Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White (1904 to 1971) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist known in the first half of her career as an architectural and commercial photographer, representing corporate clients with black-and-white images of steel factories and skyscrapers; in 1930 she became the first foreign photographer granted official access to document Soviet industrial sites, and in 1933 she created a monumental photomural for the NBC rotunda at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Her photograph of the construction of Fort Peck Dam became the cover of the first issue of Life magazine, and the second half of her career shifted toward photojournalism, beginning with her Depression-era documentation of the Dust Bowl. She became the first American female war photojournalist attached to the United States Army Air Forces, photographed the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, was with Patton's Third Army when it documented the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945, brought early American attention to South African apartheid in 1949, and covered the Korean War for Life in the early 1950s.