Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), American photographer, who broke ground for women in the fields of industrial photography and photojournalism. Her photographs for Life magazine and other publications include images of Indian nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi, military campaigns of World War II (1939-1945), and the liberation of prisoners from the German concentration camp Buchenwald at the end of the war.

Bourke-White, whose name combines her mother’s maiden name with her father’s surname, was born in New York City. She planned a career as a biologist, but took up photography while at Columbia University, where she studied for a year with photographer Clarence H. White. Bourke-White attended six universities before graduating in 1927 from Cornell University. Convinced that she could make powerful and revealing photographs of industrial buildings and blast furnaces, she headed for the steel mills of Cleveland, Ohio. Her work there pioneered a style in which giant industrial structures take on the abstract beauty of modernist sculpture.

Bourke-White’s early industrial work attracted the attention of American publisher Henry R. Luce, who hired her in 1929 as the first staff photographer for Fortune magazine. Later, along with Alfred Eisenstaedt, she became one of four staff photographers for Luce’s new picture magazine, Life. Her photographs of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana illustrated the cover and lead article of the first issue of Life in 1936.

Bourke-White was an associate editor at Life from 1933 to 1940, but then left briefly to work as chief photographer for a New York daily newspaper called PM. She returned to Life in the fall of 1940 and remained there into the 1950s. In 1930 she was the first American journalist to photograph in the Soviet Union, and in 1941 she was the only American journalist to document German bombing raids on Moscow. In 1942 she became a photographer for the United States Army Air Force, sharing her photographs with Life. She documented military campaigns in North Africa, flew on a bombing mission, and accompanied the forces that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. Sent to India after the war, she photographed Gandhi many times and interviewed him just hours before he was assassinated in 1948.

In addition to her magazine work, Bourke-White published her photographs in a dozen of her own books and in countless works by others. Her prints are found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and other major museums.