Bourke-White - Portrait of Myself

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

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PORTRAIT OF MYSELF

BY

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE

Contents

OTHER BOOKS BY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE

Those photographs not specifically credited are courtesy of Life Magazine with the exception of those appearing on pages 67, 74, 75, 91, 98, 108 and 109, courtesy of Fortune . Copyright 1929, 1930, 1932, 1934, 1936, 1937, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1950, 1952 and 1959, Time, Inc.

The captions which appear on pages 127 and 135 were first published in You Have Seen Their Faces , copyright 1937 by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White.

TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the many people at Time, Life and Fortune who have helped me; to the unsung heroes and heroines in the Life photo-lab for their technical assistance; to Alfred Eisenstaedt for his portrait of me taken for the jacket of this book, for the photographic record he kept during the time of my illness, and especially for his constant encouragement; to Edward Stanley for his thoughtful suggestions over the years; to Betty Hannifin who gave generously of her time and talents; to my two secretaries, Anne Mills and Travis Rogers, for their understanding and expert help; and most of all to the editors of Life , first for sending me on many of these assignments and secondly for their graciousness in allowing me to use the photographs in this book. There are many others in Asia and Europe as well as American to whom I am also indebted. They are too many to be publicly acknowledged, but I know they will understand my gratitude.

MARGARET, you can always be proud that you were invited into the world, my mother told me.

I dont know where she got this fine philosophy that children should come because they were wanted and should not be the result of accidents. She came from a poor family with a multitude of children, and she had little chance to get an education, although she made up for this after marriage by going to college at intervals until she was over sixty. When each of her own three children was on the way, Mother would say to those closest to her, I dont know whether this will be a boy or girl and I dont care. But this child was invited into the world and it will be a wonderful child.

She was explicit about the invitation and believed the child should be the welcomed result of a known and definite act of love between man and wife (which Mahatma Gandhi believedI was to learn much lateralthough Mother never would have gone along with the Mahatma on his ideas of celibacy between invitations. Mother believed in warmth and ardor between married partners).

Mothers plan of voluntary parenthood was so outstandingly successful in my case that not only did I come along as requested, but I arrived on the specific date that had been decided upon.

This fine flourish to my orderly entry into upper Manhattan was as much the doctors doing as my mothers. In the early evening of June 13 my arrival was imminent, and the doctor had directed my mother to walk the floor to ease and speed the process. He noticed that my father was placing some packages wrapped as gifts on the dining room table, and inquired about it.

Tomorrow is our wedding anniversary, said my father.

Put that woman to bed, ordered the doctor, and devoting himself to postponing my arrival, he held me off till two o'clock the next morning.

This was a good birthday in any case for a little American girl, as on June 14 the whole nation hangs out the Stars and Stripes to commemorate the day when Betsy Ross hung the first American flag. But my friends who know my bad habits, and hear the story of my delayed arrival, are apt to complain that I have never been on time for an appointment since.

I do not know how many joint birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and Flag Days had been celebrated before my mother decided I was old enough to hear her invited-into-the-world theory, but I must have been still quite small. I believe she took the usual road to knowledge, brushing quite hastily through the flowers and the bees, and swiftly made the steep ascent into the more specific pages of the family Medical Book.

This massive Book is one of my most vivid childhood memories. We were not to touch it unless Mother showed it to us. To be given a glimpse into the radiant mysteries of the Medical Book was a reward for good behavior. On such days, my older sister Ruth and I were treated to a graphically unfolding diagram of the physiology of a woman, in which successive leaves were folded back to reveal the muscles, nerves, blood vessels, that lay underneath. On some rare occasion when we had been supremely good children, the last leaves of the chart were folded back, and my sister and I would exclaim rapturously over the dear little baby at the bottom of the diagram, neatly curled up and waiting to be born.

Our home was always full of creatures waiting to be born. Mother and Father were interested in natural history, and I caught that interest with such lasting ardor that it nearly made a biologist of me instead of a photographer. Mother must have been very tolerant, her sympathy for wildlife notwithstanding, to endure the avalanche of glutinous polliwog egg masses, disintegrating fragments of bark dotted with eggs of unknown vintage, and legions of moth and butterfly eggs with which I populated the house. When Mother noticed that one of her children had developed some special interest, she had a wise way of leaving appropriate books around the house. I read the Henri Fabre classics, The Hunting Wasps, The Life of the Grasshopper, lived with the Comstock Handbook of Nature Study, which I consulted constantly as to the care and feeding of my assorted pets. One summer I raised two hundred caterpillars under rows of overturned glasses on the dining room windowsill, brought each its favorite fresh leaf diet daily, hoping some would complete their dramatic life cycle and emerge as moths and butterflies. Only the rare ones did, but when a tell-tale wiggle of a chrysalis or a little rattle inside a cocoon indicated that the last splendid transformation was due, our whole family would sit up all night on the edges of our chairs to watch that magic spectacle of damp shapeless creature crawling from its shell, expanding wrinkled wings until a full-blown butterfly took form under our eyes.