Design Research Paper for Margaret Bourke-White 

You might say in your mind who is Margaret Bourke-White, and why should I care. Well Margaret Bourke-White is photographer and not only that she was the first Female War journalist and the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviet’s Five-year plan (The Russian Five-year plan was to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power.)  

Anyways Margaret Bourke-White was born on June 14th, 1904 in the Bronx, New York. However, she started to grow up in Bond Brook, in New Jersey, with her three siblings. Which is her younger brother Roger Bourke White, her Ruth White. Her parents are Joseph White who was her Father who came from Poland, who was an engineer who worked with printing presses and the development of offset lithography and the rotary press, and her mother was Minnie Bourke, her mother was educated at Pratt Institute in stenography and was a dedicated homemaker who encouraged her children to become educated. This Information was found in (Margaret Bourke-White | International Photography Hall of Fame (iphf.org)) where it shows how she was inspired by her father the most by his enthusiasm for cameras, and how Margaret did not pick up a camera until after her father’s passed away. During this time, she was studying in Columbia University in New York to study art. Throughout her life education, she attends 5 in total, including Cornell University, Case Western Reserve University, Purdue University, and University of Michigan. It wasn’t until Her mother bought Margaret her first camera that year. It was a 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ Ica Reflex. The camera had cost her mother $20 and it had a cracked lens. She took a one-week course under Clarence H. White. Where she eventually met Everett “Chappie” Chapman who would later become her husband.  

However, her carrier started to take off when after making arrangements with a commercial photographer to use his darkroom, Bourke-White made her first step to become a photographer. It wasn’t until her photographs were a huge success. Calls began to come in from architects wondering if she was studying to become a photographer, which had never crossed her mind until that point. But her marriage to Chappie had ended just after a few years, and now Margaret had the freedom to “embark on my new life”.  And she did by Margert Bourke-White’s first studio was in one of Cleveland’s latest skyscrapers. Not only did Margaret continued with her company she had vowed to never fall in love again after her horrible marriage with Chappie, until Erskine Caldwell somehow caught her off guard and the two fell in love while on their trip to the South, and they finally were married in February 1939.  It wasn’t until in 1941, Caldwell and Bourke-White went to the Soviet Union, to be the first women who interviewed the soviet unit for Life. She was the only photographer in Moscow during the German raid on the Kremlin and she photographed Josef Stalin. One of Margaret Bourke-White’s most famous images was taken of Gandhi with his spinning wheel in 1946.  

This was one of many of Margaret Bourke-White’s famous photography photos that she has done. However; it soon was cut short when one day when she was photographing the Korean war in 1963, started to realize stiffness in her arms and had difficulty walking. She had soon realized that she had Parkinson’s disease (A chronic and progressive movement disorder). This did not stop Margaret Bourke-White from taking photograph photos until she took an untested surgery, and by writing her publications for her disease in life by Lizabeth Ronk from Life/ Time photo editor writing about Margaret how “Her struggles with Parkinson’s disease cut her career and her life short to me this represents her largest conflict.” However, this was one battle she could not win, losing this battle at age 67, on August 27, 1971, in Stamford Connecticut, Us.  But here legend still lives on by representing that women are able to do more than at the time they were supposed to do. Such as being a house mom and being an accounting, she should that all women can do what men can do with the same or more racial preference that is being judged. Such as what Margaret Bourke-White’s had to face with which was gender bias, and blacklisting, but this never stopped her and she passed representing that any women can do what they love without worrying about what others comment have about them.