Margaret Bourke-White
was a trailblazing documentary photographer — documenting some of the biggest events of the 20th century. Columnist Matthew J. Palm takes a look at a Cornell Museum show and related talk about her work.
Margaret Bourke-White was a trailblazing documentary photographer — documenting the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of World War II and becoming the first foreigner to document life in Russia under the regime of Joseph Stalin.
Central Florida has its own award-winning documentary photographer, as well: Peter Schreyer, who’s executive director of the Crealde School of Art in Winter Park.
The two come together Tuesday at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Winter Park, where Schreyer will give a talk on the art of documentary photography in conjunction with the Cornell’s exhibition of “Margaret White’s Different Worlds.”
Schreyer’s free talk will not dwell on the photos of the exhibition — which he calls “fabulous.” Instead, he will discuss the role documentary photographers play in capturing moments in history.
The Bourke-White exhibition, for example, focuses on the trailblazing photographer’s work abroad. It not only draws on the museum’s collection of Russian photographs by Bourke-White, who died in 1971, but also explores her groundbreaking and rarely seen works from India, Pakistan and South Africa.
The exhibition’s goal, the museum says, is to provide a “more complex understanding of her role as a woman photographer documenting pivotal moments of change, political consequences, cultural shifts and class transformations.”
Those are all topics near and dear to Schreyer’s heart. A native of Switzerland, he has lived in the United States since 1978 — and spent much of that time examining the changes and cultural shifts of Central Florida locales. Among them: Winter Garden, an African-American community in New Smyrna Beach, the Lake Apopka area and the historically black Hannibal Square neighborhood in Winter Park.
“While I am still fascinated by the constantly changing character of America’s culture,” Schreyer says in his artist’s statement, “I also have come to learn its price tag: uprooted communities, environmental destruction, out of control development and sprawl, and a lack of respect for the past — all resulting in a feeling of disconnect in many of its communities.”
His free talk will include a slide show of his images covering the past three decades.
“I hope that my work will establish more than a photographic record, but will motivate others to become more aware of, to respect and to explore their own community’s history and heritage,” he says.
He’s humbled when he looks at Bourke-White’s work, saying: “It’s a huge honor for me as a fellow documentary photographer to give my talk.”