PHOTOGRAPHS
Bourke-White, Margaret
U.S. (1906 - 1971)
The Living Dead of Buchenwald, April 1945
1945
Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 in. (28 x 35.6 cm) image and sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company
FA 97.27
Keywords: War (World War II); Portrait (group); Human figure (male); Human figures (group); Woman artist

One of the most prolific and courageous photojournalists of the 20th century, Margaret Bourke-White recorded most of the major events of the world from the 1920s through the 1950s. In 1927, two years after graduating from college, she became the first staff photographer at Fortune magazine, and in 1936 joined Life magazine. Bourke-White reveled in the challenge of photographing under adverse conditions: in coal and gold mines, steel mills, droughts, floods, death camps, chain gangs, mass migrations of displaced populations, World War II, the partition of India, and the Korean War. She had an unshakable belief in the importance of facts, no matter how distressing they might be. Bourke-White's international fame was solidified by her World War II photography. During the closing days of the war, she moved along the Rhine with General Patton's Third Army. She entered Buchenwald, a concentration camp, with the armies to photograph the dead and dying. This famous photograph of Buchenwald prisoners, The Living Dead of Buchenwald, April 1945, is probably the best known of the thousands of images made of death camps. By including this photograph in the Typology section, we have chosen to shift attention from the artist's documentary intentions in order to allow the image to remind us of the intense depersonalization suffered by the victims of the Holocaust. -- Label copy for After Art: Rethinking 150 Years of Photography, December 4, 1994 to March 26, 1995.

Margaret Bourke-White was a pioneering American photojournalist. She worked as a staff photographer for Fortune in 1929, and then became one of only four staff photographers at the new picture magazine Life, founded in 1935. In fact, one of her photographs appeared on the cover of its first issue. Bourke-White left Life to work as a photographer for the U.S. Army Air Force in 1943, photographing bombing missions throughout Europe and North Africa. In 1945, she was part of the first Allied liberation force to reach the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. Through the barbed-wire fence, she made this picture of haggard survivors awaiting release. With her typical emphasis on the human dimension of every story, Bourke-White created in this image what is surely one of the iconic images of the Holocaust—a picture frequently used to stimulate recollection of its human toll. -- Label copy for The Photographic Impulse: Selections from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, July 12 to November 10, 2002.