Margaret Bourke-White

Bourke-White was a first in many things and had a knack of being in the right place at the right time. Born in 1904 and working as the first woman photojournalist she photographed the depression era dust bowl along with Dorotea Lange and then became a war correspondent photographing in many of the main theatres of war. She continued working as a journalist as well as a commercial photographer making memorable images in Russia and also made the last photograph of Gandhi, this section from wikipedia gives an insight into her extensive work during the Second World War

“Bourke-White was the first female war correspondent^[4] and the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II. In 1941, she traveled to the Soviet Union just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggression. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. Taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy, she then captured the ensuing firestorms on camera.

As the war progressed, she was attached to the U.S. Army Air Force in North Africa, then to the U.S. Army in Italy and later Germany. She repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting.

“The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life staff as ‘Maggie the Indestructible.'”^[5] This incident in the Mediterranean refers to the sinking of the England-Africa bound British troopship SS Strathallan which she recorded in an article “Women in Lifeboats”, in Life, February 22, 1943.

In the spring of 1945, she traveled through a collapsing Germany with General George S. Patton. She arrived at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp, and later said, “Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.” After the war, she produced a book titled Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.

“To many who got in the way of a Bourke-White photograph — and that included not just bureaucrats and functionaries but professional colleagues like assistants, reporters, and other photographers — she was regarded as imperious, calculating, and insensitive.”^[5]

She had a knack for being at the right place at the right time: She interviewed and photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just a few hours before his assassination. Alfred Eisenstaedt, her friend and colleague, said one of her strengths was that there was no assignment and no picture that was unimportant to her. She also started the first photo lab at Life.^“

The big picture: Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1950s Moscow

Henri Cartier-Bresson visited Moscow in 1954 to document daily life under communism. Cartier-Bresson sought to capture with his camera what he called decisive moments, coincidentally graceful arrangements of people or objects that other observers would have overlooked. He wandered through foreign cities like a libertine on the prowl, poised to take advantage of any opportunity for visual seduction. The taller soldier here, whose lips curl into a raffish smirk as he strides towards a possible conquest, might be a mirror-image of the invisible photographer. You can feel the frisson of sensual anticipation that accompanied the click of the shutter.…more

If you want to see more go to this rather excellent site, here are some pictures from there