35 Facts About Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White was an American photographer and documentary photographer.

Margaret Bourke-White was arguably best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviets' first five-year plan, as the first American female war photojournalist, and for taking the photograph that became the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.

Margaret Bourke-White, born Margaret White in the Bronx, New York, was the daughter of Joseph White, a non-practicing Jew whose father came from Poland, and Minnie Bourke, who was of Irish Catholic descent.

Margaret Bourke-White grew up near Bound Brook, New Jersey, and graduated from Plainfield High School in Union County.

Margaret Bourke-White was not surprised at his sister Margaret's success, saying "[she] was not unfriendly or aloof".

Margaret Bourke-White left after one semester, following the death of her father.

Margaret Bourke-White transferred colleges several times, attending the University of Michigan, Purdue University in Indiana, and Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Margaret Bourke-White ultimately graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1927, leaving behind a photographic study of the rural campus for the school's newspaper, including photographs of her famed dormitory, Risley Hall.

Margaret Bourke-White's success was due to her skills with both people and her technique.

Margaret Bourke-White solved this problem by bringing along a new style of magnesium flare, which produces white light, and having assistants hold the flares to light her scenes.

Margaret Bourke-White's abilities resulted in some of the best steel-factory photographs of that era, which earned her national attention.

Margaret Bourke-White was deeply inspired by the new structure and especially smitten by the massive eagle's-head figures projecting off the building.

Margaret Bourke-White hired John Vassos to design the deluxe interior, whose clean modern lines echoed the building's bold and graceful exterior.

In 1929 Margaret Bourke-White accepted a job as associate editor and staff photographer of Fortune magazine, a position she held until 1935.

Margaret Bourke-White held the title of staff photographer until 1940, but returned from 1941 to 1942, and again in 1945, after which she stayed through her semi-retirement in 1957 and her full retirement in 1969.

Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Europe to record how Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were faring under Nazism.

Margaret Bourke-White was "the first Western professional photographer permitted into the Soviet Union".

Margaret Bourke-White took portraits of other famous people in the Soviet Union, such as Karl Radek, Sergei Eisenstein, and Hugh Cooper.

Margaret Bourke-White noted that the trips and work there required a lot of patience, and generally had mixed, yet positive impressions of the USSR.

Margaret Bourke-White's photographs were first published in Fortune magazine in 1931 under the title Eyes on Russia, and then as a book with the same name by Simon and Schuster.

Margaret Bourke-White returned to the Soviet Union in 1941 during the Second World War.

Margaret Bourke-White was the first known female war correspondent, as well as the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II.

Margaret Bourke-White was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded.

Margaret Bourke-White repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting.

Margaret Bourke-White is known equally well in both India and Pakistan for her photographs of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar at his home Rajgriha, Dadar in Mumbai on the occasion of a third impression of his book which was published in December 1940 as Thoughts on Pakistan.

Margaret Bourke-White photographed M K Gandhi and Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

Margaret Bourke-White was "one of the most effective chroniclers" of the violence that erupted at the 1947 independence and partition of India and Pakistan, according to Somini Sengupta, who calls her photographs of the episode "gut-wrenching, and staring at them, you glimpse the photographer's undaunted desire to stare down horror".

Margaret Bourke-White recorded streets littered with corpses, dead victims with open eyes, and refugees with vacant eyes.

Margaret Bourke-White had a knack for being at the right place at the right time: she interviewed and photographed Mohandas K Gandhi just a few hours before his assassination in 1948.

Margaret Bourke-White started the first photography laboratory at Life magazine.

In 1953, Margaret Bourke-White developed her first symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Margaret Bourke-White was forced to slow her career to fight encroaching paralysis.

Margaret Bourke-White wrote an autobiography, Portrait of Myself, which was published in 1963 and became a bestseller, but she grew increasingly infirm and isolated in her home in Darien, Connecticut.

Margaret Bourke-White suffered financially from her personal generosity and from "less-than-responsible attendant care".

Margaret Bourke-White White added her mother's surname, "Bourke" to her name in 1927 and hyphenated it.