Margaret Bourke-White, arguably the most renowned among the six photographers, was the first to be hired by Henry Luce in 1936 for the newly founded LIFE. In her memoirs Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White noted that the magazine wanted “faces that would express what we wanted to tell. Not just the unusual or striking face, but the face that would speak out the message from the printed page.” The six photographers followed this path and created photoessays that documented the life of American workers, Hollywood stars, soldiers and conflicts, major political events of the nineteenth century, and women’s lives in the postwar era.
Bourke-White was the first Western photographer to allowed to take images of the Soviet industry and its workers. She covered the Second World War, becoming the first female war correspondent, and took the famous photograph of Mohandas K. Gandhi a few hours before he was assassinated in 1948.