Maragareth Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White is one of the best-known photographers of the twentieth century, to such an extent that at the height of her success, at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, she was the protagonist of a comic strip and a television series.

Her love for photography began during her university years, after which she moved to Cleveland, focusing on industrial and architectural photography.

In 1929, she began working for Fortune magazine, and in 1936, when Life was first issued, she begame the magazine’s head photographer. The following year, together with the writer Erskine Caldwell (whom she married in 1939), she published the photographic book You Have Seen Their Faces, denouncing the state of poverty in the South of the United States.

During the Second World War, she produced reportages in the Soviet Union, North Africa, Italy and Germany, following the entry of US troops into Berlin and documenting the horrors of the concentration camps. In 1947 she was in India, when tensions over the creation of the Pakistani state led to terrible massacres, and in 1952 she documented the war in Korea. She devoted her last reports to apartheid in South Africa and racial segregation in the United States. Forced to give up photography due to Parkinson’s disease in the late 1950s, she wrote her autobiography Portrait of Myself, published in 1963.