名人轶事:Photographer Margaret Bourke-White Helped Create

Photographer Margaret Bourke-White Helped Create the Modern Art of Photojournalism
Written by Shelley Gollust

(THEME)

VOICE ONE:

I’m Barbara Klein.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we complete our report about photographer Margaret Bourke-White. She helped create the modern art of photojournalism.

(THEME)

VOICE ONE:

Margaret Bourke-White  

Margaret Bourke-White began her career as an industrial photographer in the early nineteen thirties. Her pictures captured¹ the beauty and power of machines. They told a story – one image at a time. The technique became know as the photographic essay. In nineteen thirty-six, American publisher Henry Luce started a new magazine, called Life, based on the photographic essay. In this magazine, the pictures told the story. Bourke-White had worked as a photographer for one of Luce’s other magazines, called Fortune. Luce chose her to work on his new magazine.

VOICE TWO:

Margaret Bourke-White took the picture that appeared on the first cover of Life magazine. It was a picture of a new dam being built in the western state of Montana. The light on the rounded supports showed the dam’s great strength. The small shapes of two men at the bottom showed the dam’s huge size. Bourke-White was no longer satisfied just to show the products of industry in her pictures, as she had in the past. She wanted to tell the story of the people behind the industry:  In this case, the people who were building the dam.

VOICE ONE:

The dam in Montana was a federal² project. Ten thousand people worked on it. Bourke-White took pictures of those people – at the dam, in the rooms where they lived, and in the places where they had fun. With her pictures in Life magazine, she told a story about America’s “Wild West” in the twentieth century.

(MUSIC)

VOICE TWO:

Margaret Bourke-White was a social activist³. She was a member of the American Artists Congress⁴. These artists supported state financial aid for the arts. They fought discrimination against African-American artists. And they supported artists fighting against fascism in Europe.

In the nineteen thirties, Bourke-White met the American writer Erskine Caldwell. Caldwell was known for his stories about people in the American South. The photographer and the writer decided⁵ to produce a book to tell Americans about some of those poor country people of the South. They traveled through eight states, from South Carolina to Louisiana. Their book, “You Have Seen Their Faces,” was published in nineteen thirty-seven. It was a great success.

Caldwell’s words were beautiful. But Bourke-White’s pictures could have told the story by themselves. They showed the faces of people in a land that still wore the mask of defeat in America’s Civil War.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

In nineteen thirty-eight, some countries in Europe were close to war. Bourke-White and Caldwell went there to report on these events. They produced another book together, this time about Czechoslovakia. It was called “North of the Danube.” The next year Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell were married. They continued to work together.

By the spring of nineteen forty-one, Europe had been at war for a year and a half. Bourke-White and Caldwell went to the Soviet⁶ Union. They were the only foreign reporters there. For six weeks, Bourke-White took pictures of the Soviet people preparing for war. Then, one night in July, Soviet officials announced that German bomber⁷ planes were flying toward⁸ Moscow. No civilians⁹ were permitted to stay above ground because of the coming attacks.

VOICE TWO:

As others were hurrying to safety, Bourke-White placed several cameras in the window of her hotel room. She set the cameras so they would remain open to the light of the night sky. Then she joined the others in rooms under the hotel. While she waited for the bombing attack to end, her cameras recorded the explosions¹⁰, which lit up the rooftops of the city.

Before leaving the country, Bourke-White received permission to meet with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. She returned home with his picture and a series of other photographic essays for Life magazine. She also had enough material for a book on the war in the Soviet Union. Margaret Bourke-White’s marriage to Erskine Caldwell ended in divorce¹¹ in nineteen forty-two
VOICE ONE:

During World War Two, she became an official photographer with the United States Army. Her photographs were to be used jointly¹² by the military and by Life magazine. She was the first woman to be permitted to work in combat¹³ areas during World War Two.

Bourke-White flew with American bomber planes in England as they prepared to attack enemy targets on the European continent. She wanted to fly with the Army to North Africa, where the allies¹⁴ were fighting German troops in the desert.

But the commanding general told her it would be too dangerous. So she sailed for North Africa instead. Before she reached the African coast, enemy bombs hit the ship and sank it. An allied¹⁵ warship¹⁶ rescued Bourke-White and the other survivors¹⁷ and took them to Algeria.

VOICE TWO:

The incident did not stop Bourke-White from reporting on the war. She flew in an allied bombing attack on a German airfield¹⁸ at El Aouina in Tunisia. She flew over the terrible fighting in the Cassino Valley in Italy. And she moved along the Rhine River with the United States Third Army, under the command of General George Patton. At the end of the war, she was with American troops when they entered and freed several Nazi¹⁹ death camps. She took photographs of the prisoners in the Buchenwald death camp in Germany in nineteen forty-five.

Later, she wrote about the war. She said she sometimes pulled an imaginary²⁰ cloth across her eyes as she worked. In the death camps, she said, the cloth was so thick that she did not really know what she was photographing until she saw the finished pictures. In addition to her stories for Life magazine, Bourke-White published books on the allied campaign in Italy and on the fall of Nazi Germany.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

After the war, Life magazine sent Margaret Bourke-White to India. She stayed for three years as India prepared for its independence from Britain. She photographed the battles between Muslims and Hindus. And she met with the leader of India’s non-violent campaign for independence, Mohandas Gandhi. She made a famous photograph of him called “Gandhi at His Spinning Wheel.”  She was the last person to photograph Gandhi before he was murdered in nineteen forty-eight.

"The Spinner" (Margaret Bourke-White)   

VOICE TWO:

After that, Bourke-White traveled to South Africa. Her job was to tell the story of the black people who worked in the country’s gold mines. To get the pictures she wanted, she followed the workers deep into the mine tunnels.

In the early nineteen fifties, she went to Korea to photograph the effects of war on the Korean people. She took a famous photograph of a returning soldier reunited with his mother in South Korea in nineteen fifty-two. The mother had believed that her son had been killed several months earlier in the Korean War.

VOICE ONE:

Margaret Bourke-White tried to make her pictures perfect. Often, she was not satisfied with what she had done. She would look at her pictures and see something she had failed to do, or something she had not done right. Reaching perfection²¹ was not easy. Many things got in the way of her work. She said: “There is only one moment when a picture is there. And a moment later, it is gone forever. My memory is full of those pictures that were lost.”

(MUSIC)

VOICE TWO:

More of Margaret Bourke-White’s beautiful pictures were to be lost, sooner than anyone expected. In the middle nineteen fifties, she began to suffer from the effects of Parkinson’s disease²².

Her hands shook so badly that she could not hold a camera. She wrote a book about her life, called “Portrait of Myself.” And, even though she was unable to take photographs, she continued to work for Life magazine until nineteen sixty-nine. She died in nineteen seventy-one at the age of sixty-seven.

Margaret Bourke-White was a woman doing what had been a man’s job. Her work took her around the world, from factories to battlefields. Her life was full of adventure. She was one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century.

(THEME)

VOICE ONE:

This program was written by Shelley Gollust. It was produced by Lawan Davis. I’m Barbara Klein.

VOICE TWO:

And I’m Steve Ember. Join us again next week for People in America in VOA Special English
 

1 captured   

俘获( capture的过去式和过去分词 )； 夺取； 夺得； 引起（注意、想像、兴趣）

参考例句：

• Allied troops captured over 300 enemy soldiers. 盟军俘虏了300多名敌方士兵。
• Most of the rebels were captured and disarmed. 大部分叛乱分子被俘获并解除了武装。

2 federal   

adj.联盟的；联邦的；(美国)联邦政府的

参考例句：

• Switzerland is a federal republic.瑞士是一个联邦共和国。
• The schools are screaming for federal aid.那些学校强烈要求联邦政府的援助。

3 activist   

n.活动分子，积极分子

参考例句：

• He's been a trade union activist for many years.多年来他一直是工会的积极分子。
• He is a social activist in our factory.他是我厂的社会活动积极分子。

4 Congress   

n.(代表)大会；(C-:美国等国的)国会，议会

参考例句：

• There were some days to wait before the Congress.大会的召开还有几天时间。
• After 18 years in Congress,he intented to return to private life.在国会供职18年后，他打算告老还乡。

5 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

6 Soviet   

adj.苏联的，苏维埃的；n.苏维埃

参考例句：

• Zhukov was a marshal of the former Soviet Union.朱可夫是前苏联的一位元帅。
• Germany began to attack the Soviet Union in 1941.德国在1941年开始进攻苏联。

7 bomber   

n.轰炸机，投弹手，投掷炸弹者

参考例句：

• He flew a bomber during the war.他在战时驾驶轰炸机。
• Detectives hunting the London bombers will be keen to interview him.追查伦敦爆炸案凶犯的侦探们急于对他进行讯问。

8 toward   

prep.对于，关于，接近，将近，向，朝

参考例句：

• Suddenly I saw a tall figure approaching toward the policeman.突然间我看到一个高大的身影朝警察靠近。
• Upon seeing her,I smiled and ran toward her. 看到她我笑了，并跑了过去。

9 civilians   

平民，百姓( civilian的名词复数 )； 老百姓

参考例句：

• the bloody massacre of innocent civilians 对无辜平民的血腥屠杀
• At least 300 civilians are unaccounted for after the bombing raids. 遭轰炸袭击之后，至少有300名平民下落不明。

10 explosions   

爆炸( explosion的名词复数 )； 爆发； 激增； （感情，尤指愤怒的）突然爆发

参考例句：

• Soon afterwards five explosions were heard from the area. 此后不久从那个地方传来五次爆炸声。
• They were monitoring the upper air to collect evidence of atomic explosions. 他们正在检测高空空气以收集原子爆炸的证据。

11 divorce   

n.离婚；分离；vi.离婚；vt.离婚；脱离

参考例句：

• Did he divorce his wife or did she divorce him?是他要和妻子离婚，还是妻子要和他离婚？
• None of us like the divorce of word and deed.我们都不喜欢言行不一。

12 jointly   

ad.联合地，共同地

参考例句：

• Tenants are jointly and severally liable for payment of the rent. 租金由承租人共同且分别承担。
• She owns the house jointly with her husband. 她和丈夫共同拥有这所房子。

13 combat   

n.战斗，斗争，格斗；vt.与...斗争，与...战斗

参考例句：

• The police are now using computers to help combat crime.警方现在使用电脑打击犯罪活动。
• A reporter interviewed the combat hero.记者访问了这位战斗英雄。

14 allies   

联盟国，同盟者； 同盟国，同盟者( ally的名词复数 )； 支持者； 盟军

参考例句：

• The allies would fear that they were pawns in a superpower condominium. 这个联盟担心他们会成为超级大国共管的牺牲品。
• A number of the United States' allies had urged him not to take a hasty decision. 美国的一些盟友已力劝他不要急于作决定。

15 allied   

adj.协约国的；同盟国的

参考例句：

• Britain was allied with the United States many times in history.历史上英国曾多次与美国结盟。
• Allied forces sustained heavy losses in the first few weeks of the campaign.同盟国在最初几周内遭受了巨大的损失。

16 warship   

n.军舰，战舰

参考例句：

• He is serving on a warship in the Pacific.他在太平洋海域的一艘军舰上服役。
• The warship was making towards the pier.军舰正驶向码头。

17 survivors   

幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The survivors were adrift in a lifeboat for six days. 幸存者在救生艇上漂流了六天。
• survivors clinging to a raft 紧紧抓住救生筏的幸存者

18 airfield   

n.飞机场

参考例句：

• The foreign guests were motored from the airfield to the hotel.用车把外宾从机场送到旅馆。
• The airfield was seized by enemy troops.机场被敌军占领。

19 Nazi   

n.纳粹分子，adj.纳粹党的，纳粹的

参考例句：

• They declare the Nazi regime overthrown and sue for peace.他们宣布纳粹政权已被推翻，并出面求和。
• Nazi closes those war criminals inside their concentration camp.纳粹把那些战犯关在他们的集中营里。

20 imaginary   

adj.想象中的，假想的，虚构的，幻想的；虚数的

参考例句：

• All the characters in this book are imaginary.此书中的所有人物都是虚构的。
• The boy's fears were only imaginary.这小孩的恐惧只是一种想象。

21 perfection   

n.尽善尽美，无比精确

参考例句：

• Their works reach to a great height of perfection.他们的作品到了极完美的境地。
• The picture wants something of perfection.这幅画还有些不够完美。

22 disease   

n.疾病，弊端

参考例句：

• The doctors are trying to stamp out the disease.医生正在尽力消灭这种疾病。
• He fought against the disease for a long time.他同疾病做了长时间的斗争。