Popular local storyteller Nan Colton will return to the Catherine Hickman Theater October 16, 2022, to perform her newest character, LIFE Magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White. The show will be a Sunday matinee, 4-6 pm. Tickets are $25 each and proceeds will support the Gulfport Senior Center Foundation.
Colton says Bourke-White’s life was more dramatic than her photographs. Her enthusiasm for this new character promises a powerful not-to-be-missed performance. One of LIFE Magazine’s original four staff photographers, Bourke-White’s picture of Montana’s monumental Fort Peck Dam graced the cover of LIFE’s debut issue in November 1936. Bourke-White broke ground again and again throughout her career, covering momentous events and key historical figures.
In 1930, she was the first Western photographer officially allowed into the USSR. She was America’s first accredited woman photographer in WWII, and the first authorized to fly on combat missions. She was the only Western photographer to witness the German invasion of Moscow in 1941 and the first woman to accompany Air Corps crews on bombing missions in 1942. She was also one of the first photographers to document the horrors of Nazi concentration camps after they were liberated in the spring of 1945.
During the next 12 years, she photographed major international events and stories, including the unrest in South Africa and the Korean War. She was the last person to interview Mohandas Gandhi before he was assassinated. Bourke-White contracted Parkinson’s disease in 1953 and made her last photo essay for LIFE, “Megalopolis,” in 1957