Portrait of Myself

THIS is the story of a gallant beautiful and glamorous American woman.For more than thirty years Margaret Bourke-White had made photographic history as the first photographer to see the artistic and storytelling possibilities in American industry as the first to write social criticism with a lens and as the most distinguished and venturesome foreign correspondent-with-a camera to report wars politics and social and political revolution on three continents. In the world of pictures of magazines of books she won fame and fortune.Here are the tales of her struggles to master her art and craft of photographing Stalin Gandhi and many other notables of being torpedoed off North Africa while reporting World War II of flying combat missions of photographing the dread murder camps of Nazi Germany of touring Tobacco Road to produce the book You Have Seen Their Faces with Erskine Caldwell (whom she later married) of adventures and wonderful picture-taking in the mines of South Africa in the frozen North in war-torn Korea.And then tragically this beautiful and indomitably vigorous woman was stricken by Parkinsons disease. This story of Miss Bourke-Whites winning battle with Parkinsons was the subject first of a long report in Life Magazine and then of a thrilling documentary television film which was seen throughout the nation.