Margaret Bourke-White - master of black and white photojournalism. Margaret Bourke-White was a natural subject for legends while she was alive, and The Black and white photographs of Margaret Bourke-White helps explain why most of the stories about her were true. One legend made her a glamorous, ambitious woman (she was almost as good a subject as she was a photographer) who went to any lengths, and put herself in all kinds of physical peril, to get the black and white pictures she wanted. First as a contributor to FORTUNE and later as one of the first staff black and white photographers on LIFE, she competed-successfully - in what was regarded as a man's domain, the world of black and white photojournalism. She cajoled officials to let her ride on bombing missions during World War II - the first woman to do so. She dropped down mine shafts in South Africa, and when she recovered from the dead faint caused by oppressive airlessness, got her black and white pictures. She forced herself to walk through German concentration camps as gamely as she wriggled on the Kremlin floor to coax a twinkle of life onto Josef Stalin's stony face. Bourke-White was determined and courageous; nothing stopped her, not even the 19-year battle against Parkinson's disease that ended only with her death in 1971. But more than determination is needed for great black and white pictures. As the 200 or so black and white pictures in the new book show, Bourke-White possessed a masterful sense of composition, notable from almost the beginning of her career black and white particularly in the early black and white photographs of industry that made mundane factories and workshops into dramatic pieces of black and white art. One critic remarked that she could transform an American factory into a Gothic cathedral. She filled a frame as a painter covers a canvas with a broad brush, using bold, prime colors. No matter what her subject, she approached it with an eye alert to its surface patterns and its inner rhythms. It was this sense of design that gives her black and white pictures the forcefulness that unmistakably identifies each one as a Bourke-White.