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Fotomuseum Den Haag Stadhouderslaan 43 | Postbus 72 | 2517 HV Den Haag

Moments in History 1930-1945

Margaret Bourke-White

12 Apr — 29 Jun 2014

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In the male-dominated world of early twentieth-century photojournalism, Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) was a striking exception to the rule. She was the first woman to work for Fortune and Life Magazine. In Russia, she photographed a smiling Stalin and in Georgia the aged mother of the dictator. In 1941, when the first German bombs fell on Moscow, Bourke-White was the only foreign photojournalist in the city. Fearlessly, she covered the work of medical teams behind the front line. Many of her images are unforgettable, like the ones she took following the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp by American troops. This exhibition at the Hague Museum of Photography comprises over 180 original vintage photographs taken in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Germany, England and Italy in the 1930s and 40s.

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) was not just a passionate and gifted photographer; she was, above all, the ‘eye’ of her time. She was prepared to do whatever it took to capture current events and she photographed the most remarkable moments in 20th century history. As a young photographer, she barely survived a German torpedo attack, shot pictures from Allied bombers and teetered on a projecting roof-top ledge to photograph New York from the dizzy heights of the Chrysler Building.         

Fascinated by the industrial revolution and the social changes it caused, Bourke-White photographed the great new factories of the Soviet Union and the United States. Her first trip to the Soviet Union in 1930 was at the time of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan, with the consequent Soviet obsession with technology and emphasis on rapid expansion, particularly of heavy industry. Workers and their machines are therefore central to her photographs of Soviet factories. However, she also documented other aspects of everyday life in the Soviet Union, including children on their way to school, street life, designers at work, and agricultural workers in the countryside. In the United States, she captured the hidden beauty of the vast steel production plants.                

During the Second World War, Margaret Bourke-White recorded scenes of wartime life in England, Tunisia, Italy and Germany. She photographed the ruins of bombed-out German cities. Her post-capitulation images of the Buchenwald concentration camp and collective suicides by loyal Nazis are engraved in the public mind. 

After graduating from Cornell University, Margaret Bourke-White moved to Cleveland, the industrial heartland of America, where she set up her own photography studio. Bourke-White’s photography is penetrating and always imbued with a sense of involvement with the people and situations she photographed. She produced various photo-books. Her pictures went around the world and regularly made the covers of Fortune and Life Magazine (periodicals for which she worked for many years).

This exhibition, Margaret Bourke-White – Moments in History 1930-1945, is a co-production by the Hague Museum of Photography, La Fábrica (Spain), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Germany), Preus-Museum (Norway), and Syracuse University (United States).