Bourke White was a photo journalist and one of the first female to be hired as a war correspondent. She was born on June 14th, 1904, in the Bronx, New York. When she was young, the family moved to a rural suburb in New Jersey. She and her sister were taught by her mother who was was strict in regulating their outside influences. Her father was an engineer and inventor.If something interested Margaret's father, it also interested her, therefore her father's interest in cameras carried over to her. She pretended as a girl to take photographs with an empty cigar box and she claimed that she never took a photograph until after her father's death. Her cousin Florence remembers her helping her father to develop prints in his bathtub. In 1917, her father suffered a stroke but by 1919, he had recovered enough for the family to take a trip to Niagara Falls and Canada. While there, she began to make notes on his photographs, and helped him set up shots on several occasions. Here she obtained her love for photography which continued through her life and purse photojournalism, making her one of the first women to do so.
In 1929, she accepted a job as associate editor and staff photographer of Fortune magazine, a position she held until 1935. In 1930, she became the first Western photographer allowed to take pictures of the Soviet Industry which was rare for a female. She traveled to Europe to record how Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were faring under Nazism and how Russia was faring under Communism. She was then hired by Henry Luce as the first female photojournalist for Life magazine in 1936. She also was honored with the first Life cover: a picture of the Fort Peck Dam construction on November 23, 1936. This cover photograph became such an iconic image that it was featured as the 1930s representative to the United States Postal Service's Celebrate the Century series of commemorative postage stamps. She officially held the title of staff photographer until 1940, but returned for a period from 1941 to 1942. She returned again in 1945, and fully retirement in 1969. Despite were success over those years, she is more commonly known for her photographs of the Great Depression victims in the mid-1930s. These images are still revered today and though she is no loner here, her work lives and legacy live on.
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