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MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (American, 1904-1971) TOWER BRIDGE DURING THE BLACKOUT, LONDON inscribed

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MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (American, 1904-1971) TOWER BRIDGE DURING THE BLACKOUT, LONDON inscribed
MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (American, 1904-1971) TOWER BRIDGE DURING THE BLACKOUT, LONDON inscribed "Tower Bridge of London in the Black-Out, Courtesy of Life Magazine, Margaret Bourke White, PM, 27 Sixth Avenue, Brooklyn" in gold ink on verso vintage gelatin silver print 13 5/16 x 10 3/16 in. (33.8 x 25.9 cm) 1940 PROVENANCE Print discovered in her home in early 1970s (found posthumously) Schoelkopf Gallery, NEW YORK Lawrence Miller Gallery, NEW YORK Private Collection, NEW YORK LITERATURE "England at War: Life Goes on in the Dark," LIFE, January 1, 1940, pp. 40-41 (not illustrated, but taken as a part of this segment) Jonathan Silverman, FOR THE WORLD TO SEE: THE LIFE OF MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE, NEW YORK, 1983, p. 133 (illustrated) In the fall of 1939, life sent Bourke-White to France and England to cover people living under the conditions of the war. This photograph was part of her series depicting London during a blackout. Working throughout the night, Bourke-White used long exposures to register the dark images, lit only by moonlight. A bold driver seems to have ventured onto the bridge, as we see streaks left by headlights receding into the night. The photographs were supposed to appear as a layout in the January 1, 1940, issue of LIFE. The article began as follows. "When night falls on England now, nothing happens. No street lamps go on. No windows light up. London and all the cities and towns of England plunge into the pitch dark of the 17th Century. The silence of the streets is eerie. It is broken now and then by the sound of a tapping cane, by the solitary honk of a bus feeling its way through the black. Some future night it may be broken by the crash of bombs and anti-aircraft shells and the wail of the sirens. But now the risk of walking out at night in London is the considerable danger of getting run over or completely lost in a city of 7,000,000 lit only by a moon" ("England at War: Life Goes on in the Dark," LIFE, January 1, 1940, p. 40). To her surprise and dismay only one of Bourke-White's photographs was published with the article. If the present photograph is representative of the entire series, the layout would have been quite powerful.
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