Margaret Bourke-White, The Louisville Flood, 1937.

Margaret Bourke-White best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent (and the first female permitted to work in combat zones) and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her photograph appeared on the first cover (Fort Peck Dam construction, November 23, 1936).

During the mid-1930s, Bourke-White, like Dorothea Lange, photographed drought victims of the Dust Bowl.

Her associations with leftist politics in the 1930s drew much criticism in later decades. Her first book, Eyes on Russia, published in 1931 is of extraordinary interest as a source, both visual and narrative, on the Soviet Union during its first Five Year Plan.

With letters of recommendation from influential people, including the Russian film maker, Sergei Eisenstein, Bourke-White arrived in Moscow in the fall of 1930, where she obtained the official endorsement of A.B. Khalatoff, chief of the Soviet publishing house (he was later liquidated in the 1937 purges). Khalatoff supplied her with a thick roll of rubles and a guide. Bourke-White then toured some of the most important industrial and other sites and came back with stellar images of Russia under construction, which she complemented by a spritely and charming narrative of her experiences as the first foreign photographer to photograph in the Soviet Union with official permission. On her trip, she made 800 negatives, of which 40 were published in Eyes on Russia.

This book, along with at least eight related illustrated articles in Fortune, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and other periodicals, significantly enhanced Bourke-White's reputation and helped initiate relationships she established with both Soviet officials and Americans sympathetic to the U.S.S.R.