DARE TO DREAM BIG!: From Adventurous Young Woman to Trailblazing Photographer

Imagine This: You are a young woman who wants to do all those things “that women never do.” Your passion is photography, but this is a man’s field in a man’s world, and you aren’t a man. So what do you do? Do you give up your dream?

 You’re born in the Bronx, New York, on June 14, 1904, the second of three children. Your father, Joseph White, is an inventor and an engineer, and your mother, Minnie Bourke, is a forward thinking and loving mother.

 Your parents encourage you to read books, study nature, and think for yourself. One night the whole family stays up to watch a butterfly slowly emerge from its chrysalis.

 As a child, you’re shy and serious and, unlike your classmates, you love bugs and snakes. One day you take your pet snakes to school and cause such a panic that the principal forbids you to ever bring them again!

 In addition to being a mechanical engineer and an inventor, your father is also an amateur photographer in his spare time, and your home is filled with his photographs. You often follow him around the house, pretending to take photographs with an empty cigar box and you help him develop his prints in the bathtub.

 On Sundays he takes you on trips to factories. He tells you that the beauty of machines is as great as that of nature and that their beauty is in their usefulness to humans.

 After graduating from Cornell University in Ithica, New York, in 1927, you return to Cleveland, Ohio, where your family is living. You open your own photography studio in your one-room apartment and specialize in architectural photography. You set up your stack of developing trays near the kitchen sink, do your printing in the tiny breakfast alcove, and rinse your photos in the bathtub.

 The money you earn from shooting elegant houses and gardens by day allows you to spend your time photographing steel mills at night and on the weekends.

 Your adventurous nature and your dedication to your craft lead you to become a world-famous photographer by age twenty-five. You take great risks whenever necessary to get just the right picture, and you tell yourself that you will do all the things that women never do!

 The industrial photos you take are used in a book, The Story of Steel, which creates such a sensation that you become famous almost overnight.

 In 1929, you become a staff photographer for Fortune Magazine and your documentation of a hog processing plant is a major step in the development of the photo essay.

 In 1930, you spend five weeks in Russia, the first Western photographer allowed into that country. You take nearly three thousand photographs and in 1931 you publish your book Eyes on Russia.

 In 1936, you become one of four photojournalists for the pictorial magazine Life and you make history with the publication of your haunting photos of the Depression in your book You Have Seen Their Faces.

 You’re the only photographer there in Russia in 1941 when the first bombs fall on Moscow and your pictures are a major scoop for both you and for Life.

 You become the first female war correspondent and for the next four years, you work in combat zones during World War II and you’re one of the first photographers to enter and document the death camps.

 You have become a trailblazing photographer who photographs the major events of the day. You show Americans the beauty of industry and its machinery in the 1920s, document poverty and suffering during the Great Depression in the 1930s, and bring home World War II in the 1940s.

 You die on August 27, 1971, at age sixty-seven after spending the last seventeen years of your life fighting your Parkinson’s disease (a degenerative illness which attacks the nervous system) with the same bravery and determination that made you a great photographer. You were, and still are, one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century.       

 “Work is something you can count on, a trusted lifelong friend who never deserts you.”

                                      Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971)

 Excerpted from They Stood Alone!: 25 Men and Women Who Made a Difference by Sandra McLeod Humphrey

 For More about

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAkBu63H8H0

Giving Back: Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs emphasized the human side of the news and are in a number of museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Did You Know that at one point in her life, a rumor had spread that she was really a man because of some of the daring feats her photographs required, so she had her assistant photograph her while she was actually taking some of her more daring photographs?

 Something to Think about: Why do you think Margaret Bourke-White took such risks to get “just the right picture?”

Willoughby and I hope you enjoyed this week’s true story and will be back next week for another story to inspire you to DARE TO DREAM BIG!