Margaret Bourke-White
[Photographer, b. 1904, New York, d. 1971, Darien, Connecticut.]
Difficult as these things may be to report and to photograph, it is something we war correspondents must do, We are in a privileged and sometimes unhappy position. We see a great deal of the world. Our obligation is to pass it on to others.
Of course, I am at the very core a photographer. It is my trade—and my deep joy.
[At Buchenwald] using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.
I know of nothing to equal the happy expectancy of finding something new, something unguessed in advance, something only you would find, because as well as being a photographer, you were a certain kind of human being, and you would react to something all others might walk by.
In photographing the murder camps, the protective veil was so tightly drawn that I hardly knew what I had taken until I saw prints of my own photographs.
It was not that I was against marriage, despite my initial unhappy experience. But... I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and human suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance. This was something I could not have if I was torn apart for fear of hurting someone every time an assignment of this kind came up.
