MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE
Buchenwald 1945
time-life lab, new york city
hands: john loengard, 3.4.92

“The sights I have just seen are so unbelievable that I don’t think I’ll believe them myself until I’ve seen the photographs,” Margaret Bourke-White wrote in the captions accompanying her film sent from Germany in April, 1945.

“Hundreds of dead naked bodies…piles of bones, a gallows, a row of incinerators…. But worse than the actual dead are the living dead. And Buchenwald is still inhabited by thousands of these.”

“I had a deep conviction,” she would write later, “that an atrocity like this demanded to be recorded. So I forced myself to map the place with negatives.”

Bourke-White used one 2A x 3A inch film pack and eleven #120 rolls of film that day—taking about 150 pictures. On the pack’s last sheet is the only exposure she made of inmates lined up at a fence outside the camp hospital (red masking has been applied to the negative’s edges).

Life magazine’s sole story on the liberation of the death camps used two other Bourke-White pictures, both taken inside a barracks. This picture, possibly the most unforgettable taken that day, was first published in 1960 in an issue celebrating the magazine’s 25th anniversary.

“Using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me,” Bourke-White wrote in her autobiography. When she first saw prints of her pictures, she wept.