Program Information

Some of the most compelling photographs to emerge from World War II were the images by Margaret Bourke-White, a woman who was accustomed to breaking down barriers erected to keep women out.

A Moment in Time is a brief, exciting and compelling journey into the past. Created to excite and enlighten the public about the past, its relevance to the present and its impact on the future, A Moment In Time is a captivating historical narrative that is currently broadcast worldwide.

Transcript

Lead: For 400 years service men and women have fought to carve out and defend freedom and the civilization we know as America. This series on A Moment in Time is dedicated to the memory of those warriors whose devotion gave, in the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, "the last full measure."

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Some of the most compelling photographs to emerge from World War II were the images by Margaret Bourke-White, a woman who was accustomed to breaking down barriers erected to keep women out. Her unconventional early career photos of industrial plants and architectural designs would have been innovative for anyone but, for a woman photographer, they were ground-breaking--not because there was an absence of female talent but because photography was a field that required years of professional practice to achieve mastery of subject matter, angle and lighting. In the early 20th century it was a vocation inhabited almost exclusively by men.

Yet it was her international work for Life Magazine, especially during World War II as a fully accredited Army Air Force photographer, that firmly established Bourke-White as one of the premier documentarians of that mighty conflict. In Russia for the months of the 1941 German invasion, she was the first American journalist to photograph Joseph Stalin; and the horrific images of Russian suffering that brought Americans their initial view of this new and not very-well trusted ally.

Her pictures of actual air combat and the sheer horror of war opened eyes on the home front. But it was her haunting vision of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, overrun in spring 1945, which illustrated the nightmarish quality of Nazi atrocities, of gaunt survivors and of literal stacks of the dead, that riveted the world...and justified, for many, the sacrifices of the war and awakened the hope that something, anything better, must emerge from such a dreadful conflict.

Seemingly to be nearly always present to snap some iconic representation of history in the making and paving the way for women in the field, Margaret Bourke-White worked until the ravages of Parkinson’s Disease claimed her photographer’s keen steady eye and hand, and brain operations claimed her voice. She died in August 1971.

At the University of Richmond, I'm Dan Roberts.

Virginia Standards