BOURKE WHITE MARGARET (1904 1971) The Liberation of Buchenwa

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Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000

BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET (1904-1971)
The Liberation of Buchenwald. Silver print, 10x13 1/2 inches (25.4x34.3 cm.), with a hand stamp with Bourke-White's credit and a date (1945), in ink, on verso. 1945; printed 1966-72

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From Vernon Merritt III (1940-2000), a staff photographer at Life Magazine from 1966-72.

Margaret Bourke-White's haunting photograph depicting survivors of the death camp at Buchenwald, a village near Weimar, is one of the startling images of the 20th century. Made in April 1945 on assignment for LIFE magazine, Bourke-White was among a retinue of journalists and photographers accompanying General George Patton's Third Army through Germany. While pictures of Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and other notorious concentration camps were reproduced at the close of the war, interestingly, the image was not published until nearly fifteen years later, when the magazine commemorated its silver anniversary on December 26, 1960.

In Bourke-White's memoir, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly (1946), which was subtitled "A Report on the Collapse of Hitler's 'Thousand Years,'" Bourke-White recalls the scene confronting the Allied troops who liberated Buchenwald and her own agonized response:

There was an air of unreality about that April day in Weimar, a feeling to which I found myself stubbornly clinging. I kept telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible sign in the courtyard before me only when I had a chance to look at my own photographs. Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier between my self and the white horror in front of me.

The whiteness had the fragile translucence of snow, and I wished that under the bright April sun which sone from a clean blue sky it would all simply melt away. I longed for it to disappear, because it was there I was reminded that men actually had done this thing--men with arms and legs and eyes and hearts not so very unlike our own. And it made me ashamed to be a member of the human race.