Quote of the Week by Margaret Bourke-White

“Sometimes I come away from what I am photographing sick at heart, with the faces of people in pain etched as sharply in my mind as on my negatives. But I go back because I feel it is my place to make such pictures. Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera.” —Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971)

Margaret Bourke-White was a landmark American photojournalist. Remembered as the first female war correspondent and the first foreign photographer permitted to document Soviet industry, she captured countless iconic images of 20th-century life, conflict, and the politicians at its center. At the beginning of her career, she established a studio in Cleveland, where she specialised in architectural and industrial photography. In 1929, she changed her name to include Bourke, her mother’s maiden name, in order to seem more professional while pursuing photojournalism at the Fortune magazine. Over the following decades, she worked for Life magazine, documenting the Dust Bowl in the American heartland, and later the concentration camps left by the Nazi regime. One of her most iconic pictures came after the World War II, when she visited India and captured Mahatma Gandhi reading peacefully in his home, mere hours before his assassination in 1948. Her works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others.