The Industrial revelations of Margaret Bourke-White.

• Position: Photojournalism

A native of the Bronx, N.Y., Margaret Bourke-White (1904-71) first gained recognition as an industrial photographer based in Cleveland. "I stood on the deck to watch the city come into view," she said of her Lake Erie boat trip to the Ohio city. "As the skyline took form in the morning mist, I felt I was coming to my promised land ... columns of machinery gaining height as we drew toward the pier, derricks swinging like living creatures. Deep inside, I knew these were my subjects."

During her unique career, Bourke-White was stranded in the Arctic, strafed by the German Luftwaffe, torpedoed in the Mediterranean Sea, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled from Chesapeake Bay after her helicopter crashed. She was the first Western journalist to document Soviet industry after the Russian Revolution as well as create a travelogue of the Balkan states right before German dictator Adolph Hitler moved in to ignite World War II.

Bourke-White studied photography as a hobby while still a young woman. Her father, Joseph, a naturalist and inventor, was somewhat of a camera enthusiast. Still, when she went off to Columbia University in New York City, it was to study herpetology. However, after meeting Clarence White, a leader in the pictorial school of photography, her interest in that subject was accelerated. After transferring among numerous colleges, Bourke-White eventually graduated from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., where she had made a photographic study of the rural...