The picture captures Faiz’s words “This sacred morning light, this dawn, bearing the wounds of night/ Surely, this is not the morning we waited for…” than any other attempt could have.
Margaret Bourke-White was born in 1904, in the Bronx, New York. Her interest in photography began as a young girl, when she would pretend to take photographs with an empty cigar box. After studying photography at Columbia University, she was recruited by Henry R. Luce, founder publisher of Time magazine, as a staff photographer for his new business magazine, Fortune.
It was the year 1946 after conclusion of WWII that she was sent by Life, magazine she was working for then, to cover the emerging nations of India and Pakistan. She lived and travelled in India through 1946-47, photographing with an unflinching eye the horrors that were unfolding in a sub-continent torn asunder by an arbitrary line drawn by an Empire on whom the sun was setting. Published in Life magazine, the images sent shock waves across the world.
Bourke-White died in 1971, after a life full of adventure, pioneering a new art form: photo journalism. She remains one of the most important photographers of the 20th century.
