Margaret Bourke White

Margaret Bourke‑White (1904–1971) was an American photographer whose pioneering photojournalism reshaped both industry and wartime reporting. Born in New York City to a printing‑industry designer, she studied engineering and art at Columbia, Michigan, Western Reserve, and Cornell, where she first took up the camera. Combining her mother’s maiden name with her own, she established a distinctive professional identity as Bourke‑White.

After beginning her career in 1927 shooting factories and architecture, she became Fortune magazine’s first staff photographer in 1930, capturing the Krupp works in Germany and documenting the Soviet Union’s First Five‑Year Plan. In 1936 she joined the inaugural team of Life magazine, her powerful cover story on Fort Peck Dam setting a new standard for visual storytelling.

During World War II, Bourke‑White was the first female photographer accredited by the U.S. armed forces, surviving the sinking of her transport ship to document North Africa, Italy, and the liberation of European concentration camps. Her postwar assignments took her to India to photograph Gandhi and to Korea as a war correspondent. Struck by Parkinson’s disease in 1952, she continued to work and publish, including her memoir Portrait of Myself (1963), before retiring in 1969. Today her images remain touchstones of industrial might, humanitarian witness, and the unflinching power of the photographic image.