Margaret Bourke-White: Moments in History concentrates on the decades in which photography became inseparable from the public record of political upheaval and mechanized war. Its center of gravity is Bourke-White’s work of the 1930s and 1940s in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. Her subjects include the Soviet Union’s first Five-Year Plan, the German invasion of 1941, Allied bombing, and the ruins of German cities photographed on assignment for Life in 1945.
The historical scope is severe. Bourke-White witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald and the Leipzig-Thekla forced-labor camp; she later photographed the partition of India and the Korean War. Yet the book does not reduce her practice to a succession of headline events. Among its 150 black-and-white photographs is her widely known portrait of Gandhi at his spinning wheel, an image in which political history is registered through a concentrated encounter with a person, an object and a daily act.
Photographs are placed in dialogue with extracts from letters and periodical publications, including examples of the word-and-picture sequences Bourke-White produced for Fortune and Life. Correspondence with figures such as Winston Churchill and Georgia O’Keeffe further situates her within the political, cultural and publishing networks through which twentieth-century photojournalism circulated. This editorial structure matters: it presents not only individual images, but also the working contexts in which they were commissioned, narrated and received by contemporary readers.
Published in 2013 by D.A.P./La Fabrica, the volume accompanied an exhibition shown in Berlin, Horten, The Hague and Syracuse. For a serious collection, its interest lies in this combination of concentrated historical coverage and documentary apparatus. It offers a substantial account of America’s first female war correspondent while preserving the connection between Bourke-White’s photographs and the magazines, assignments and written exchanges that shaped their public meaning.
