Her primary source for learning about accomplished women, she said, was the pages of LIFE.

Here’s how the former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and First Lady explained it to a packed house at the library (Ms. Clinton’s entire, wide-ranging conversation with author Jennifer Weiner can be viewed here, with Clinton’s comment about LIFE coming at the one-hour mark):

“I learned about women not in school but by reading LIFE magazine every week. And you have to be of a certain age. But that magazine would come to my house every week, and it was a big magazine with great photographs in it, and I’d come home from school and it would be sitting there on the table, and I would read it faithfully. And that’s where I learned about Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Chase-Smith, Margaret Bourke-White, I mean… Maria Tallchief. I had a lot of exposure to women who I read about and really admired by reading in the magazines.”

While Ms. Clinton talked about LIFE, she did not mention that the magazine was where she just so happened to make her first national splash, when she was an undergraduate at Wellesley and she included in a 1969 story about students’ college commencement speeches. (You can see young Hillary’s commencement speech here.)

This gallery includes images from when she appeared in the magazine herself, and also photos of the women that she learned about as a reader of LIFE.

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, shown on the day she announced her 1964 candidacy for president at the Women’s National Press Club, was the first woman to have her name placed into nomination at the convention of a major party.

Francis Miller/Life Photo Collection/Shutterstock

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress, spoke with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles during a Senate committee meeting, 1957.

Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt walks with children en route to a picnic, 1948.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Eleanor Roosevelt addressed delegates at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where she supported Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson over the party’s eventual nominee, John F. Kennedy.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Eleanor Roosevelt talking to another UN delegate near a mural by artist Fernand Leger, 1952.

Lisa Larsen/The LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock© Meredith Corporation

Portrait of LIFE’s first hired and first female staff photographer, Margaret Bourke-White. She was on assignment in Algeria, standing in front of Flying Fortress bomber in which she made combat mission photographs of the U.S. attack on Tunis, 1943.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

Margaret Bourke-White with her camera during her later years, when the LIFE staff photographer was struggling with Parkinson’s disease.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ballerina Maria Tallchief (right) performing the Nutcracker Ballet at New York’s City Center, 1954.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Maria Tallchief in rehearsal for ” Swan Lake,” 1963.

Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ballerina Maria Tallchief performing in Swan Lake, 1963.

Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Aviator Amelia Earhart in 1932, five years before her plane disappeared in the Pacific.

Life Photo Collection

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post Young Hillary Clinton Learned About Strong Women “By Reading LIFE” appeared first on LIFE.

But for all those successes, Brando had not yet made the cover of LIFE — a magazine that prided itself on capturing and reflecting the nations’ obsessions and interests, week after week after week. In 1952, that oversight was remedied, as legendary photographer Margaret Bourke-White shot a portrait session with Brando, capturing the 28-year-old star in a casual, playful mood.

For reasons lost to time, Bourke-White’s photos — discovered in LIFE’s archives and marked with the sole descriptive phrase, “cover tries” — were never published in the magazine. (Though Bourke-White’s portraits never saw the light of day, Brando ultimately did grace the cover of LIFE, making his first appearance in character as Antony from Julius Caesar in the April 20, 1953, issue. He’d appear on the cover three more times.)

It is difficult to look at the face of the young Brando without feeling the influence of his most iconic performances, from On the Waterfront to The Godfather. Here, meet the young Brando at his most charismatic and mysterious, seen through the lens of one of LIFE’s greatest photographers, in a series of photos that never ran in the magazine.

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando: First LIFE Cover

Margaret Bourke-White Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post Marlon Brando: Portraits of a Charismatic Young Star, 1952 appeared first on LIFE.

Opening on May 6, 2022, the exhibit celebrates what the Monroes call LIFE’s “stunning affirmation of the humanist notion that the camera’s proper function is to persuade and inform.” Photographs from essays by LIFE icons such as Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Carl Mydans, and Andreas Feininger will be on display. LIFE photographer Bob Gomel, now 88, will also be in attendance at the opening reception from 5-7pm on Friday, May 6.

LIFE.com recently caught up with the gallerists Sid and Michelle Monroe over email to learn more about their show and their thoughts on LIFE, and, well, life in Santa Fe.

How did you become gallerists? Why did you choose to focus on photojournalism?

We both entered the museum field after college, Michelle with the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Sid with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Michelle was also a working artist and Sid was the director of a SoHo gallery specializing in fine art editions, where the gallery owner was exploring an exhibition with Alfred Eisenstaedt in collaboration with the LIFE Picture Collection. In 1985, we sat down with Alfred Eisenstaedt to discuss the exhibition and, then in our 20s, were were awed and engaged with his stories of an extraordinary life behind the camera.

We understood that we were in the presence of something bigger than we had ever encountered before. The work of Alfred Eisenstaedt is our collective history—we didn’t live this but this is what formed the world we were born into. In the eighties, photography was only beginning to gain a foothold in the fine art market, and most galleries were concentrating on the early “masters” of fine art photography. Eisenstaedt, and in general the field of photojournalism, had not been exhibited in a gallery setting. We believed immediately that a gallery which combined the realms of art, history, and reportage would be unique, and that set us on our course.

Albert Einstein

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Why a LIFE exhibition? Why now?

We had our beginning in New York, and over the course of the 1990s had the extraordinary opportunity to meet, get to know, and work with many of the legendary photographers of LIFE magazine, all in their retirement years. Through countless conversations, we learned how they saw the world and recorded it for the magazine, and more importantly, for history. Their work, and work approach, helped us gain insight into how to view their photographs, decades after they made them. Ever since, we have have worked conscientiously over the past 20 years to establish Monroe Gallery of Photography at the intersection between photojournalism and fine art, showcasing works embedded in our collective consciousness that shape our shared history. The Gallery represents several of the most significant photojournalists up to the present day, but the work of the LIFE photographers has been our foundation.

Mother and child in Hiroshima, Japan, December 1945.

Alfred Eisenstaedt; The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

What do you wish collectors knew about LIFE? The general public?

The work of the photographers of LIFE magazine came to define the medium of photojournalism, and their photographs recorded history and informed us all for most of the twentieth century. It was long one of the most popular and widely imitated of American magazines, selling millions of copies a week. From its start, LIFE emphasized photography, with gripping, superbly chosen news photographs, amplified by photo features and photo essays on an international range of topics. Its photographers were the elite of their craft and enjoyed worldwide esteem. Published weekly from 1936 to 1972, the work of the photographers of LIFE magazine came to define the medium of photojournalism.

American sprinters Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos (right), after winning gold and bronze Olympic medals in the 200 meters, respectively, raised their fists in a Black Power salute, Mexico, 1968. Australian silver medalist Peter Norman is at left.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Do you have a favorite piece in the show?

Considering we curated the exhibit from potentially thousands of images, the exhibit itself represents our favorites—with enough left over we could easily do a “part two”!

Who are some of your favorite LIFE photographers? Are there some that may have been overlooked?

That’s a difficult question, as each LIFE photographer had their own individual and particular personality and style. We consider ourselves extraordinarily privileged to have been able to have known, and call friends, so many of these great photographers. To name only a few, Eisenstaedt was by many measures the “Dean” of the LIFE photographers and he taught us how to “see”;  Carl Mydans left a deep impression on us with his humility and intense humanistic dedication; Bill Eppridge was deeply committed to documenting historic and deeply sensitive subjects; and Bob Gomel‘s versatility and ingenuity impresses us to this day. 

John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul Mccartney and Ringo Starr, February 1964.

© Bob Gomel / Courtesy of Bob Gomel

And for people who plan to visit the LIFE show in Santa Fe, are there other favorite art spots in the area that you recommend?

Santa Fe is a gem of an art-destination city. There are over 200 galleries showing every possible form of art from ancient Native American art and pottery to cutting edge contemporary art. [We recommend] SITE Santa Fe, a contemporary art space; Institute of American Indian Arts; Museum Hill; Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; and Meow Wolf, an ‘immersive art installation’ where visitors enter and discover that nothing is as it seems…

Do you have advice for young photojournalists who might want to display their works in a gallery?

Foremost, understand and dedicate yourself to the profession and its specific ethical requirements. Respect its role as the fourth estate and its check on power. Do the work. The role of photojournalists has perhaps never been as vital and important as it is today.

Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi reading next to a spinning wheel at home. (Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection © DotDash Meredith)

The LIFE Photographers exhibit will be on display at Monroe Gallery from May 6 through June 26, 2022. For hours and location, please consult the gallery’s website.

Jill Golden is the director of the LIFE Picture Collection, an archive of more than 10 million photographs created by—and collected by—LIFE Magazine.

The post LIFE Magazine Show Opens At Monroe Gallery Of Photography appeared first on LIFE.

NFTS (non-fungible tokens) are one-of-a-kind digital items with blockchain-managed ownership. LIFE will collaborate with the NFT marketplace KnownOrigin, and distribute exclusive drops of their iconic photographs via their profile, beginning with the first on April 14.  

Founded in 1936, LIFE, the first photography publication in the United States, coined the term “photo essay” and established a unique visual storytelling style in popular culture. With work from trailblazing photographer Margaret Bourke-White, the first drop offers the opportunity for serious collectors to own selected authentic, important pieces of photography from the cover essay of LIFE’s first issue.

“LIFE always seeks to share its incredible photography with new communities,” said Tom Rowland, President of the Picture Collection. “There is a growing number of photography enthusiasts on Web3, and we see this as a way to engage with new audiences around photojournalism and art.”

David Moore, one of the KnownOrigin co-founders commented, “We are delighted that LIFE has partnered with KnownOrigin to launch their journey into NFTs. LIFE is an iconic and historically important brand with compelling and instantly recognizable imagery, including famous LIFE magazine covers…We have recently seen photography grow in importance and collectability within the NFT community. The LIFE Picture Collection is unrivaled in its breadth and variety of awe-inspiring content. It’s an honor to have LIFE on our platform.”

The drop will include an auction with a reserve, rare editions, and other pieces with a larger limited run and items will be priced according to their rarity. It will also be accompanied by Twitter Spaces and a new LIFE Discord channel to connect audiences with the brand.

LIFE and KnownOrigin will feature a virtual gallery in Decentraland on KnownOrigin’s plot of land. As a continuation of LIFE’s cutting-edge philosophy, the gallery will form an immersive world celebrating LIFE’s inception and its digital form. The LIFE gallery platform will display NFTS and additional LIFE photography, allowing collectors to display their unique pieces.

LIFE will offset any emissions generated from the NFT minting process from sales. A portion of the proceeds from the NFT sales will also be donated to charities chosen by the LIFE team, with the first drop benefitting the Malala Fund. 

Here’s an exclusive first look at the first pieces we’ll be releasing as NFTs on KnownOrigin.

LIFE’s first cover on November 23, 1963 of Fort Peck Dam.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

Original print of first LIFE Cover from 1936, that will be on view at our largest retrospective to date, at the Boston MFA, in October 2022.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

A contact sheet from 1936 of aerial views of Fort Peck Dam’s landscape.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

Portrait of LIFE’s first hired and first female staff photographer, Margaret Bourke-White. She was on assignment in Algeria, standing in front of Flying Fortress bomber in which she made combat mission photographs of the U.S. attack on Tunis, 1943.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

A workman crawls inside a giant pipe segment, Fort Peck, Montana. The pipe, divided by latticelike support struts, was used to divert the flow of the Missouri River during construction of the Fort Peck dam, 1936.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

View of New Deal, Montana, which was one of the six shack towns around the US work relief construction project of the Fort Peck Dam in Fort Peck, Montana, 1936.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

Two children leaning against a sign reading “Entering New Deal, Speed Limit 25 Miles Per Hour” marking the boundary of New Deal, one of the shanty towns which have grown up around the work-relief project at Fort Peck Dam in Montana, 1936.

(Margaret Bourke-White/ LIFE Picture Collection /Shutterstock)

The post LIFE Launches Collection of NFTs From Iconic Photographs appeared first on LIFE.

As she would recount in an extraordinary LIFE story seven years later, it turned out after years of misdiagnosis and confusion that her brief stumble was a symptom of the onset of Parkinson’s disease, against which she would fight with everything she had for nearly two decades until her death at 67. It was, as the introduction to that 1959 article noted, the toughest battle ever faced by a woman who had seen many including literal battles in World War II, during which she served as the first woman accredited to cover the combat zones as a photojournalist.

With photographs by her fellow LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, some of which are seen here, the story offered up the personal reflections of the woman who had taken the image that appeared on the first-ever issue of the magazine.

“When I opened some medical insurance papers one day and learned I had Parkinson’s disease, the name did not frighten me because I did not know what in the world it was,” she wrote, describing how she learned the name that her doctors had kept from her as they prescribed physical therapy for her unlabeled symptoms. “Then slowly a memory came back, of a description Edward Steichen once gave at a photographers’ meeting of the illness of Edward Weston, ‘dean of photographers,’ who was a Parkinsonian. I remembered the break in Steichen’s voice: ‘A terrible disease… you can’t work because you can’t hold things… you grow stiffer each year until you are a walking prison… there is no known cure…'”

The knowledge was, unsurprisingly, devastating to Bourke-White.

But she set her mind to learn what she could, to look for anything she could do for relief. She learned, she wrote, that she was just one of three quarters of a million Americans with the disease “often they appear to be struck down at their peak,” she wrote and that, despite this number and the fact that the symptoms had been observed for thousands of years, nobody knew what caused it or how to stop it. Though Bourke-White was an extreme devotee of her exercise routine and even underwent a then-cutting-edge brain surgery to “deaden permanently” part of her brain, she knew that the operation she’d received had only treated some of her disease and that there was no way to know how the symptoms would progress from there.

Today, more than half a century later, many of the questions that confronted Bourke-White remain frustratingly unresolved for those who receive the same diagnosis she did. Treatment options, however, have advanced significantly since Bourke-White’s time and new advances are offering the hope for something even better.

For one thing, says Dr. Rachel Dolhun, vice president of medical communications at the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, a person with Parkinson’s disease in the 1950s had no effective options for medication. The most widely prescribed therapy used today—levodopa, which temporarily addresses some Parkinson’s-related loss of dopamine, a movement-regulating brain chemical—wasn’t discovered until the late 1960s. It is now also understood in a way that it was not a few decades ago that many different brain chemicals and parts of the body are involved in symptoms linked to Parkinson’s, not just dopamine and the brain. In addition, the operation that Bourke-White received to basically destroy part of her brain is largely obsolete today, and a patient who was a candidate for brain surgery now would likely instead receive deep brain stimulation, which uses wires or electrodes to stimulate parts of the brain. (The physical therapy that was prescribed for Bourke-White, however, is one thing that hasn’t changed: exercise remains a key way to address symptoms.)

And Dolhun said that advances in genetic science in the last 20 years or so, by offering new insights into how the disease works, have opened up a new range of research angles and hope for a real cure, rather than just a better way to address the symptoms. For example, experts are excited by the testing of possible therapies that would target a protein called alpha-synuclein. “Right now, because of those understandings, the development pipeline is richer than it’s ever been,” she said.

Technology is also changing what’s possible for researchers and scientists. The Michael J. Fox Foundation is running an online clinical study in which patients can log on and tell researchers about what it’s like to live their experience of Parkinson’s disease, Dolhun said, and devices like wearables and smartphones are providing new ways to track and communicate about the symptoms. For example, whereas it used to be that a doctor might observe a patient’s tremor for 15 minutes at a time every couple of months, now an app or a watch can allow patients to log data that gives researchers a 24/7 look at information about those symptoms.

These new possibilities are particularly important when it comes to Parkinson’s disease, since the experience of what it’s like to live with and fight the symptoms is very individualized. “It’s a different journey for every single person who’s on it,” said Dolhun. “That’s why we need the patient experience to inform us so much, and that’s why it’s so important for patients to be involved directly in research.”

That’s also one reason why the openness of people like Margaret Bourke-White mattered in 1959 and continues to matter today. There can still be a stigma attached to telling others that you are experiencing something that might make them see you as weak or in need of assistance. But if those who have it keep their experiences to themselves, it’s harder for researchers to make progress toward a cure and harder for others with the diagnosis to feel that they’re not alone.

For Bourke-White, as she described for LIFE’s readers, her fight against Parkinson’s was, to the fullest extent possible, a reminder to keep working and enjoying what her body could do for every second possible. Nowadays, she wrote in 1959 after the surgery that helped her do that longer than would otherwise have been possible, “my fingers are more and more often loading my cameras, changing their lenses, and turning their winding buttons as I practice the simple blessed business of living and working again.”

“It’s not uncommon for people to feel shy about sharing their stories,” Dolhun said. “For [Bourke-White] to share her story so publicly I think really speaks volumes. When we see people come forward with their story, it’s not an uncommon thing for them to say, ‘I really wish I had shared it earlier.’ They feel a burden lifted.”

Straining to relearn how to speak distinctly after disease had blurred and weakened her voice, Bourke-White, with another patient, was taught by therapists (rear) to exaggerate lip movements.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Crumpling paper into balls, Miss Bourke-White worked to keep fingers from stiffening.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Face intent with effort, Margaret Bourke-White exercised as part of her fight against Parkinson’s disease.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A nurse aided photographer Margaret Bourke-White during a therapy session.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White did the tango during a dance class meant to improve her coordination.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White squeezed a towel.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White with her camera during her later years, when the LIFE staff photographer was struggling with Parkinson’s disease.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White during her Parkinson’s therapy.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A doctor explained an operation, here identifying the brain’s thalamus.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Researching her case, Miss. Bourke-White insisted on learning all details from Dr. Cooper (left) and Dr. Manuel Riklan, interviewed them as though on journalistic assignment. “I realized I had been through one of the greatest adventures of my life,” she explained. “The patient’s world was for me a new world. Experiencing surgery was like going on a new assignment.” She asked if she could watch a similar operation to one she had already had.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White prepared to observe a surgery.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White said, “I reached for his hand quite impulsively, when suddenly it stopped trembling. The balloon’s pressure had reached the right spot in the man’s brain. His once-rigid fingers were now relaxed, his hand steady for the first time in 10 years. Dr. Cooper asked him to make a fist, then open it. The fingers closed and opened easily. ‘God bless you, Dr. Cooper,’ the man said. For me this was a magic moment. I knew that in a few days, after the surgeon had deadened the area located by the balloon, this man would be up and about, his tremors relieved. I never met the man, or heard his name, but I shared with him a miracle.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“Proof of progress,” she declared, “is that at long last I again can load my camera.”

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White at home.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Margaret Bourke-White outside her home with her cats.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post The Fight: A Legendary LIFE Photographer Battles Parkinson’s, 1959 appeared first on LIFE.

Surprisingly few photographs of this world-changing exodus survive, and some of the best were taken by Margaret Bourke-White for LIFE. The rediscovery of her contact sheets, together with the notes written by the reporter Lee Eitingon, give a powerful sense of how she did it. Having chronicled the liberation of Buchenwald and nearly every theatre of war in World War II, the celebrated and notoriously resourceful Bourke-White was not fazed by the chaos of a newly divided subcontinent. Eitingon, though in her mid-20s, was an experienced conflict reporter. A note in the archives reads: “Old India hands warned that the assignment was impossible for women – transportation would be difficult, native women were being abducted, even British army officers were being attacked.”

Ingeniously, they obtained a Jeep and an escort of a few soldiers from the military authorities including an English captain nicknamed “Snuggles” and drove to Punjab. “We were dressed in khaki shirts and slacks,” Eitingon wrote, “and we carried bedrolls, a four-gallon thermos of purified water, camera equipment and typewriter.” Although they were certainly aided by Bourke-White privilege, the two women were constantly close to danger. Driving towards Lahore, they encountered a stalled truck packed with refugees, which was in the process of being surrounded “by about 30 men with ten-foot-long spears.” The soldiers in their escort intervened. “The captain shot one attacker, then leaped into the Jeep. A stray shot followed us as we drove off,” wrote Eitingon.

In the absence of a comprehensive visual record of the horrors of 1947—in which at least one million people are estimated to have died—Bourke-White’s photographs have gained an iconic value. At Beas near Amritsar, she noted: “There were 17 corpses lying at the left of the railway tracks, the flies thick on the bloody stumps of arms.”

We “see” the partition of India through her formalized, decolored, black-and-white images: kafilas or human caravans of refugees in Punjab, wooden bullock-carts piled with belongings, faces hovering between life and death, corpses in a river watched by fat vultures, an aerial shot of migrants sheltering in Qila-i-Kuhna mosque in Delhi, a cholera hospital in Kasur in the new Pakistan which, Bourke-White records here, was “pervaded with a sickening, sweetish smell.”

With the recovery of her notes from the LIFE archives, we are afforded, nearly 70 years later, little details that return some humanity to the nameless suffering figures. A famous photograph, of a shrouded corpse of a child who has died of starvation, comes back to life. We learn his name is Mansoor; he is 4 years old, and he is being buried near Lahore Cantonment railway station. The figures around him are his mother, father and grandfather. When their house in Delhi was looted, they had stayed at a refugee camp in Humayun’s Tomb. Then some good news came: because the father was a mechanic for the water and sewerage board in Delhi, the family would be able to board a “Pakistan Special” train, bearing government employees. But in Punjab its passage was blocked, and for three days no food or water was allowed to the train. Mansoor died. Now he was being buried, and Margaret Bourke-White was a witness.

What of the stately image of a Sikh man bearing an ailing woman on his shoulders as they seek to walk to safety? From a biography of Bourke-White, we know this picture was to an extent staged. “We were there for hours,” Eitingon recalled years later. “She told them to go back again and again and again. They were too frightened to say no.” From the contact sheets, we can now see that an army vehicle was nearby, and the photograph was cropped. Bourke-White’s fierce determination to get just the pictures she wanted does not negate their quality, even if they were far from candid. From her scrupulously recorded notes, we learn this man was a farmer from Lyallpur district, now heading to India with his sick wife on his shoulders. Their kafila had been raided; 103 of its members were dead.

Across northern India and the nascent Pakistan, from Karachi to Bengal, many millions of people suffered in 1947 and the years that followed. Like all historical events, partition must be seen in the context of the time: politicians on all sides failed utterly to grasp the catastrophe they were creating. The British, bankrupt from World War II and exhausted by a dissolving empire, thought the solutions proposed by the Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, and endorsed by nationalist Indian and proto-Pakistani statesmen, provided a constitutional answer.

What they had not foreseen was that terrified populations, when spurred by a new kind of identity politics, would flee or be driven from the lands in which they had lived for centuries. In that respect, the events chronicled in LIFE in 1947 seem very similar to ones that can still be seen in the world today.

Patrick French is the author of India: A Portrait and Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division, and a winner of the National Books Critics Circle Award.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Original caption: “Spindly but determined old Sikh, carrying ailing wife, sets out on the dangerous journey to India’s border.”

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “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.”

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Contact sheet showing the mass migration.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Millions of people fled shortly after the creation of the nations of India and Pakistan.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “Mosque within fort also packed with homeless Moslems. The great dome provides a measure of shelter against the elements for some of the refugees.”

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Contact sheet showing the mass migration.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Contact sheet showing the mass migration.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Muslim refugee cholera patient with child, getting an intravenous glucose solution in the infusion room at the Infectious Disease Hospital.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Muslim refugee cholera patients in filthy conditions at the Infectious Disease Hospital upon their arrival after their long march from Delhi, India.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Original caption: “As the bitter migration goes on a Moslem family pauses to bury a child who died of starvation.”

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Contact sheet showing the mass migration.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Great Migration, 1947.

Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post The Brutal ‘Great Migration’ That Followed India’s Independence and Partition appeared first on LIFE.