Philippe Halsman and Margaret Bourke-White were colleagues at LIFE Magazine, and their photo shoot took place in Halsman’s NY studio in 1943. Halsman had just broken out from the freelance grind and gotten his first of 101 LIFE covers in 1942. Bourke-White on the other hand, took the photo for the very first cover of LIFE magazine ever, in 1936. At the time of her first cover she was 32, and had met the editor of LIFE, Henry Luce, through her work as an editor and staff photographer at Fortune magazine. Her specialty at the time was photographing the unconscious beauty of industrial and architectural forms, and portraits of the victims of the Great Depression. LIFE magazine was a new photo based publication, and Bourke-White was their first female photojournalist, and they sent her on many groundbreaking assignments. When reading about her life you get the sense she seemed to have some protection from guardian angels, as she often covered areas of conflict and always escaped unscathed. She was the first Western photographer to enter the Soviet Union in 1930, and she returned there in the height of WWII when Germany was attacking Moscow. She was the first female war correspondent and was embedded with the US Air Force because she was adept at aerial photography. She flew in battle missions, survived boats being torpedoed, was on site with General Patton when concentration camp Buchenwald was liberated, photographed the Indian Pakistan partition, photographed Gandhi hours before he was assassinated, and embedded herself with the guerrilla fighters in the Korean War. Over the course of her 284 LIFE assignments, and countless personal projects, she was witness to many tragedies and horrors of the 20th century. She had the sensitivity to capture the humanity in her portraits of people in challenging situations. Her powerful and diverse body of work is preserved for the future in institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography.
