In her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White wrote, ‘On the sixty-first floor, the workmen started building some curious structures which overhung 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue below.

When I learned these were to be gargoyles à la Notre Dame, but made of stainless steel as more suitable for the twentieth century, I decided that here would be my new studio.

There was no place in the world that I would accept as a substitute.’ When the building's management initially refused to rent to a woman, Bourke-White secured a recommendation from Fortune magazine, her principal employer at the time, and opened her studio shortly thereafter.

She hired John Vassos to design the deluxe interior, whose clean modern lines echoed the building's bold and graceful exterior.

[7] Her photographs of the construction of the Fort Peck Dam featured in Life's first issue, dated November 23, 1936, including the cover.

[18] This cover photograph became such a favorite that it was the 1930s' representative in the United States Postal Service's Celebrate the Century series of commemorative postage stamps.

She held the title of staff photographer at LIFE until 1940, but returned from 1941 to 1942,[7] and again in 1945, after which she stayed through her semi-retirement in 1957 (which ended her photography for the magazine)[5] and her full retirement in 1969.

In the February 15, 1937, issue of Life magazine, her famous photograph of black flood-victims standing in front of a sign that declared, "World's Highest Standard of Living", showing a white family, was published.

They collaborated on two more books North of the Danube (1939) a travelogue about Czechoslovakia under the specter of Nazi occupation and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941) about industrialization in the United States.

She also took portraits of other famous people in the Soviet Union, such as Karl Radek, Sergei Eisenstein, and Hugh Cooper.

She noted that the trips and work there required a lot of patience, and generally had mixed, yet positive impressions of the USSR.

Her photographs were first published in Fortune magazine in 1931 under the title Eyes on Russia,[21] and then as a book with the same name by Simon and Schuster.

On January 22, 1943, Major Rudolph Emil Flack piloted the lead aircraft with Margaret Bourke-White (the first female photographer/writer to fly on a combat mission) aboard his 414th Bombardment Squadron B-17F and bombed the El Aouina Airdrome in Tunis, Tunisia.

[26] "The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life staff as 'Maggie the Indestructible.

'"[5] The incident in the Mediterranean refers to the sinking of the England-Africa bound British troopship SS Strathallan that she recorded in an article, "Women in Lifeboats", in Life, February 22, 1943.

She also photographed M. K. Gandhi (at his spinning wheel) and Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah (upright in a chair).

[27] Sixty-six of Bourke-White's photographs of the partition violence featured in a 2006 reissue of Khushwant Singh's 1956 novel about the disruption, Train to Pakistan.

In connection with the reissue, many of the photographs in the book were displayed at "the posh shopping center Khan Market" in Delhi, India.

No memorial to the partition victims exists in India, according to Pramod Kapoor, head of Roli, the Indian publishing house coming out with the new book.

[5] Bourke-White wrote an autobiography, Portrait of Myself, which was published in 1963 and became a bestseller, but she grew increasingly infirm and isolated in her home in Darien, Connecticut.

Many of her manuscripts, memorabilia, photographs, and negatives are housed in Syracuse University's Bird Library Special Collections section.

Group Solo In April 2023, Phillips NY auctioned Gargoyle, Chrysler Building, New York City (c1930) for an above-high estimate $127,000.