”