This Artist’s Portraits of Isolated New Yorkers Invoke Legendary Photographer Margaret Bourke-White (Who Happens to Be Her Great-Aunt)

“COVID-19 has turned me much more into an artist,” says the
photographer Caroline White. Since the outbreak reached American
shores, White has been photographing people in lockdown, often
taking their portraits through the windows of their homes.

White has primarily worked as a commercial photographer,
focusing on brands and lifestyle influencers. But now she feels
she’s following more in the footsteps of her famous great-aunt,
Margaret Bourke-White, the first female photojournalist
for LIFE magazine, who documented life in the
Dust Bowl and the struggles of the Great Depression, and was the
first Western photographer to capture images of the Soviet Union’s
industrial infrastructure.

“I think [Bourke-White] would be saying, ‘OK, Caroline, you’re
finally on to something here,’” White says. “I was always very
intimidated by her.”

Before the pandemic, White had taken a few photos of clients
through glass at hotels and restaurants, and found that she enjoyed
playing with the reflections and the voyeuristic side of the
images.

Once the outbreak struck, White started shooting friends and
neighbors, capturing intimate and isolated moments. Then she began
booking appointments with life coaches looking for social media
content that fits the current mood.

“There’s this combination of sadness and beauty, and loneliness.
Some of them are kind of hopeful,” said White of her subjects.
“They’re all beautiful, in a way.”

Now, with soaring unemployment and a new economic crisis on our
hands, White keeps thinking back to her great-aunt’s seminal images
of the Great Depression.

“Things are certainly coming full circle,” White said. At the
same time, the lives she photographs are still more comfortable
than many of her great-aunt’s pictures. “These are all people with
houses, homes, apartments, I haven’t photographed anyone living in
a tent or a trailer yet. It shows how cozy and comfortable and
lucky a lot of people are.”

Lately, White’s been thinking a lot about one of Bourke-White’s
most famous photographs, of African-American men, women, and
children on a breadline, standing beneath a cheerful billboard that
proclaims the US to have the “world’s highest standard of
living.”

“The contrast is so prevalent and has become so much more
exaggerated than it already was,” said White, who has donated some
of the proceeds from the sales of her recent work to the LA
Regional Food Bank. “I am thinking of going to photograph the lines
for food banks.”

See more photos from White’s “Quarantine Through Glass” series
below.

The post This Artist’s Portraits of Isolated New Yorkers
Invoke Legendary Photographer Margaret Bourke-White (Who Happens to
Be Her Great-Aunt) appeared first on artnet News.