The Friday Picture(s)

*Margaret Bourke-White positioning her camera atop the Chrysler Building taken by her assistant Oscar Graubner*

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) was an American photographer and photo-journalist. She was an amazing talent with a remarkable career. In 1927, aged 23 she opened a commercial photography studio, two years later she was hired as as associate editor of Fortune magazine and a year later she became the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union and was hired by Life magazine. In the 1930's she travelled extensively through Europe to record the impact of Nazism and Communism. When World War Two broke out in 1939 she became the first female war correspondent and the first woman to be permitted to work in combat zones in that conflict. She repeatedly came under fire, was torpedoed in the Mediterranean and left stranded in the arctic - no surprise then that she earned the title Maggie The Indestructible! She photographed Stalin, Gandhi (famously only hours before he was assassinated) and was one of the first people to photograph Buchenwald. Of this last experience she is quoted as saying "Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me." . Here are just a few of her many remarkable photographs:

*New York 1939*

*Nuremberg 1945*

*Mahatma Gandhi 1946*