Santa Fe Public Radio "At Noon" features Margaret Bourke-White exhibition

 

 

KSFR Santa Fe Public Radio

 

The exhibition Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photographer was featured on "At Noon" June 15, 2015.

The work of trail-blazing photo-journalist Margaret Bourke-White is on display in downtown Santa Fe. The Monroe Gallery of Photography opened in Santa Fe in 2002, re-locating from Manhattan where it stood near the targeted World Trade Center towers on September 11th, 2001. The Monroe Gallery specializes in classic black & white photography with an emphasis on humanist and photojournalist imagery. Sid Monroe co-owns the gallery with his wife, Michelle. The Bourke-White exhibit at the Monroe Gallery runs through June 28th.


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San Antonio McNay exhibition offers snapshot of World War II

Alfred Eisenstaedt, V-J Day in Times Square, New York, Aug. 14, 1945. ©Time Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe, New Mexico A jubilant Amererican sailor clutching a white-uniformed nurse in a back-bending, passionate kiss as he vents his joy while thousands jam the Times Square area to celebrate the long awaited victory over Japan.

Monroe Gallery of Photography is very proud to have contributed numerous photographs from its collection to this exhibit.


Via The San Antonio Express News

From iconic images such as Joe Rosenthal’s U.S. Marines raising the flag atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima, to intimate shots from the home front, “World War II in Photographs: Looking Back” offers a slice of life from “the good war” — which ended 70 years ago this year — chronicling both its triumphs and horrors.

The exhibition of more than 40 prints — as well as video and memorabilia — opens Tuesday at the McNay Art Museum and continues through May 10. There are sections on the European and Asian theaters, the home front, the Monuments Men who rescued stolen art from the Nazis, and the Tuskegee airmen.

“It’s an interesting mix,” said McNay director William Chiego, who organized the show from a wide variety of sources, including the Fort Sam Houston Museum and the Library of Congress. “We intentionally interspersed these iconic images with lesser known works to show all sides of the war. We show leaders, but also the ordinary soldiers, sailors, Marines and civilians.”

The exhibition not only commemorates the 70th anniversary and pays tribute to San Antonio’s rich military history, but also honors museum founder Marion Koogler McNay, who was a strong supporter of the war effort at home.

 

McNay’s first husband Don McNay died in the World War I flu pandemic of 1918, which had a lasting effect on her, Chiego said.

“She really cared about servicemen in San Antonio,” Chiego said. “She even provided housing for servicemen here on the grounds and bought houses around town and made them available to servicemen. She knew how important it was to have a place to live and have family nearby.”

“World War II in Photographs: Looking Back” features the work of eminent names such as Margaret Bourke-White (Buchenwald prisoners), Alfred Eisenstaedt (the kiss in Times Square) and Carl Mydans, who captured two of the war’s most timeless moments: MacArthur returning to the Philippines and the Japanese surrender on board the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

And then of course there’s the Rosenthal photo, probably the most beloved image of the war.

“I give lectures on history painting — French and American — and I often end with Rosenthal’s famous image as a 20th-century equivalent of history painting,” Chiego said.

But the exhibition also includes intimate moments such as Toni Frissell’s heartrending shot of a small abandoned boy holding a stuffed animal amidst the destruction of the London blitz.

“It’s important to show how much a photograph is able to document the war and how it relates to the history of photojournalism,” Chiego said. “For San Antonio it’s an important show, and I’m hoping we can get some veterans or children of veterans in here who can tell us more about some of these images. And I hope we can attract a younger audience as well, because I fear they don’t know these images at all.”

sbennett@express-news.net

More Information

“World War II in Photographs: Looking Back”
What: An exhibition of more than 40 WWII photographs ranging from iconic images such as Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day Times Square kiss to intimate images from the home front.
When: Runs through May 10.
Where: McNay Art Museum, 6000 N. New Braunfels
Museum admission: $5 to $10. www.mcnayart.org, 210-824-5368.

Statue of Liberty Crown Reopens

Margaret Bourke-White: Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor, 1952

For one of the best views of New York, you have to get inside a great lady’s head.

Via NBC News

Starting this weekend, it’s possible again as the Statue of Liberty crown reopens to the public on Sunday after a year of renovations. Visitors seeking magnificent vistas of the Big Apple and a glimpse of the famous monument’s inner workings are already snapping up tickets online.

“It’s an experience that stays with you for your entire lifetime,” said Chris Heywood, a spokesman for New York City’s official tourism agency NYC & Company, who still remembers making the climb as a child.

“The Statue of Liberty remains one of the city’s most iconic attractions and there certainly will be a pent up demand for visitors to want to go up and see the crown.”

The renovations promise better access and safer conditions. There are two new staircases, a new elevator inside the pedestal and a lift that will take visitors who are mobility impaired higher into the monument than ever before, said Mindi Rambo, a spokeswoman for the National Parks of New York Harbor.

“For the first time, people in wheelchairs will be able to go up to the top of the pedestal and actually see into the statue, whereas before, the highest level that they ever really got to was the museum level,” Rambo said.

“The lift is brand new, we’ve never had that before and we’re very excited about it.”

There is no elevator service from Lady Liberty’s feet to her head, so visitors must still go up a double spiral staircase to reach the crown. Official pamphlets warn it’s a strenuous journey, but Heywood recalled that it feels short “when you’re looking forward to a view that’s stunning.”

It takes adults up to 20 minutes to make the climb depending on whether they stop to examine the statue’s inner architecture and copper skin, Rambo said.

“You can see the folds of the robe, the interior of the statue, and many people find that fascinating. They stop to take photos and point things out to their kids like, ‘Oh, that looks like the back of her heel,’” Rambo said.

Once at the top, only 10 adults can fit inside the crown, a space that’s much smaller than people expect, Rambo added. Visitors often tell park rangers that they have come because they remember making the trip as a child and want their kids to have the same experience.

 

“I think part of that is just driven by the ability to say that they have made that climb and to look out into the harbor and, I suppose in a way, to look back in time to when people came on the big steam ships,” Rambo said.

 

The crown will be open each week from Thursday through Sunday. If you’d like to visit, you must make a reservation through Statue Cruises – the monument’s ferry transportation provider.

Tickets became available on October 1 and sales have been brisk: just a few dates in December remain available for 2012.

This is the second time in recent years that the National Park Service is reopening the statue’s crown. The attraction was closed after the 9/11 attacks for security reasons and then reopened on July 4, 2009.

National Park Service

Visitors to the crown of the Statue of Liberty get a great look at New York Harbor.

 

 

National Park Service         

National Park Service staff and the media greeted visitors when Lady Liberty's crown reopened on July 4, 2009, after being closed following the 9/11 attacks.

 

The chance to make the climb will give travelers just one more reason to visit New York, which is on track to set another record year for tourism, Heywood said.

Sunday’s crown reopening also coincides with the 126th anniversary of the statue’s dedication.

Margaret Bourke-White: Statue of Liberty

John Edwin Mason: Margaret Bourke-White in South Africa

We have held that Margaret Bourke-White, although highly acclaimed during her career years, has been largely overlooked in modern photography. We highly recommend this post from John Edwin Mason. See part One here.

Margaret Bourke-White in South Africa: Part 2, the Black Problem

Now about the mines. One thing that’s happened to me... from now on I just hate gold and diamonds.

--Margaret Bourke-White

* * *

Note: It's a sad coincidence that I'm posting this piece on the day after over 30 striking platinum miners were killed and nearly 80 were wounded by police bullets in Marikana, South Africa. When I began my research on Margaret Bourke-White's 1949-1950 South African photos nearly a year ago, I was initially drawn to the subject by her powerful and sympathetic portrait of two gold miners. [See below.] She had come to understand the exploitation and degradation that defined their working lives. For her, the men embodied the strength and endurance of all black South Africans in face of odds that were overwhelmingly stacked against them.

It will take some time for conflicting accounts of this tragedy to be sorted out. It seems clear, however, that the root causes of the strike are low wages, dangerous working conditions, and abysmal housing. Just as important is the miners' sense of having been betrayed by their union and abandoned by their government. Eighteen years after the coming of democracy to South Africa, too little has changed in the lives of the country's miners.

You can read reports about these awful events in the South African Mail and Guardian and the New York Times. The South African Daily Maverick has a good piece on the background to the strike.

* * *

Life, 18 September 1950, pp. 110-111. [The magazine was much larger than it looks here -- approximately 14 inches high and (opened) 22 inches across.]

"Visually dazzling but surprisingly naive." In Part 1 of this brief series, that what I had to say about "South Africa Enshrines Pioneer Heroes", the first of two long photo-essays about South Africa that Margaret Bourke-White produced for Life magazine in 1950. In accounting for Bourke-White's unexpected naivete -- she was, after all, one of most highly regarded photojournalists of her generation -- I noted that she had been in the country for a very short time when she shot the story on the dedication of the Voortrekker Monument. She was also seduced, I thought, by the sheer spectacle of the occasion and the warmth of the people that she met

Full Post here.

Related: "The Daring Camera Girl"

Must Read

Via John Edwin Mason

Margaret Bourke-White & the Photography of Segregation: Life Magazine, 1956

"Photographs are notoriously ornery critters. Their meanings are as slippery as eels, as impossible to nail down as Jell-O is to a wall. Photos mean different things to different viewers and different things in different contexts.

I'm absolutely certain that Margaret Bourke-White didn't want the photos that she made for Part III of Life magazine's 1956 series on racial segregation in the South -- "The Voices of the White South" -- to be a defense of white supremacy and an affront to African Americans. But that's exactly what they were."

Full post.

67 Years after Liberation, Bourke-White Print of Buchenwald Sells for Over $115,000

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"Sotheby's Photographs sale brought $3.8 million and achieved strong prices
for the masters of 20th-century photography, including Ansel Adams,
Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Steichen and Robert Mapplethorpe."

Sotheby's Photographs Sale
April 3, 2012
LOT 74: MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE, 1904-1971


THE LIVING DEAD AT BUCHENWALD
large-format, ferrotyped, mounted, annotations in ink on the reverse, framed, 1945 (Portrait
of  Myself, pp. 268-9; Callahan, pp. 152-153; Goldberg, pl. 45; Retrospective, p. 93; Best of
Life, p. 20)
15 5/8 by 19 3/8 in. (39.7 by 49.3 cm.)

ESTIMATE 30,000-50,000 USD
Sold: 116,500 USD

Related: April in History: The Liberation of Buchenwald
             
              Modern print information available here

LIFE photographers: "He or she needs to bring empathy, insight, patience and frequently courage"

America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine, BBC Four
How the camera captured America's golden age
Via The Arts Desk

by Adam Sweeting  Friday, 02 December 2011


Before the internet and the Kindle were invented, generations of Americans saw their lives refracted through the pages of Life magazine. In particular, through its photography, since writers at Life were largely relegated to supplying glorified picture captions. They were also allowed to carry the photographers' equipment.

Obviously the idea of being an object of reverence appeals to photographers. Portrait and fashion snapper Rankin has long admired the work of the great Life lenspersons, and in this film he reviewed their accomplishments and tracked down some of the magazine's fabled survivors. Not that Rankin is the world's greatest TV presenter, frankly. His voice is the sort of nondescript Home Counties drone that American satirists love to parody. As an inquisitor, he looked a bit blank when he found himself face to face with the likes of Burk Uzzle, now retired to small-town North Carolina after a vivid career in which one of many highlights was being assigned to document Hugh Hefner and his voluptuous Playmates at Hef's mansion.

Luckily, though, most of his subjects were rather awesome characters who had no difficulty in filling the screen unaided (Life photographer Bill Eppridge, pictured right). Indeed, this seemed to be rather the point - a photographer isn't, or shouldn't be, just some geek who knows how to work a camera and programme an array of electronic flashguns. He or she needs to bring empathy, insight, patience and frequently courage to an assignment if they're going to bring back anything that will resonate with readers.

Amid a mostly male roll call, Margaret Bourke-White inevitably stood out, not only because she was a fabulous photographer, but also for the way she candidly used her sexuality to gain maximum professional advantage. A highly successful tactic was bedding American generals in order to get priceless wartime scoops. A rival lensman was chastised by Life HQ because she was beating him to the best stories. He cabled back: "Bourke-White has a piece of equipment that I don't have."

But there were many other stars in the dazzling Life firmament. Alfred Eisenstaedt (pictured left with Marilyn Monroe) was the magazine's grand eminence, and a pioneer of the "candid" style in which he used a Rolleiflex camera held unobtrusively at waist level. W Eugene Smith did pioneering work in the photo-essay genre, gaining extraordinarily intimate access to his subjects in stories like "Career Girl" or "Country Doctor". Rankin noted that "Smith was a tortured genius, Life's Van Gogh." John Loengard shot Marilyn Monroe, The Beatles and the Vietnam War.

Life became so singular and influential during the mid-20th century, when 100 million readers would see it every week, that the question inevitably arose of to what extent the magazine was making the news rather than merely recording it. John Shearer's assignments covering the Civil Rights protests in the 1960s became a part of the fabric of social change, as did his astonishing work during the 1971 Attica prison riot. Shearer spent four days inside the jail as a ferocious miniature war raged, leaving 41 men dead.

Life took a dim view of the Vietnam conflict and ignored demands to tone down its frequently shattering battlefield photographs. British photographer Larry Burrows (seen in clips from a 1969 Omnibus film) talked about his concerns that he was exploiting wartime deaths and suffering, but felt his pictures were justified if they "contribute to the understanding of what others were going through". He was killed in Laos in 1971 (Larry Burrows, pictured right).

Rankin reckoned that it was the arrival of celebrity culture in the 1970s which pulled the carpet out from underneath Life, which published its last issue in December 1972. Celebs were going to rule, and the intimate, deeply researched work that Life had specialised in would become outmoded. Glaswegian snapper Harry Benson, a transplanted Daily Express veteran, was in at the death of Life, and famously became the man who gained access to mad chess genius Bobby Fischer as he played his epic tournament against Boris Spassky in Iceland. The recent documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World gave the impression that Benson had become friendly with Fischer, but the photographer didn't see it that way.

"Everyone knew he was a piece of shit, he was terrible!" he declared. "But it was worth fighting for, to get as close as you can and then get out." He never, ever wanted to become friends with any of his subjects, he added. Photography was apparently no mere popularity contest.

REVIEW: "ICONIC CONSCIOUSNESS"



Eric Smith: Funeral for Iraq War Soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006

By Maylin Wilson Powell
The Albuquerque Journal
July 29, 2011

In our current era of citizen journalism, when amateur submissions are used on Internet news sites, technology and media consolidation have rendered the work of professional photojournalists a much more contingent endeavor. There is, of course, great value in the kind of rousing images that were taken by young women with cellphones during the heat of Egypt’s uprising and transmitted instantaneously around the planet. But, what of the men and women who consistently invested in firsthand photographic reporting over a number of years? The number of photojournalism images published by news organizations has shrunk dramatically in the shift of emphasis to more entertainment and lifestyle coverage. Without courageous and seasoned photojournalists actually going and talking to and taking pictures of people during the eruptions of wars and revolutions, our understanding of the world becomes more and more distorted.

“History’s Big Picture” exhibition at the Monroe Gallery of Photography is a gripping selection of images that brings home the power of visual storytelling. Hung chronologically from the 1930s to the present, these 58 photo images by the masters of 20th and 21st century photojournalism are predominately sobering. The overall impression of history and the big picture presented here tells a collective story of “Woe is us.”

More than a third of the images are from what is known as the “Golden Age” of photojournalism, the 1930s to the 1950s, when magazines including LIFE, Look and Sports Illustrated (USA), Paris Match, and the Berliner Illustrierte Zetung along with newspapers The Daily Mirror (London) and The New York Daily News built huge reputations and circulations based on photography by such artists as Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White. The show opens with the work of these three celebrity photojournalists, including Eisenstaedt’s image of the self-satisfied architects of fascism, “The First Meeting of Mussolini and Hitler, Venice, June 1934,” along with an especially chilling image of the vampirish “Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Geneva, September, 1933,” the Reich’s minister of propaganda, himself a failed journalist and writer who organized the 1938 Kristallnacht for burning books and synagogues.

Capa’s “D-Day, Normandy, Omaha Beach, 1944″ is actually a great watery blur of a soldier swimming toward such massive implements for killing as fortified tank turrets and hundreds of thousands of land mines. Bourke-White is represented by two images –– the first captures three raggedy children in front of a raggedy sign that announces “Entering New Deal, Montana, 1936,” which was a mini-boomtown that faded away in the 1940s after the completion of a federally financed dam. Her second image is a riveting, crowded composition of “Buchenwald Prisoners, 1945″ each of them staring directly at us and still pressing forward across more than half a century from behind a metal fence on the day of their liberation. Scanning their figures and faces, it brings into question what the concepts of liberation and survival could mean to every one of these individuals and their descendants.

On view are five iconic images that were seen on the front pages of newspapers around the world the day after they were shot on location. In the case of Joe Rosenthal’s “Marines Raise the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945,” the U.S. government also printed 3.5 million posters for free distribution, and this image was certainly the template for Thomas E. Franklin’s raising of the flag by “Firefighters at Ground Zero, Sept 11, 2001.”

As the gallery notes, other justly famous images of the turbulent and troubled 1960s still “shake and disquiet us,” including Robert Jackson’s “Jack Ruby Shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, November 24, 1964,” Eddie Adams’ “Execution in Saigon, South Vietnam, February 1, 1968,” John Olson’s “U.S. Marines at battle of Hue, Vietnam, 1968,” and Bill Eppridge’s assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

Mixed in with these images that are part of the collective consciousness of baby boomers and assembled to celebrate the gallery’s 10th year in Santa Fe (after 14 years in Manhattan) are many images that are no less powerful but that have never before been exhibited on gallery walls. All of the conventions of fine art composition and framing are deployed by these masters in the heat of the “decisive moment.” Cameras are angled upward to frame such famous men as Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. as towering presences. Ground level shots with strong diagonals that signal things gone seriously awry including Eppridge’s splayed, spot-lit pieta of Bobby Kennedy attended by a waiter on bended knee, Loomis Dean’s tilting blasted “Mannequins after nuclear test at Yucca Flats, Nevada, May 1955,” and John Filo’s “May Vecchio grieving over slain student, Kent State, May 1970.” Unflinching, upright, straight-ahead perspective confers dignity and gives the viewer a place of privilege in such heart-wrenching situations as Ed Clark’s image of a tear-stained African American accordionist “Navy CPO Graham Jackson playing” a dirge for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral cortege.

Sixties minimalism is used to great effect in Steve Schapiro’s austere and stripped-to-the-essential “White Women, Arkansas, 1961,” and in Eric Smith’s somber empty auditorium “Funeral for Iraqi War soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006.” Like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s late-1970s empty “Theatres” lit only by a streaming movie projector, Smith’s flag-draped, centrally illuminated casket with no one in attendance is an eerie metaphor, in this case, of offshore deaths that are intended to be kept out of sight and out of mind. In 2003, the Bush administration summarily banned all coverage of the bodies of U.S. troops returning from Iraq, a ban that was lifted in February 2009.

 Hadai Mizban: Iraq "War Games", Baghdad, Iraq, July 2, 2007 (c. AP)

That the gallery is almost always crowded with people talking about these images is due to a multitude of factors. The core reason is the consummate talent, quick response and fortitude of photojournalists working in often terrifying situations where their cameras make them prime targets. Are all those young viewers, who never had the opportunity to see them in print, a testimony to their thirst for truth, rather than entertainment? Certainly, it also has to do with the central location and welcoming open door of Monroe Gallery, a valuable addition to Santa Fe and a recognized international and persistent player in recovering and encouraging the best photojournalism.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the gallery is sponsoring an evening of conversation, next Friday, August 5, from 5 to 7 p.m., between two American photojournalists turned editors, Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo.

If you go WHAT: “History’s Big Picture”
WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don GasparÂ
WHEN: Through Sept. 25.
HOURS: Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
CONTACT: 505.992-0800 or info@monroegallery.com

Carl Mydans:  Demonstrators in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) Strike, 1937 (c.Time Inc.)



Read more: ABQJournal Online » Photos Capture History http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2011/07/29/north/photos-capture-history.html#ixzz1TUabZmqX
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APRIL IN HISTORY: THE LIBERATION OF BUCHENWALD

Margaret Bourke-White: Buchenwald Prisoners, 1945 (©Time Inc.)

A detachment of troops belonging to the US 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, 6th Armored Division of the US Third Army, arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 under the leadership of Captain Frederic Keffer.

Impending victory was sobered by the grim facts of the atrocities which allied troops were uncovering all over Germany. Margaret Bourke-White was with General Patton's third army when they reached Buchenwald on the outskirts of Weimar. Patton was so incensed by what he saw that he ordered his police to get a thousand civilians to make them see with their own eyes what their leaders had done. The MPs were so enraged they brought back 2,000. Bourke-White said, "I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons who would die the next day... and tattooed skin for lampshades. Using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me." LIFE published in their May 7, 1945 issue many photographs of these atrocities, saying, "Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them."

Margaret Bourke-White prepares to take a photo of corpses, April 16, 1945

Photo Credit: USHMM

 The Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

October 2, 1869 – January 30, 1948

Margaret Bourke -White: Gandhi, 1946

On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot while he was walking to a platform from which he was to address a prayer meeting. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a Hindu nationalist with links to the extremist Hindu Mahasabha, who held Gandhi responsible for weakening India by insisting upon a payment to Pakistan. Godse and his co-conspirator Narayan Apte were later tried and convicted; they were executed on November 15, 1949. Gandhi's memorial at Rāj Ghāt, New Delhi, bears the epigraph "Hē Ram", (Devanagari: हे ! राम or, He Rām), which may be translated as "Oh God". These are widely believed to be Gandhi's last words after he was shot, though the veracity of this statement has been disputed. Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the nation through radio:

"Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that; nevertheless, we will not see him again, as we have seen him for these many years, we will not run to him for advice or seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow, not only for me, but for millions and millions in this country."