Margaret was born on June 14th, 1904, in the Bronx, New York. Her father, Joseph White, was an inventor and engineer, and her mother, Minnie Bourke, was a forward thinking woman, especially for the early 1900's. When Margaret was very young, the family moved to a rural suburb in New Jersey, so that Joseph could be closer to his job. Their mother taught Margaret, along with her sister Ruth, from an early age. Her mother was strict in monitoring their outside influences, limiting everything from fried foods to funny papers. When Margaret was eight, her father took her inside a foundry to watch the manufacture of printing presses. While in the foundry, she saw some molten iron poured. This event filled Margaret with joy, and this memory would be burned in her mind for years to come. Joseph White's chief recreation activity suited his scientific mind; he was an amateur photographer. The White's home was filled with his photographs. If something interested Margaret's father, it also interested her. She pretended as a girl to take photographs with an empty cigar box. Although she claimed that she never took a photograph until after her father's death. Her cousin Florence remembers he

In 1936, Bourke-white toured the south with the writer Erskine Caldwell to supply the pictures for the book ‘You Have Seen Their Faces’. The book was a photo documentary of the poor, rural people of the south. Later in 1936, Henry Luce decided to launch a picture magazine, spurred on by the success of European picture tabloids. In this magazine, pictures wouldn't be subservient to the text; the pictures would tell the story. The magazine was called Life and Bourke-White was one of the four original photographers hired. She covered everything from the New Deal towns springing up in the Midwest to the growing conflict in Europe. In early 1941, tensions were running high in Europe, and Life asked her to return to Russia, to make a comparison between the current Russia and the one that she saw ten years before. Bourke-White and Caldwell entered Russia though China. On July 22nd, the first bombs fell on Moscow and Bourke-White was the only foreign photographer present. The resulting pictures were a major scoop for Bourke-White and Life. She spent the next four years covering the European theater of war, it's leaders, and the aftermath of the Nazi death camps. She also flew in American bombers on their bombing raids, taking pictures of the destruction.

Margaret Bourke-White contributed many things to the world of photography. She was a woman, doing a man's job, in a man's world, from the foundries of Cleveland to the battlefields in World War II. She was an original staff photographer for two of the most prominent magazines of her day, Fortune and Life. She led a life full of adventure, pioneering a new art form:

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