Halfway to Freedom / Interview with India: In the words and pictures of Margaret Bourke-White

a) Margaret Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949

pp. xi, 245 pages including 115 photographs documenting India shortly after independence; hardcover without dustjacket, end papers are color illustrated maps of India and Pakistan.
8.5 x 6 in (21.2 x 15 cm)

This book is a report on the new India in the words and photographs of Margaret Bourke-White.

Bourke-White was a photographer working for Life magazine at the time she took these photographs "I arrived in India in the early spring of 1946. The groundwork for independence was being laid, and I stayed for most of that year, traveling about the country . Then I came home, started this book, found I wanted to learn more about India, and returned to spend part of '47 and '48 there. I found startling parallels to Western life and problems; many times I was reminded of the struggles of the infant American republic. India and Pakistan are far from realizing complete 'freedom'; new constitutions do not automatically dissolve old inequities as some events in this book will demonstrate. But to an American, the whole charter of liberty for the Indian people is illuminated by its first five words. 'We the People of India."

Arriving in India in 1946, she sought a photograph of Gandhi. His secretary informed her, she would first have to learn to spin, and she retorted, ‘Oh, I didn’t come here to spin with the Mahatma, I came here to photograph the Mahatma spinning’. The result is the iconic image of Gandhi that has been reprinted endlessly.

b) b) Margaret Bourke-White, Interview with India: In the words and pictures of Margaret Bourke-White, London: The Travel Book Club, 1951

192 pages including 29 black and white plates by Margaret Bourke-White; green clothboards with dust jacket
8.5 x 5.75 x 0.75 in (22 x 14.5 x 2 cm)

Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904 - August 27, 1971) was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She was nicknamed ‘Indestructible Maggie’ and is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet five-year plan, the firsthand American female war photojournalist, and to have her photograph on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine. She died of Parkinson's disease about eighteen years after she developed her first symptoms.

(Set of two)

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