Margaret Bourke-White Photographer and Photojournalist

“Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand”

Margaret made history throughout her career and achieved many firsts with her pioneering style which started when she was an industrial photographer based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her photos of the Ohio steel mill interiors caught the eye of Henry Luce with Fortune magazine and he asked her to come to work for him. She joined the magazine and was sent to Germany in 1930 to photograph their emerging industries and followed that up with visits to the Soviet Union. She then became the first Western professional photographer allowed to document the Soviet industries and life during her visits between1930 and 1933.

Their successful collaboration expanded when she joined him at Life magazine in 1936. As one of the original Life staff photographers, she developed a style focused on the human side of news and her photos became iconic. She shot the first cover for Life and is also credited with starting the first photo lab at Life. She then went on to become the first military accredited woman war correspondent in WWII. Her war photos from the Italian Campaign, the siege of Moscow and American soldiers crossing the Rhine into Germany provided an often-disturbing realism of the war. This was especially true of her photos of the concentration camps which shocked the world. While she wrote several books, she is best known for her collaborative efforts with her second husband, Erskine Caldwell. Together they published Have you Seen Their Faces, a study of rural poverty in the South. She died at the age of 67 from Parkinson disease.