Wednesday 14 June 2006

Today's Birthdays


Margaret Bourke-White 1906-1971

born in New York City 14th June 1906; died in Stamford, Connecticut Aug. 27, 1971; photographer, pioneer of photojournalism; 1920s as a student at Cornell bought her first camera, a $20 second-hand Ica Reflex that had a crack in the lens; worked as as an architectural photographer in Cleveland; 1929 staff photographer with Time magazine and with the new Fortune magazine as associate editor; 1930 sent to the Soviet Union on assignment, the first Western photographer allowed into that country; 1931 she published Eyes on Russia; 1935 asked by Henry Luce to join his newly created Life magazine, and her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on Life's first cover; 1936 traveled the South with novelist Erskine Caldwell, to document living conditions of poor tenant farmers; 1937 they published a book You Have Seen Their Faces.
In 1939 married Caldwell and together they published two more books. North of the Danube (1939, about life in Czechoslovakia before the Nazi invasion) and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941). She was in Moscow when the Germans attacked, and sent photos to Life; 1942 she and Caldwell divorced; went on to photograph US Forces crossing into Germany, concentration camps; also the division of India, Mahatma Gandhi; the Korean War. Quote: "The very secret of life for me...was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility. I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things, I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance."

Che Guevara 1928-1967

born Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna in Rosario, Argentina; died in Bolivia in 1967; Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla leader; qualified as an MD, but chose to get involved in revolution; 1954 met Cuban political emigres Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexco City, joined their cause and was given a tough commando course of professional training in guerrilla warfare by Spanish Republican Army captain, Alberto Bayo, a Maoist; 1956 active in the Cuban Revolution; became a ruthless disciplinarian who unhesitatingly shot defectors; 1959 second only to Fidel Castro in the new government of Cuba; organized and directed the Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria to administer the new agrarian laws expropriating the large land holders; ran its Department of Industries; was appointed President of the National Bank of Cuba; forced non-communist out of the government and key posts; pushed the Cuban economy so fast into total Communism, and into crop and production diversification, that he temporarily ruined it; 1960 as Minister for Industry signed a trade pact with Moscow whereby the USSR bought Cuban sugar in exchange for mercenary support in the Congo and Bolivia; 1965 estranged from Castro when he charged the USSR with being a 'tacit accomplice of imperialism' by not trading exclusively with the Communist bloc and by not giving underdeveloped socialist countries aid without any thought of return; killed by government forces in Bolivia, he became a poster boy for discontented youth in the 1960s and early 70's.