Girl with a Camera Read online

  And I also had a plan. I loved the idea of New York, but I believed the city was so competitive, so hard to make a living in, that I would end up taking on too much monotonous work to pay the rent. How would I ever grow as a photographer, if I was always scrambling to survive? Maybe someday I could live in New York, but not yet.

  I would move back to Cleveland. The first step was to write to Mr. Moskowitz and ask him for the names of Cleveland architects who had graduated from Cornell. This was the city where I could launch my career as an architectural photographer.

  18

  Cleveland—1927

  I PACKED UP MY DIPLOMA AND MY CAMERA, CAUGHT the train from Ithaca to Buffalo, and boarded the night boat across Lake Erie to Cleveland. I was on the deck of The City of Buffalo when it sidled up to the pier, paddlewheels churning, the outlines of Cleveland emerging from the early morning mist. When I’d lived here three years earlier as Peggy Chapman, I’d explored the docks and railroads and foundries with the idea of making a photographic portrait of the city. But my teaching, my college classes, and my troubled marriage hadn’t left me the time or energy to follow through. Now I was ready for anything.

  After a cup of coffee to wake me up, I went to my mother’s house. I found her preparing to rush off to work at the school for the blind. She seemed happy to see me, but she went directly to the question looming most important in her mind. “What about Chappie?”

  “That’s over,” I said. “You were right. We were too young.” There was much more to it, but it was still too painful to talk about. I wondered if I’d ever be able to tell her about Mrs. Chapman’s cruel words or Chappie’s black moods.

  She looked at me for a long moment and sighed. “I’m truly sorry, Margaret,” she said. “I so much wanted this to be the right thing for you. I’m sure you didn’t choose the easy way.” Then she straightened up and said briskly, “The little room is ready for you. I don’t mind telling you, it will be nice to have you home again. It’s been awfully lonely since your father died. And I know Roger will be glad to have you around.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her then that I wanted to be on my own, and not have to answer questions or offer explanations when my camera kept me out until all hours.

  Almost on cue, my sixteen-year-old brother stumbled into the kitchen, rumpled and yawning. I had not seen much of Roger over the past few years, and he appeared to have changed from a timid little boy into a great, hulking young male. “Hi, Peg.”

  Mother frowned, her mood making a right-angle turn from pleasure at seeing me again to disapproval at this monosyllabic creature now denuding the icebox.

  “Would you care for some breakfast, Margaret?” Mother asked, adding pointedly, “I assume there’s a little something left. But you’ll have to fix it yourself. I must leave for work.”

  As soon as Mother was out the door, Roger visibly relaxed. He dropped a blob of butter into the frying pan. “Want some eggs? Scrambled or fried?”

  “Over easy.”

  Roger cracked two eggs into the sizzling butter. “You are so damn lucky, Peg,” he said. Had he actually said damn? “You remember how she grilled me when I was a little kid? And I had to tell her everything that happened? Even my dreams! I used to make things up, just to get her off my back. And it’s no better since Father died. Worse, in fact.” He flipped the eggs expertly, turned them out onto a plate, and sat down across from me.

  “I didn’t realize it was so hard for you,” I said. “Mother didn’t question me about my dreams, but she was very demanding. ‘Always take the harder path,’ she told me. She wanted us to be successful, and she knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

  “I just wish she’d get married again,” Roger said, finishing one glass of milk and pouring another.

  “You say that, but you’d change your tune if she did. Marriage isn’t the cure for anything. I promise you that.”

  Roger looked at me closely. “You and Chappie are done for?”

  My throat tightened, and I felt tears welling. My reaction caught me off guard. I’d thought I was over Chappie. “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Sorry,” Roger mumbled. “Shouldn’t have asked. None of my business.”

  “Let’s talk about you. What are your plans?”

  He grimaced. “Finish school and get the hell out of here.”

  “Worthy goals,” I said. “Nothing beyond that?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet,” he growled. He collected his books and headed out the door.

  “Thanks for breakfast,” I called after him, then carried my dishes to the sink and washed them and my brother’s—better than I would have done when Chappie and I were together.

  I unpacked a few things and planned my next moves. Mr. Moskowitz had sent the list of architects I’d asked for. I would start calling on them right away. I didn’t expect it to be easy. I was young, only twenty-three, and that might equal “inexperienced” in the eyes of some. More of a problem than my age—I could always fib about that—was my gender. Few women were architects, few were photographers, and if any were architectural photographers, I hadn’t heard of them.

  I knew that I had to sell myself before I could sell my photographs, and to do that, I had to look as though I knew exactly what I was doing. First, I needed a professional-looking outfit. The Mungers had sent a generous graduation check, and I used it to go shopping. I invested in a smartly tailored gray suit, two plain white blouses, one blue hat and matching gloves, one red hat and matching gloves, and a pair of sturdy black pumps.

  Dressed in one of my outfits, I left my mother’s house in Cleveland Heights the next day, rode the streetcar into the city, and pounded the sidewalks with my photographs. I went from one architect’s office to the next along Euclid Avenue, Cleveland’s main boulevard. The trick was to talk my way past the receptionist, flashing a bright smile. Sometimes I met a minor associate and offered to show my portfolio. Sometimes I got an appointment to come back. More often I was greeted with a flat “No thanks, we don’t need your services.” I did this day after day.

  When the offices closed for the lunch hour, I stopped for a cream cheese sandwich in a diner or a hot dog from a cart on the street. At the end of the day, exhausted and feeling I could not smile and chat my way into one more office, I visited the shoeshine parlor on lower Euclid, where a little old Italian shoemaker cleaned and polished my pumps. While I waited, my stocking feet on a sheet of newspaper, I made notes on file cards, one for each firm I’d called on, with information about whom I’d met and what had been said, and whether I’d worn the red hat and gloves or the blue ones. Then I caught the streetcar back to my mother’s house, ate supper with Mother and Roger, and indulged in a long, hot bath.

  Weeks passed. There were a few vague promises: “We can’t give you anything now, Miss White, but come back and see us in a month or so.” But no assignments. It was hard not to get discouraged.

  One rainy morning in September I slipped into the courthouse I passed nearly every day and filed the papers for my divorce, writing the final chapter of my marriage. I added a hyphen to my name: Margaret Bourke-White. With a hyphenated name people were less likely to call me “Margaret White,” and I thought it sounded more professional.

  I had promised myself that I would move out of my mother’s house and into a place of my own when I was paid for my first assignment. I didn’t have an assignment yet, but after I filed for a divorce, I felt a new sense of my independence. I withdrew all of my savings and rented a minuscule apartment in a slightly seedy part of Cleveland between downtown, with its tall office buildings, and the Cuyahoga River. It was drably furnished with a stained rug and a lumpy couch plus a few mismatched dishes. There was a sink in the tiny kitchen where I could develop my films and a rust-stained bathtub where I could rinse them. That was all I needed. I called it the Bourke-White Studio and ordered letterhead and business cards.

  The first time Mother saw my studio, she shook her head and said, “Well, I suppose it’s
a beginning.”

  Finally I got my first commission.

  A wealthy woman contacted me; a landscape architect I’d called on had suggested that I might be the person to photograph her rose garden. This wasn’t the kind of commission I wanted, but I was in no position to turn it down. The light was perfect, the roses were at their peak, and the shoot went extraordinarily well. I had taped black cloth over the two windows for a makeshift darkroom, but light nevertheless leaked in while I was developing the film and fogged the negatives. I was sick, but determined—there was still a chance to get it right.

  When I rushed back to the garden the next morning, the sun shone brightly, but a rainstorm had swept through during the night. Petals from the rosebushes littered the ground. There was no way to recover from this mistake. It was like a repeat of the sorority pictures I’d ruined in Indiana. Again I had failed miserably, and for the first time since I’d returned to Cleveland, I sat down and cried.

  I pressed on, showing my portfolio and leaving my card, over and over. Then one day, wearing my red gloves and red hat—I had worn blue the first time—I made a follow-up visit to the offices of Pitkin and Mott. They were young, only a few years older than I was, and they had not been in business long. Mr. Mott sported an impressive mustache but was not yet successful enough to have gold cufflinks. On my first visit he’d told me that Architecture magazine wanted to do a feature on a school he and Mr. Pitkin had designed, if they could provide good pictures of the finished building. The job had been assigned to another photographer, but his pictures hadn’t met the standards of the magazine’s editor.

  “Perhaps you can do better,” said Mr. Mott. “We’ll pay you five dollars a picture if your work is satisfactory.”

  He gave me the address of the school, and I went to look it over. The building was handsome, but it sat amid a sea of mud, surrounded by piles of leftover lumber, pipes, and roofing. Mountains of dirt had been dug out for the foundation and trash was left everywhere by workmen. I studied the building from every angle, thinking which might work best. Sunsets always yield a flattering light, so that was when I would return with my camera.

  The next few days were rainy or cloudy. When the weather finally cleared, I discovered that the sun wasn’t setting where I thought it would and was brilliantly illuminating the wrong side of the building. Sunrise would have to do. For the next four days I arrived at the site before dawn, but the sun came up through a thick haze that didn’t burn off quickly enough. On the fifth morning, conditions were perfect, but now I saw a new problem: the rising sun illuminated not only the best angles of the school but all the trash around it.

  Off I hurried to find a flower shop, coaxed the proprietor to open early, and begged him to sell me whatever flowers were cheapest that day. The best price was on asters, and I splurged on as many as I could carry. I lugged them back to the schoolyard and stuck them in the ground in the foreground of the first shot I planned to make. Squatting in the mud, I aimed my camera so that the flowers blotted out the ugly surroundings. Then I pulled up the asters and transplanted them to the next location. If you believed the photographs, the handsome schoolhouse existed in the midst of a lovely autumn garden. Fortunately I had worn an old dress and sweater and a neglected pair of cotton stockings, because I was a mud-covered mess by the time I’d finished.

  The next day I returned to the offices of Pitkin and Mott with a dozen fine photographs. Mott’s mustache twitched with amusement and pleasure at the instant landscaping I’d created, and they bought the whole dozen. “I know the magazine will accept these,” said Mott. “And we’ll all benefit when they’re published,” Pitkin chimed in.

  But publication was months away, and the sixty dollars I collected would have been spent by then. I continued to make the rounds in search of work that paid, leaving little time to take the kind of photographs that I loved.

  One day as I was carrying my portfolio to call on yet another prospect, I passed through a large open space known as Public Square. A Negro preacher stood on a soapbox, delivering an impassioned sermon to a square that was deserted except for a flock of pigeons that ignored him. Preacher and pigeons would have made a wonderful photograph, if I’d had a camera. But my camera was back in my apartment.

  I’d passed a camera store many times on my way to the shoeshine parlor, and I raced down the street to find it. The short, middle-aged man in thick eyeglasses behind the counter goggled as I burst in, shouting, “I need a camera right away! Do you have one I can borrow? Or rent? There’s a perfect photograph out there begging to be taken!” I waved in the direction of the preacher and the pigeons.

  The man behind the counter hauled a Graflex down from a shelf and handed it over without stopping to ask for a deposit, my name, or any sort of identification. I rushed out with the camera, heading for the hotdog cart to buy a bag of peanuts, and sprinted back to Public Square.

  The preacher was still there, still ranting, but now the pigeons had left. Several young boys were hanging around a street corner, and for a few pennies apiece I hired them. “Go scatter these nuts in front of the preacher,” I instructed. The boys stared at me, shrugged, and then did as I told them. The pigeons flocked back, the preacher now had an audience, and I had the photograph I wanted.

  The story ended even better than I could have hoped: the man who had loaned me the camera suggested I show the picture of the preacher to the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, which paid ten dollars for it and put it on the cover of their monthly magazine.

  My benefactor’s name was Alfred Bemis. He’d spent all his life around cameras and darkrooms, and he became my teacher and mentor. I called him Beme.

  19

  A New Style—1927

  MY PHOTOGRAPHIC STYLE WAS CHANGING. I MOVED away from the soft focus Clarence White advocated and discovered the raw beauty in the swampy, gritty area of Cleveland known as the Flats.

  The Flats began where the tall, dignified office buildings ended. The Cuyahoga River slashed the Flats in two. Bridges with trestles resembling abstract sculptures spanned it; railroad tracks chopped it crosswise. Great arches that would soon support more railroad tracks reached across the sky and stitched the parts together. Tugboats nudged barges down the river toward Lake Erie, locomotives hauled cars back and forth, and towering smokestacks shot sparks toward the sky. There were mills and factories everywhere. With my camera I could capture the clamor and confusion of a factory in a way that words could not.

  On the day I borrowed the camera, Beme said when I returned it, “Let’s go have lunch. You look as though you could use something to eat.” Between mouthfuls of ham on rye, I told him how my love for factories and steel mills had started when I was a little girl and my father took me to the foundry.

  “I’ve never forgotten it,” I said. “I can still picture that fiery cascade of liquid metal and the shower of sparks just as vividly as if it were yesterday. It has inspired what I want to do now.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I see that. But you have some mustard on your chin.”

  Beme did everything possible to teach me and everything imaginable to help me. “You should have your own enlarger,” he said when he’d seen what I was using, and somehow he found the parts to cobble one together for me. “You’ve got to have more than one camera,” he said. “I know you love your Ica, but you don’t use the same camera for a portrait that you do for a landscape or the close-up of a piece of machinery. You should have at least two more. Three or four would be best.”

  “Beme, you know I can’t afford that!”

  “Never mind. Eventually you will.”

  Beme knew that I worried about what other photographers were doing—Edward Weston, who could make a woman’s knees look like a piece of sculpture; Alfred Stieglitz and his clouds; Paul Strand’s geometric compositions. But Beme banished my anxiety with one piece of advice I never forgot: “Go ahead, little girl. Never mind what anybody else is doing. Shoot off your own cannon.”

  He hovered over me like
a worried nanny. “You’re too thin,” he dithered. “You’re not eating right, are you? And you’ve got dark circles under your eyes. Do you ever get a decent night’s sleep?” He knew the answer to both questions; I often neglected to eat, and I spent too many nights developing photographs, the only times my apartment was truly a darkroom.

  Beme introduced me to Earl Leiter, a photofinisher who developed photographic film and made prints from the negatives. Earl occupied the darkroom on the fifth floor above the camera shop, and he possessed all the technical expertise that I was lacking. I had an unerring eye for a great subject when I saw it, and my instinct for setting up the shot was excellent. But I made too many mistakes in the darkroom. Chappie once told me, “You have the best eye, but I know how to get the best pictures out of the exposed film.” Earl was like that, too.

  When I worried about my darkroom skills, Beme reassured me, “You can make a technician, and there are a million of them out there, but you can’t make a photographer. I can teach you some techniques, but the rest is up to you.”

  I still rotated the red-hat-and-gloves set with the blue as accessories to my plain gray suit and prim white blouse, but because I was calling on the same companies so often, I needed another outfit. I used my mother’s sewing machine to make myself a purple dress and stitched up a set of camera cloths to cover my head when I was focusing my camera on a tripod—a blue cloth for the blue hat and gloves, a black one to go with the red, and purple to match my new dress.

  “I worry about you, Margaret,” my mother remarked as I pumped the treadle of the sewing machine. “Are you earning enough to make ends meet?”

  “Somehow it always works out,” I said above the chatter of the machine. “If I overdraw my bank account by a few dollars in the morning, by the end of the day I always manage to sell a couple of prints to cover it. And the Chamber of Commerce just ordered several more photographs, so I’m in good shape for a while.” I bit off a thread. “My goal is to sell enough pictures so I can make the kind of pictures that fascinate me.”