The Press: The Great Achiever

Patterns in pictures fascinated her, and her brooding shot of the partly finished crenelated dam at Fort Peck, Mont., graced the very first cover of LIFE in 1936. In a 40-year career with Time Inc. that started when she was hired as FORTUNE’S first photographer in 1929, Margaret Bourke-White pursued patterns everywhere, from sweat droplets on a South African miner’s face more than a mile underground to the look of New York from a precarious perch atop a gargoyle on the Chrysler Building, 800 ft. above the street. By the time she died last week at 67, after an agonizing 19-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, Bourke-White had long been recognized as one of the world’s great photographers.

Though patterns were her favorite preoccupation, people’s faces brought her the most fame. Bourke-White portraits of suffering slum dwellers or world statesmen showed the same deep sensitivity. Her persistence and unceasing quest for perfection once led Mahatma Gandhi to dub her “the torturer.” Churchill scowled memorably for her; she coaxed a rare smile out of a stone-faced Stalin, she explained, by assuming “all kinds of crazy postures searching for a good camera angle.” In World War II she became the first accredited woman war photographer. While covering Russian soldiers fighting the Nazis within 150 miles of Moscow, she bemoaned not the personal hardships but the fact that “during a week at the front, I had a total of 16 minutes of sunlight.” In a B-17 over North Africa with General Jimmy Doolittle’s bomber group, she became the first woman to fly on a combat bombing mission.

One of the Boys. Margaret originally intended to become a biologist, and took up photography only in order to help pay for her last year at Cornell. Using a secondhand lea Reflex with a cracked lens that her mother had bought for $20, she shot campus scenes and sold them to students. Her early reputation was made in the unlikely field of industrial photography. Where others saw only grime, Bourke-White saw beauty; her camera could find drama and action in a factory. All the major pictures in FORTUNE’S first issue were by Bourke-White, and she was one of the four photographers on LIFE’S original masthead (the others: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Peter Stackpole, Tom McAvoy). She remained there until her retirement in 1969.

Although very feminine and pretty, Bourke-White liked to be treated on assignment like one of the boys. Once she complained that her male colleagues were “somewhat overprotective when there was shooting.” But she was also smart enough to realize that her gender could be an asset: “At important meetings, a woman is not as likely to be thrown out as a man.” Demanding and visionary, in 1954 she badgered Henry Luce into promising that she would be LIFE’S first photographer to go to the moon. “Even at the peak of her career,” recalled Eisenstaedt, “she was willing and eager. She would get up at daybreak to photograph a bread crumb if necessary.”

The onset of Parkinson’s in 1952 gradually curtailed Bourke-White’s photographic career, but she turned to writing and produced a moving autobiography, Portrait of Myself. Her nine books of photographs included three with text by Erskine Caldwell, who was once her husband. As the disease progressed, Bourke-White restricted herself to photographing friends’ babies, animals and flowers, but never lost sight of her dream. “LIFE has commissioned me,” she would say proudly, “to go to the moon for the first pictures.” She would have enjoyed the trip. “She was always reaching beyond,” her colleague Carl Mydans recalled last week, “trying to better what she had already done. She thought visually. She had an eye, a great feeling. In a man’s world, Margaret was one of the great achievers of our time.”