Margaret Bourke-White is remembered for her relentless photographs of some of the innovations, conflicts and major calamities of the XNUMXth century.
She was the first woman correspondent world war fighter, the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union, and the first staff photographer for Henry Luce's LIFE magazine.
Bourke-White is the author of the infamous inaugural cover image depicting the construction of the Fort Peck Dam and its massive gate looming over the workers like a super modern megalith.
This woman, who paved the way for so many others in the photography industry, was born in the Bronx of New York on June 14, 1904 and it turns out that he managed to turn his great passion into his main activity while studying at Cornell University.
The Statue of Liberty, photographed by Bourke-White from a helicopter, 1952. Source: LIFE
This educational institution was crucial in the professional life of Margaret Bourke-White because she found great inspiration and in its splendid (and unrivaled) Gothic Revival architecture, glacial waterfalls, and also landed him his first paid job shooting scenic covers for his magazine, Cornell Alumni.
After graduating in 1927, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and established a commercial photographic studio. His images of the Otis steel mill, lit by a special flare to evoke the glow of molten metal, brought national attention to his work and not long after Fortune magazine made him an attractive offer to join their team.
She served as staff photographer for that magazine until 1936, when she moved to LIFE. In addition to his landmark cover on the Fort Peck Dam, his contributions to the latter medium included the era-defining shot of African-American flood victims queuing wearily in front of a massive billboard that proudly proclaimed, "There's no road like the American way."
During World War II, Bourke-White was the first woman allowed into combat zones, something historical at that time.
It narrowly survived torpedo fire in the Mediterranean, shelling in Moscow and the helicopter crash in the Chesapeake Bay before traveling to Germany to capture the liberation of Buchenwald.
Years later he managed to visually record the tumultuous partition of India and Pakistan and sat down with Mahatma Gandhi a few hours before he was assassinated.
Unfortunately in 1953 he began to experience the symptoms of Parkinson's, for which he had to considerably slow down his pace of work and not many years later, on August 27, 1971, he passed away in Stamford, Connecticut.
Bourke-White's photographs can be found in such important institutions as the Brooklyn Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.