Margaret Bourke-White Research Paper

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Margaret Bourke-White was a famous female photographer known for being a pioneer in the world of photography. As one of the original Life photographers, she made many firsts and set trends in photojournalism.
Margaret was born in the Bronx of New York on June 14,1904. Her parents were Joseph White and Minnie Bourke. Her father was a Jewish man from Poland and her mother was an Irish Catholic. Her parents were intelligent and open-minded who taught in their children success through personal achievement. Margaret's father was very supportive of her interest in photography at an early age.
Margaret grew up in the small town of Bound Brook, New Jersey. When Margaret was young she had a passion for nature and loved to go on walks with her …show more content…
She wasn't very liked at school because she wasn't like the other girls and she was very serious about her work. She was often bored with the curriculum and thought school was very dull. Despite this, she was the yearbook editor and in her senior year she co-wrote the class poem which won an award for creativity.
After high school, she attended Columbia University and studied herpetology. Unfortunately, she only stayed for one semester and transferred to Michigan following her father's death in 1922. From there she bounced around to different colleges and eventually landed at Cornell university. During that time, photography was more of a hobby, when she was studying at Columbia her love of photography only grew more powerful. She graduated with her B.A. and a year later started her own commercial photography studio.
In the first of many firsts to come, Margaret was hired as an associate editor and staff photographer for Fortune magazine making her one of the first female photo journalists. Independently, she travelled to the Soviet Union and was the first Western photographer allowed to take pictures of the Soviet Union. She began to develop a reputation as a photographer and in 1936 as one of the original four photographers hired for Life magazine by Henry Luce. Her pictures of the poor in the Deep American South showed people how photography could capture and communicate the horrible parts of our
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Margaret Bourke-White was born in New York City in 1904. She added “Bourke”, which was her mother’s maiden name, to her name after her first marriage ended. In 1921, Margaret enrolled in classes at Columbia University to study art. Her mother bought her an Ica Reflex camera that had a broken lense that year. She used the camera to photograph the campus and sell the images to other students. This was Bourke-White’s first steps to becoming a photographer. Bourke-White’s photographs of the Otis Steel…

Words 643 - Pages 3