Margaret Bourke-White (1904 - 1971)

Margaret Bourke-White was born on June 14, 1904 in the Bronx, New York. Cameras always fascinated her. After attending Rutgers, University of Michigan, and Cornell University, she got married and stopped taking pictures but two years later she got divorced and resumed her work. She opened her own studio and began taking all kinds of pictures - everything from private gardens to steel mills. Her work came to the attention of Henry Luce, publisher of a new magazine called Fortune, who offered her a job as a staff photographer. She accepted and her first story, about the hog processing industry, set the standard for the "photo essay."

She traveled to Russia in 1930 where she took 3,000 pictures, documenting life inside the new Soviet Union. In 1936, she turned her camera on the poor people of the rural Southern United States. Henry Luce decided to launch a new magazine called Life that would focus on pictures rather than articles, and he asked Bourke-White to take pictures for it. Bourke-White was in Europe during World War II, including going on bomber raids with pilots to get the best pictures. One of her most famous pictures was taken of Mahatma Gandhi hours before he was assassinated.

In 1956, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's Diesease and underwent two experimental surgeries which enabled her to continue working, although she did more writing about photography. In 1971 she had a fall and ended up confined to a hospital bed. She died on August 21, 1971 at age 67.

What made her so remarkable, aside from her beautiful and dramatic photos, was her success in a man's occupation, taking pictures of things that most women never saw, like steel mills, slaughterhouses, and back then, the war. She was responsible in large part for the creation of a new occupation and art called photojournalism. "This is a big wonderful world," she said, "and people, especially artists, should grow in it because artists show others the world."