Female Photographers Who Shaped the Way We Look at the World

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.

Lisa Larsen, a German-born photographer, worked for major publications such as Vogue, The New York Times, and Glamour. While at LIFE, she was sent to cover the visit of Yugoslavia’s president Josip Broz (Tito) to the Kremlin in 1956. She also traveled with Cornell Capa to Jamaica to cover Queen Elisabeth II’s first royal tour and she was the first American photographer allowed to visit Outer Mongolia in the late 1950s.

Marta Holmes, instead, became famous for her unique portraits of Hollywood stars of the caliber of Jackson Pollock, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Her 1950’s image of the mixed-raced crooner Billy Eckstine being hugged by a white fan sparked huge controversies. “It was groundbreaking back then in that it was a black man hugging a white woman,” Holmes said, “There was a discussion about whether we should run it or not.’” Henry Luce pushed for the photograph to be in the magazine because, he said, “this is what the future is going to be.” 

Each in their own way and through their work, these women contributed to a new way of looking at the world. This exhibition emphasizes the fundamental role that these women played in the development of LIFE and American photojournalism while drawing attention to the much-overlooked contribution that female photo-reporters always had in the history of photography.