The Twining of Art and Photojournalism
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document in english
journalism
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published 02/06/2008
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SummaryBy the decisive spring of 1945, Allied Forces had entered Germany and were pushing towards the Rhine River. A series of bombing campaigns destroyed a number of major cities, crippling German industry and leading to the defeat of the Third Reich. Among the war correspondents who chronicled the destruction of German industry was Margaret Bourke-White, a photojournalist on assignment for Life magazine. Among the hundreds of photographs she snapped during her time as a war correspondent is an image of the wrecked Hoherzollen Bridge in Cologne, Germany. It is not a well-known photograph – her images of ruined German cities would soon be eclipsed by her chronicling of concentration camp horrors – but it reflects her function as a war correspondent charged with informing the public. Simultaneously, however, the photo reflects her keen sense of artistry honed by years of pioneering industrial photography and glorifying the machine age. The photograph thus echoes two warring impulses.
Table of Contents
- At the time she snapped Hohenzollern Bridge, Margaret Bourke-White was already one of the top photographers of her day.
- Hohenzollern Bridge does indeed serve as a telling document of the wreckage.
- Today both Royal Air Force and American bombers attacked the Hohenzollern bridge at Cologne.
- Bourke-White's eye for the aesthetic emerges in the photograph primarily through the geometries of the composition.
- As I drove in to the city from Deutz today, it felt like it always did.
- As a war photograph, Hohenzollern Bridge is best contextualized by the intersections of Bourke-White's entire body of work.
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