Margaret Bourke-White, Life's first woman photographer
« American photographer (1904-1971), Life's first staff photographer, the first American woman war correspondent. »
Born in New York in 1904, Bourke-White first specialised in industrial photography. Her cover of Life's first issue in 1936 — the Fort Peck Dam in Montana — set the magazine's grammar for twenty years: large format, monumental perspective, working subject.
During the war she photographed the bombing of Moscow in 1941, landed with the troops in Italy, followed Patton into Germany and entered Buchenwald at its liberation. Her images of prisoners and corpses are among the first published documents of the Holocaust.
After the war: Gandhi hours before his assassination in 1948, apartheid South Africa, Korea. Stricken with Parkinson's in the 1950s, she continued to photograph and published her autobiography Portrait of Myself (1963). She died in 1971 in Stamford.