Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-Whitewas an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry, the firsthand American female war photojournalist, and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her photograph appeared on the first cover. She died of Parkinson's disease about eighteen years after she developed her first symptoms...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth14 June 1904
CityBronx, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Nothing attracts me like a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open.
"Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."
Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.
A kind of golden hour one remembers for a life time... Everything was touched with magic.
I have never forgotten a picture that I ever made.
I have always thought that if I could turn back the pages of history and photograph one man, my choice would be Moses.
Work to me is a sacred thing.
Even while you're in dead earnest about your work, you must approach it with a feeling of freedom and joy; you must be loose-jointed, like a relaxed athlete.
I like to hide my camera and use a remote control, because then no one knows when I'm actually imprisoning their souls in the visual plane of thought or just sitting there, waiting, and then making time stop. The printed film is like a bell used to symbolize its hour. Except it stands for both that hour's and everything's sudden stopping.
I love to write out of doors and sleep out of doors, too. If I sleep under the open sky it becomes part of the writing experience, part of my insulation from the world.
The very secret of life for mewas to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility. I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things, I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance.
Life is beating against the school windows. You must quickly open the doors and go out to learn that no door must be locked against you.
My idea of gardening is to discover something wild in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care until it has a chance to grow and spread.