Page 3 - To Dragma March 1932

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MARGARET BOURKE-WI •

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The Fascinating Story of That Talented Alpha

0 Photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, O I I

By L O R R A I N E J O N E S M C N A L L Y , NU

SHE loves, so she says, heights—such things as great, multi-storied
skyscrapers and factories. And yet she herself is not very tall; hard-
ly more than a slip of a girl, is Margaret Bourke-White ( O i l ) , who
works high up on the sixty-first floor of the Chrysler Building, New York
City, in her own Studio. On the other hand, there is something about her
personality which suggests heights, a vigor and eagerness which, though
her stature is slight, seem to be capable of carrying her up and up, and
then further upward. Her eyes, deep brown, sparkle with liveliness, and
her hands, long fingered and artistic, twitch to be doing things.

I t was probably that—her love of heights—which sent her off on a
career few women have even so much as thought about, that of an in-
dustrial photographer, and which has placed her, only four years after
college graduation, in a position few women could ever hope to attain. As
a matter of fact, Margaret explained, the idea of going into the field of
industrial photography did not occur to her until she was nearly a gradu-
ate. She had studied art at Columbia University—where she first became
acquainted with photography—when she decided to go out to the Uni-
versity of Michigan and plunge into the field of biology. But when she
had left Michigan and had installed herself in Cornell University to con-
tinue the work in biology, she came to acquire an interest in photography
which, in the end, grew stronger than the other interest and eventually
Mastered it.

Directly after she was graduated from Cornell therefore—1927—she
traveled out to Cleveland and began what has turned out to be—her very
successful career. The thing that really put her on her feet, she said, oc-