The Cost of Looking: The Ethics of Photographing Familial Trauma in Margaret Bourke-White’s “The Great Migration” (1947)
Adi Jalan
Instructor’s Introduction
WR 152: Family Snaps and Stories explores representations of families and familial groups in three photographic modes: personal snapshots, photojournalism, and artistic portraiture. In the medium of the photo-essay, pictures and words are organized dramatically to render a situation and appeal to one’s understanding and empathy. Life Magazine pioneered the photo-essay genre in the 1940s and introduced primarily white, middle-class Americans to events and situations that may have been remote to them: U.S. racial segregation and economic inequality as well as global environmental catastrophes and political upheavals. “The Great Migration” by Margaret Bourke-White (photographer) and Lee Eitingen (writer) is considered a foundational photo-essay for its attempt to encapsulate the genocidal violence, famine, and movement on foot of over 5,000,000 people in the regions of the Punjab and Bengal, which after division became Pakistan. Today, the eventual number of migrants is estimated to have been 12 to 14 million with hundreds of thousands having lost their lives.
Adi Jalan’s “The Cost of Looking” questions the meaning and efficacy of portraying families at their most vulnerable during the migration crisis. He brings to his argument sources that address the symbolic function of family portraits and the problem of the colonizing gaze in photojournalism. Adi explores the harm of typing people, as British colonial photographers in India originally did, and of aestheticizing the pain of families. As a student from India, Adi recognizes the power of Bourke-White’s photography to document the ethnicized politics that tore the national family apart. However, the voices and specificity of the migrant families are tragically ignored. Adi’s ethical questions are applicable to so many situations today, as our news sources and social media feeds offer glimpses of families in extremis. His essay demonstrates that the rhetorical power of photography only gets you as a viewer so far. You must consider your relationship to the pictured person or family and decide how you, your community, or your government will respond.
Michele Martinez
From the Writer
The Partition is an event that has been deeply embedded in India’s history, shaping present-day life even 79 years after it occurred. In fact, I remember being told that we had an after-school screening and talk recounting its history just a few years ago. But these stories are often microscopic, focusing on the horrors suffered by individual families and, at best, communities. This made me think: surely a country that has suffered years of oppression, and is now being threatened with being split into two right after it was able to fell its own oppressor, could be considered a family in its own right?
The Cost of Looking: The Ethics of Photographing Familial Trauma in Margaret Bourke-White’s “The Great Migration” (1947)
The 1947 Partition of India is widely recognised as one of the most violent and destabilizing events of the 20th century, with between ten and twelve million lives uprooted, entire communities divided overnight, and families fractured in ways that still shape South Asian memories today. In this upheaval, family was both the basic unit under threat and the framework through which trauma was experienced and survived. People fled not alone but in clusters, whether this be with relatives, neighbors, children they protected, or strangers who temporarily became kin through shared danger.
Margaret Bourke-White’s 1947 LIFE magazine photo-essay on the Partition translates this crisis into a sequence of images centered on families and crowds. The “story” opens with a Sikh household posed outside barren land, posed at the literal threshold of dispossession (Fig. 1), and proceeds through scenes of refugees walking, waiting, and crowding onto trains and into camps. Seen together, the photographs read almost like a national family album at the moment it is being violently torn apart. In this essay, I argue that Bourke-White’s photo-essay uses family—literal households, improvised kinship groups, and refugee crowds—as a visual language for national trauma, while raising unresolved ethical questions about representation. Drawing on Julia Hirsch’s account of family photographs, Jennifer Good and Paul Lowe’s analysis of power and “typing” in photojournalism, and Susan Sontag’s writing on images of suffering, I question how this photo-essay shapes the viewer’s understanding of the Partition and how it complicates the act of looking at other people’s pain across time and place.
Fig. 1. “Spindly but determined old Sikh, carrying ailing wife, sets out on the dangerous journey to India’s border.” Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. LIFE, 3 Nov. 1947, pp. 117–125. Google Books.
To give us a framework, let us consider Julia Hirsch. In Family Photographs: Content, Meaning, and Effect, Hirsch argues that family photographs help construct identity and can function as metaphors for larger social structures, including the nation itself (Hirsch 16). Essentially, in a family album, individual images of parents, children, and homes combine into a visual story about continuity, belonging, and shared history. When political upheaval tears those structures apart, a family photograph becomes a way of visualizing what has been lost as well as what remains.
As the picture essay unfolds, the repetition of domestic groupings turns family unity and family rupture into metaphors for a nation breaking apart, with each household standing for countless others whose stories LIFE’s pages could not contain. At this level of the photostory, these images suggest that the Partition is not just a geopolitical event but an intimate catastrophe measured in lost homes and fractured lineages. The family photograph then, in Hirsch’s sense, becomes a record and a symbol, documenting people as a measure of the fragmentation of a shared political and cultural home.
Not all of Bourke-White’s photographs are this intimate, though. Some pull back to show crowds so large that individual relationships become impossible to distinguish. In Fig. 2, a young man and a boy appear in the foreground. One is visibly distraught, while the other looks straight at the camera with a solemn expression. Behind them stretches a vast field of improvised shelters, making the men appear both anchored and overwhelmed. They occupy the front of the frame, yet the enormity of the camp still threatens to swallow them. This ambiguity, created by distance, almost expands the concept of family. In the chaos of displacement, proximity becomes its own form of survival, creating a unique bond. People move together for protection, share what little they have, and look after each other’s children when necessary, making the crowd seem like improvised households.
Fig. 2. “Misery of the dispossessed is reflected in the face of this Moslem boy, perched on the wall of the Purana Qila fortress in New Delhi. Below him thousands of his unhappy fellows, who have fled their homes in terror, are trying to survive until they can organize a convoy for the long march to Pakistan. In their squalid city of tents and lean-tos they have almost no room to sleep and little to eat. They are surrounded by filth and many will die without ever leaving camp.” Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. LIFE, 3 Nov. 1947, pp. 117–125. Google Books.
At the same time, these crowd images raise questions about how group identities are constructed and labeled. In Patrick French’s 2016 LIFE.com online gallery “The Brutal ‘Great Migration’ That Followed India’s Independence and Partition,” Bourke-White’s images are presented alongside LIFE’s original 1947 captions, which often describe subjects as “Moslem”/“Muslim refugees” or “Hindu families,” even when the photographs themselves do not visually identify religion (French).The gap between visual evidence and editorial labeling pushes viewers to confront how categories are imposed.
On the ground, refugees may have divided camps by religious affiliation, linguistic group, or village of origin. Yet in the magazine, these complexities are flattened into broad types arranged along the same political fault line that led to the Partition. For instance, one original 1947 LIFE caption frames the scene through a single identity category: “Misery of the dispossessed is reflected in the face of this Moslem boy” (Eitingon 117–25). The crowd is not simply a group of people; it becomes a representative sample of “Muslims” or “Hindus” displaced by the drawing of a border, ironically displaying apathy to one of the most gut-wrenching aspects of this forced migration.
This is where Good and Lowe’s account of power and representation becomes crucial. In Understanding Photojournalism, they argue that images are inseparable from the institutions that commission, select, and circulate them (Good and Lowe 78-79). Photojournalists do not work in a vacuum: their pictures are edited, captioned, and laid out within political and economic frameworks that shape what kinds of stories can be told and how those stories appear. Particular attention is paid to the practice of presenting subjects as representatives of broader categories, in order to make complex realities legible to distant audiences, in a method called “typing” (Good and Lowe 84). With this in mind, one may question whether Bourke-White’s Partition photographs also partakes in this system.
It’s important to preface that LIFE is a U.S. magazine aimed primarily at Western readers, many of whom would have had little prior knowledge of South Asian history. In that context, the magazine’s emphasis on religious labels does explanatory work for the viewer, but it also has a cost. By defining people primarily through religion or belief, the photo-story can recall colonial-era photography, where British officials classified colonized subjects into visual “types” as a way to assert knowledge and control. In the Partition essay, this “typing” operates on at least two levels. First, it marks subjects as ethnically and religiously different from the magazine’s assumed audience, creating distance even when the images are emotionally close. Second, it frames the Partition as a conflict primarily between religious communities, which can obscure the roles of colonial governance, political negotiations, and economic interests in producing the crisis.
The layout of the pictures reinforces this notion. When images of Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim families are placed in sequence, they appear to stand in for their communities’ respective positions within this large-scale migration. The editorial emphasis then falls on the photographer’s achievement and on the scale of the migration, rather than on the specific histories and voices of the people pictured. The families become powerful symbols, but symbols that emerge from a “colonial gaze” shaped by distance, institutional authority, and the demands of Western news media (Good and Lowe 79).
Similarly, if Good and Lowe illuminate the power structures behind the Partition’s photographic record, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others helps clarify what is at stake for those who look at these images. Sontag argues that photographs of suffering can provoke compassion or, just as easily, shock, numbness, and eventual apathy in their viewers (Sontag 100–01). They may humanize their subjects, but they can also become objects of aesthetic appreciation, consumed for their dramatic composition while the reality they depict recedes (Sontag 67).
Bourke-White’s Partition photographs sit precisely in this difficult space. Many are “formally” striking with strong contrasts of light and shadow, carefully balanced compositions, and clear focal points. A photograph of refugees walking in single file along a dusty road, for instance, arranges figures in a diagonal that leads the eye into the distance. The image’s beauty is inseparable from its horror—what draws the viewer in visually is the line of people who have lost homes, fields, and streets they grew up on. Sontag reminds us that this double effect is not an accident but part of how war and disaster photographs work. For better or worse, they rely on aesthetic choices to be legible and memorable, even as those same choices risk turning suffering into spectacle (Sontag 76-77).
Only once the essay has established this mixture of metaphor, typing, and aesthetic power does its final image emerge as a culmination rather than a starting point. In Fig. 3, one of the last photographs shows a Muslim family gathered around a small grave as they bury a child who has died of starvation during migration. The figures’ bodies are bent toward the ground, landscape opening behind them in an almost empty expanse. The composition guides the viewer’s eye from the grave to their postures and then outward into the background. While its placement at the end of the essay is intentional, as it condenses the Partition’s devastation into a single scene, it also intensifies the ethical questions raised by Sontag. Does the photograph invite viewers to witness a family’s grief with respect, or does it intrude on an intimate ritual for the sake of a compelling final page? Does it encourage empathy, or does repeated exposure risk numbing readers who encounter it as one more dramatic photograph in a stream of distant tragedies?
Fig. 3. Margaret Bourke-White, “As the bitter migration goes on a Moslem family pauses to bury a child who died of starvation.” Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. LIFE, 3 Nov. 1947, pp. 117–125. Google Books..
These questions become even more complicated when we consider how the meanings of Bourke-White’s images have shifted over time. In 1947, LIFE’s American readers likely encountered the Partition essay as documentation of a crisis unfolding far away, filtered through the magazine’s familiar format of photojournalism. The people pictured were human yet distant, connected to readers through sympathy but separated by geography, race, and even empire. But when the photographs are considered within the context of Bourke-White’s broader portfolio, the frame shifts again. The Partition images become part of a body of iconic work, placed alongside her photographs of the U.S. South, the Soviet Union, and World War II. The families’ suffering becomes one chapter in a larger story about a celebrated Western photojournalist.
For a viewer from the subcontinent, the experience of looking may be different. The images do not simply represent “a humanitarian disaster” but gesture toward specific and intergenerational wounds. Seeing Sikh and Muslim families typed and captioned for Western audiences can be both validating and unsettling: the catastrophe is recognized, yet filtered through a gaze that may not fully acknowledge its political and emotional complexity. Even deciding whether to show these pictures to friends or relatives can feel fraught. Sharing them might invite important conversations about memory and history, but it might also reopen hurt that has never been neatly resolved. The photo-essay thus operates not only as a historical document but as an ongoing site of negotiation over who gets to narrate the Partition and how.
Taken together, these layers of meaning suggest that Bourke-White’s photo-essay cannot be understood only as a record of events in 1947. It uses family—defined through both blood and kinship—as a way of visualizing the trauma of the subcontinent’s division. The essay’s images do not offer easy answers, but nor should they. They should instead invite empathy while avoiding the aestheticization of pain; acknowledge the scale of the Partition but without compressing countless experiences into a handful of representative types. The same photograph can feel like an act of necessary witnessing to one viewer and an intrusion into private grief to another, yet that ambiguity is not a flaw to be solved but a condition to be confronted. To look at Bourke-White’s Partition photographs today is to stand at these delicate crossroads. They leave us with an unfinished question about how to see others’ suffering without reducing them to types, and about how to honor the fragile relationships that allowed people to survive one of the 20th century’s most devastating upheavals.
Works Cited
Eitingon, Lee. “The Great Migration: Five Million Indians Flee for Their Lives.” LIFE, 3 Nov. 1947, pp. 117–125. Google Books, Time Inc.
French, Patrick. “The Brutal ‘Great Migration’ That Followed India’s Independence and Partition.” LIFE.com, www.life.com/history/margaret-bourke-white-great-migration/.
Good, Jennifer, and Paul Lowe. Understanding Photojournalism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Hirsch, Julia. Family Photographs: Content, Meaning, and Effect. Oxford UP, 1981.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Adi Jalan is a sophomore from Bangalore, India, studying Mathematics and Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences. Growing up in India made the struggles surrounding the aftermath of Partition a visible part of daily life, sparking his drive to learn more about such a major part of India’s history. Outside of classes, he is part of BU’s Club Cricket team, as well as The Daily Free Press, BU’s student-run newspaper, and the Undergraduate Economics Association. He thanks his family, who had to sit through his ideation sessions, and Professor Michele Martinez for the close help and feedback she gave throughout the drafting and writing process.