15 Pioneering Female Journalists
9. Margaret Bourke-White
While other journalists did their work with pen, paper, and keyboard, Margaret Bourke-White did hers with a camera. She was a pioneering photojournalist during World War II and afterwards.
However, she didn’t get her start in photojournalism. Bourke-White was initially a commercial photographer. One of her clients, the Otis Steel Company, inadvertently paved the way for her to make her mark. Though the company’s security officers were reluctant to let a seemingly delicate woman make her way through the grit and intense heat of a working steel mill, Bourke-White persisted. Despite initial technical difficulties, she produced some of the best factory photographs of her time.
Thanks to the national attention garnered by her steel mill photos, Bourke-White was able to accept a position at Fortune magazine in 1929. Just the next year, she was the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union. There, she photographed the industrial efforts of the first five-year plan, an economic plan created by Joseph Stalin.
In 1936, she left Fortune for a job at Life magazine, where she was the first female photojournalist on staff. There, she took on numerous assignments, including photographing the building of the Fort Peck Dam, the Dust Bowl, the rise of Nazism in Europe, and the state of Russia under Communism.
Bourke-White may be best known for her work during World War II. She was the first female war correspondent, as well as the first woman who could work in combat zones. While in Moscow, Bourke-White witnessed the invasion of German forces, taking dramatic pictures of the resulting firestorms. While on assignment in Italy, she was repeatedly subject to attack by Axis forces. She traveled by General Patton through 1945 Germany and photographed the atrocities at Buchenwald. After the war, Bourke-White also covered much of the conflict between India and Pakistan.
In 1953, she first began to experience the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. She was obligated to slow her fast-paced career, though the disease would not finally end her life until 1971.