Bourke-White, Margaret

Margaret Bourke-White (; June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist. She was known as an architectural and commercial photographer for the first half of her career, representing corporate clients and highlighting the success of industrial capitalism with black and white images of steel factories and skyscrapers. In 1930, she became the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of the Soviet Union. In 1933, NBC commissioned her to create a monumental photo mural about radio for its rotunda at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, then considered the largest photo mural in the world. The success of her corporate commissions led her to work at Fortune magazine in the 1930s. She took the photograph of the construction of Fort Peck Dam that became the cover of the first issue of Life magazine. The second half of her career represents her transition from corporate photography to photojournalism, beginning with her work during the Great Depression documenting the people of the Dust Bowl. Her collaboration with novelist Erskine Caldwell in You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) resulted in seventy-five photos depicting the lives of poor, rural sharecroppers...