- Her last name Bourke-White is a combination of her mother's and father's surnames.
- Frequent photo contributor to Life magazine.
- Provided Life magazine's first cover photograph in the capacity of first female photojournalist to be employed by the magazine. (1936)
- Photographed the lavish funeral of Mohandas K. Gandhi for Life magazine in Delhi, India (February 1948).
- She was the first woman photographer attached to US troops, and survived a torpedo attack on a ship in WWII.
- Inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 2015.
- She was nominated for the 2021 New Jersey Hall of Fame in the Arts and Letters category.
- She inducted into the 2022 New Jersey Hall of Fame in the Arts and Letters category.
- She received the "Honor Roll Award" from the 'American Society of Magazine Photographers' in 1964.
- She was arguably best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviets' first five-year plan.
- Bourke-White was the first known female war correspondent, as well as the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II.
- Farrah Fawcett played her in the 1989 television movie, Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White.
- She was designated a Women's History Month Honoree in 1992 and again in 1994 by the National Women's History Project.
- Megan Fox played a fictional character based on Margaret Bourke-White in the 2019 South Korean war film The Battle of Jangsari.
- A 160-foot-long photomural she created for NBC in 1933, for the Rotunda in the broadcaster's Rockefeller Center headquarters, was destroyed in the 1950s. In 2014, when the Rotunda and Grand Staircase leading up to it were rebuilt, the photomural was faithfully recreated in digital form on the 360-degree LED screens on the Rotunda's walls. It forms one of the stops on the NBC Studio Tour.
- Many of her manuscripts, memorabilia, photographs, and negatives are housed in Syracuse University's Bird Library Special Collections section.
- Bourke-White wrote an autobiography, 'Portrait of Myself', which was published in 1963 and became a bestseller.
- In 1941 she traveled to the Soviet Union just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggression. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. Taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy, she then captured the ensuing firestorms on camera.
- In 1959 and 1961 she underwent several operations to treat her condition, which effectively ended her tremors but affected her speech.
- Alfred Eisenstaedt, her friend and colleague, said one of her strengths was that there was no assignment and no picture that was unimportant to her.
- Candice Bergen played her in the 1982 film Gandhi.
- In 1953, Bourke-White developed her first symptoms of Parkinson's disease. She was forced to slow her career to fight encroaching paralysis.
- 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.
- She had a knack for being at the right place at the right time: she interviewed and photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just a few hours before his assassination in 1948.
- She served as a photographer for Life during Korean War of 1950-1953.
- A pension plan set up in the 1950s, "though generous for that time", no longer covered her health-care costs. She also suffered financially from her personal generosity and from "less-than-responsible attendant care".
- She received in 1948 a "Honorary Doctorate" from the Rutgers University.
- 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'.
- In 2016 Bourke-White was inducted into International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.
- In the spring of 1945 she traveled throughout a collapsing Germany with Gen. George S. Patton. She arrived at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp, and later said, "Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me." After the war she produced a book entitled Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.
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