Margaret Bourke-White 1906-1971
born in New York City 14th June 1906; died in Stamford, Connecticut Aug. 27, 1971; photographer, pioneer of photojournalism; 1920s as a student at Cornell bought her first camera, a $20 second-hand Ica Reflex that had a crack in the lens; worked as as an architectural photographer in Cleveland; 1929 staff photographer with Time magazine and with the new Fortune magazine as associate editor; 1930 sent to the Soviet Union on assignment, the first Western photographer allowed into that country; 1931 she published Eyes on Russia; 1935 asked by Henry Luce to join his newly created Life magazine, and her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on Life's first cover; 1936 traveled the South with novelist Erskine Caldwell, to document living conditions of poor tenant farmers; 1937 they published a book You Have Seen Their Faces.In 1939 married Caldwell and together they published two more books. North of the Danube (1939, about life in Czechoslovakia before the Nazi invasion) and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941). She was in Moscow when the Germans attacked, and sent photos to Life; 1942 she and Caldwell divorced; went on to photograph US Forces crossing into Germany, concentration camps; also the division of India, Mahatma Gandhi; the Korean War. Quote: "The very secret of life for me...was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility. I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things, I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance."
