From 14 June 2024 to 6 October 2024, don’t miss the exhibition in Turin dedicated to one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century: Margaret Bourke-Whitefirst photographer of the legendary LIFE magazine.
The exhibition
After the success of the exhibition “Robert Capa and Gerda Taro: photography, love, war” (46,000 visitors), the rooms of CAMERA – Italian Center for Photography in Turin will host around 150 photographs in an exhibition curated by Monica Poggi which will tell the work and extraordinary life of one of the protagonists of 20th century photography, and the importance of her shots, such as the iconic portraits of Stalin and Gandhi, the famous reportage on American industry, the services created during the Second World War in the Soviet Union, North Africa, Italy and Germany, where he documents the entry of US troops into Berlin and the horrors of the concentration camps.
Alongside this important exhibition project, in the Project Roomuntil July 21, the Center will also host The day after the nightsolo exhibition by Paolo Novelli, by the artistic director Walter Guadagniniwhich brings together two cycles of work created between 2011 and 2018, central to the evolution of his language.
Who was Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke White was born on June 14, 1904 in New York, in the suburb of the Bronx. “Bourke” is his mother’s surname which he added in 1927.
She enrolled at Columbia University in 1921 to study biology, but became fascinated with photography while taking a course at the same university. With her father’s death in 1922, she moved to the University of Michigan using photography to contribute to her studies. On that occasion she met Everett Chapman, a young electrical engineering student with whom she married. They divorced two years later.
He then enrolled at Cornell University and graduated in 1927 with a Bachelor’s in Biology. After graduation, Margarite returned to Ohio to live with her mother and began a career as a freelance photographer.
Among its customers is the Otis Steel Company. Her photographs of blast furnaces, including the geometric abstractions that industrial architecture allows, make her one of the most popular photographers and among the first photographers to give artistic relief to industrial photography.
The professional turning point came in 1929 when Margaret Bourke White’s industrial photographs attracted the attention of Henry Luce, editor in chief of Time, who invited her to move to New York to collaborate in the founding of a new illustrated magazine, Fortune.
The photojournalist began traveling to Germany in 1930 and photographed the Krupp Iron Works for Fortune. In 1930 she was the first Western photographer to travel to the USSR, making reportages on Soviet industry.
Henry Luce hired Margaret in 1936 for another new magazine: Life. The first cover of the magazine featured the Fort Peck Dam, symbol of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Also for her Life she is sent to Europe to document the advance of Nazism and the looming war.
The experience she lived in the USSR led her to develop the professional desire to become a war reporter on the front line. Never before had any woman been accredited by the American army in war theaters.
A uniform is created for her which has the acronym WC: War Correspondent on its insignia,
His photographic lens rests on battlefields, field hospitals, bombings. He photographs North Africa, the slow rise of Italy which became a secondary front after the Normandy landings. He immortalizes the faces and bodies of the survivors, beyond the barbed wire, of the crematoriums, the concentration camps.
In 1947 he was in Pakistan and India where he interviewed and photographed the Mahatma Ghandi just a few hours before he is killed. In 1950 he is in South Africa where he describes apartheid and descends more than 2000 meters underground to portray the work of gold miners.
In 1952 he was in Korea where he immortalized what he believed to be his favorite shot, namely the return home of a South Korean dissident whose mother ran to hug him. He died on August 27, 1971.
ph. Anthony Jordan
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