Hello Everyone, A new year begins. My focus on art is currently very slow. I have not been able to paint very much. Had a short bout with RSV which landed me in the hospital. I am fine now but struggling to keep sane in a crazy world. Our country is going through a very serious and scary time. This is not the first time we have been involved in a fight for justice and the rule of law, the bedrock of our democracy, and sadly, it probably won’t be the last. Democracy is a living breathing entity and we must all do our part to keep it alive. I hope you will all keep the fire burning in your own way.
In this newsletter I wanted to highlight some of the images of a very talented and brave woman Margaret Bourke-White who was the first female war correspondent and the first foreign photographer permitted to document Soviet industry. “Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject,” she once reflected”.
I applaud women who are not afraid to take a stand and to pursue truth in their art. She began as a very successful photographer of architectural and industrial photography. Her photojournalism for Life Magazine gained her the respect of the world.
” I was deeply moved by the suffering I saw and touched particularly by the bewilderment of the farmers. I think this was the beginning of my awareness of people in a human, sympathetic sense as subjects for the camera and photographed against a wider canvas than I had perceived before. During the rapturous period when I was discovering the beauty of industrial shapes, people were only incidental to me, and in retrospect I believe I had not much feeling for them in my earlier work. But suddenly it was the people who counted.”
-Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself,
“Born Margaret White on June 14, 1904 in Bronx, NY, she attended several universities in her pursuit of a degree in herpetology. Although Bourke-White did not pursue a degree in photography in college, her father introduced her to the medium as a young woman.
She turned her hobby into a career by opening a studio in Cleveland, where she specialized in architectural and industrial photography. She changed her name to include Bourke, her mother’s maiden name, in order to seem more professional, beginning her career in photojournalism for Fortune magazine in 1929.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. Bourke-White died on August 27, 1971 in Stamford, CT. Today, the artist’s 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.”
See more IMAGES:
further reading: Biography: “Portrait of Myself”. Buy from your local bookstore or library. Thriftbooks is a great source to order books. I am trying to limit using Amazon. I hope you will too.
Jeanean Songco Martin Painting Blog 