Margaret Bourke-White

Photographs of parachutes being tested by employees of the Irving Air Chute Company in Buffalo, New York, at that time the wrold's largest maufacturer of parachutes, taken by Margaret Bourke-White for the cover story of the March 22, 1937 issue of LIFE. (This sequence not published in the article.) (p. 6).

Margaret Bourke-White was an internationally renowned photojournalist who from the 1920s through the 1950s tirelessly and fearlessly recorded the objects, people, and events that shaped history. Famous first as an industrial photographer, then as one of the four original staff members of LIFE magazine, her vision and camera took her where others had never dared to venture. Her lasting contributions to photojournalism and documentary photography brought her international acclaim.

More than 200 black and white photographs.

First published in 1963, Bourke-White's autobiography is "the compelling story of a woman who both recorded history and made it." Here in her own words is Bourke-White's story of her beginnings in photography, her immense success as a photojournalist and her battle with Parkinson's disease. Photographs accompany Bourke-White's writing on her experiences in Russia in the early 1930s in the Dust Bowl during the 1934 drought, on the European front during World War II, and in Korea during the early 1950s, a writing that is as compelling as her images. Full text at "The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life staff as ‘Maggie the Indestructible.’"However, at the age of 50, Bourke-White was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and was forced to slow down considerably. She initially dealt with her symptoms through physical therapy. In 1959 and 1961 she had brain surgery that severely limited her ability to speak. Confined to her home in Darien, Connecticut, where her living room was wallpapered in one large photograph of an evergreen forest that she had taken in Czechoslovakia, she worked on her autobiography, Portrait of Myself which was published in 1963." [bio excerpt from ) Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American photographer and photojournalist most famed for her photo essays taken while traversing the globe for Life Magazine. In addition to being the first female photographer to work on a major magazine, during the "Golden Age of Photojournalism," she accomplished other "firsts" as well. She was the first woman accredited as a war photographer and the first woman to fly on a bombing mission (World War II). During her long and diverse career she covered landmark events of the twentieth century and brought to the world's attention important issues that ranged from poverty in the American South to the horror of Nazi concentration camps. She was known for her sharp instincts and her willingness to get the story under any circumstances, whether that required sitting on top of a gargoyle on the Chrysler Building in New York City or waiting at the feet of Mahatma Gandhi to take one of her most memorable pictures. Some of her most important works included recording the birth of a new nation (Pakistan) and the dissolution of a dictatorship (Josef Stalin).