Margaret Bourke-White

A photograph by Margaret Bourke-White was on the cover of the very first issue of the famous Life magazine in 1935 and, for a number of years, she served as one of the staff photographers for that publication, the most prestigious news and culture magazine of all time. A forerunner in the newly emerging field of photojournalism, Bourke-White was the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union after the revolution, a war correspondent who routinely went into combat zones, and one of the first photographers into the German death camps after the defeat of Hitler in World War II. Famous for her willingness to go anywhere or do anything to complete an assignment, she once hung off a flag pole high up on a skyscraper to get just the photo she wanted, and was quoted as saying, “I want to be alive when I die.”