At the entrance to the new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History looms a photograph that is oddly abstract and resolutely concrete, a row of conical towers forming part of the hulking Fort Peck Dam in Montana. The photograph covered the first issue of LIFE in 1936 and was captured by Margaret Bourke-White, the first and best known of the handful of female photojournalists on the magazine’s staff, whose work is the subject of LIFE: Six Women Photographers, an exhibition that takes advantage of New-York Historical’s recent acquisition of the archives of Time-Life. Bourke-White’s story on the dam construction, “Franklin Roosevelt’s Wild West,” documented the industrial marvel of the dam over the Missouri River while also showcasing the human effort, and the human community, that took shape around the vast building project.
One of the images used in Bourke-White’s 1936 photo-essay on the construction of the Fort Peck Dam. Margaret Bourke-White, photograph from “Franklin Roosevelt’s Wild West,” LIFE, November 23, 1936 © LIFE Picture Collection, Meredith Corporation
Alongside the display of photographs from the cover story, both published and unpublished, is a note from Bourke-White to her editors about her progress, which notes that all her subjects have been forthcoming so far except the “ladies of the evening”—but that she is working on gaining their trust. It’s a hint that while Bourke-White’s boss, the publisher Henry Luce, hired her to capture the industrial might of the project, her gender helped to shape her access and her perspective on the project.
That is not to say that there is an identifiable feminine slant on the subjects showcased here, which range from WWII preparedness to Cold War geopolitics to the career of an African-American teen idol. Bourke-White and the other photographers in the exhibition—Marie Hansen, Nina Leen, Martha Holmes, Hansel Mieth, and Lisa Larsen—were the only six women among the magazine’s 105 regular staff photographers over the course of the magazine’s lifespan, from 1936 until the early 1970s. Beyond that glaring disparity, however, the question of how gender shapes a photographer’s vision—especially in a journalistic context—is difficult to answer definitively. According to Sarah Gordon, curatorial scholar in women’s history at the museum (and my former colleague), a unique, unifying female perspective proved elusive. “In the beginning we thought they would have a different take, or that they were hired for different things because they were women, and really we couldn’t make that argument,” she explains. “I’m sure they got different assignments at times because they were women, but it wasn’t something that was obvious.”
Gordon initially acted as an internal consultant for the exhibition, which is housed in the Joyce B. Cowin Women’s History Gallery, providing historical context for the major events and figures in women’s history during the period. Her role expanded as the scope and focus of the show evolved, and she became a co-curator, with Marilyn Satin Kushner, head of the museum’s department of prints and photographs. Together they wrestled with how best to showcase the women’s work while helping visitors understand the relevant history. “At one point we were going to do it by theme: a wall of pictures that dealt with race, a wall of pictures that were about domestic life, about war,” Gordon says. “And it just wasn’t gelling somehow. We kept coming back to certain stories.”
Eventually, the curators chose to focus on a single story for each photographer, tracing its evolution, the behind-the-scenes discussions that shaped it, and the reader response. Through these specific stories, the larger goals of the magazine emerged. “LIFE was a new idea,” Gordon explains. “The idea of these big stories—multiple page, complicated stories, with a narrative, lots of photographs—that was new to Americans.” Henry Luce’s vision explicitly united photography with storytelling, a case he made in a short manifesto, “The Camera as Essayist,” published in LIFE in 1937 and displayed here in a central case. “He’s very interested in the idea, that was quite novel at the time, that a photograph had a perspective. It’s not neutral,” Gordon explains. That dual purpose, of documenting and commenting, underpinned what Luce aimed to do in his magazine. “It was really about the question, what is America? How does America function?” Luce’s photojournalists, men and women, were hired and commissioned to carry out his mission.
In the exhibition, the range of subjects covered by the photographers mirrors the magazine’s thematic concerns. “It was a way to distill the mission of LIFE magazine through the work of these women,” Gordon says. The result is a reminder that history is made up of small, specific stories that don’t always last, in their detail and drama. A singer’s popularity fades; cultural anxieties shift focus; geopolitical crises ease and are forgotten. Gordon points to Martha Holmes’s story on the popular crooner Billy Eckstine, and Lisa Larsen’s on Marshal Tito’s 1956 visit to the Soviet Union as examples. “These were not stories about race or the Cold War—they weren’t themes. The photographers were going out to tell a story.” All of the women in the exhibition joined LIFE within the first decade of its existence (Hansel Mieth and Margaret Bourke-White within the first year), and remained with the magazine for several years, some staying on as staffers or freelancers until it shuttered in 1972.
The anchor of “Mr. B,” Martha Holmes’s 1950 story on Eckstine is a striking photograph of the African-American singer being embraced by a group of white female fans—a moment of intense and risky intimacy. “That was her favorite photo of her career, because, as she put it, it showed America as it should be,” Gordon says. But Holmes’s editors were wary, and sought higher approval. “They take it to Luce, who says, This is the America that will be. He says, run it.” In an effort to neutralize the photograph’s sexual charge, the magazine’s editors appended a caption that described the fans’ “maternal feelings” towards Eckstine. “Holmes herself cracked up when she saw that,” Gordon says. “Maternal my ass, right?”
“Maternal feelings” from Billy Eckstine’s fans. Martha Holmes, photograph from “Mr. B.,” LIFE, April 24, 1950 © LIFE Picture Collection, Meredith Corporation
Despite the caption, the photograph received a flood of vicious responses, excerpts from which are included here, along with the internal correspondence about the reaction—which notes that some readers felt positively about the story. Nevertheless, Eckstine’s career was irreparably harmed by the scandal. “It’s hard to quantify, but his career continues very strong through 1950, 51, and then it slows down,” Gordon says. “His biographer, Cary Ginell, believes absolutely that it had a huge impact, that it was the fault of this story.”
In the case of Larsen’s story, “Tito as Soviet Hero,” the curators chose to build the story around an enlarged, unpublished print, a powerful portrait of a woman in a headscarf watching the proceedings with a skeptical curiosity. Although it’s not highlighted in this way, there is a charge to this picture that I think derives from the woman behind the lens, watching another woman. She doesn’t wait to catch her subject in a smile, or frame her to look attractive, but instead puts her in a position of power, as a witness to history unfolding. Her expression is hard to interpret, but invites us to wonder what she is thinking, what she knows—and then to wonder why the male photo editors might have chosen not to include it.
Lisa Larsen, unpublished photograph from “Tito as Soviet Hero, How Times Have Changed!” LIFE, June 25, 1956 © LIFE Picture Collection, Meredith Corporation
The exhibition illuminates the collaborative nature of producing these stories, from a photographer developing pictures, making contact sheets and prints, to photo editors choosing from among those prints. Image quality—darkness, sharpness, focus, and so on—played a large part in those choices, but there were political considerations in play as well, and what is left out can be as intriguing as what is included.
Gordon points to Hansel Mieth’s 1938 cover story on the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, which showcased its social and community efforts, and describes what was left out. “There are multiple pictures [in the archive] of black women working, but they don’t make it into the story anywhere,” she points out. “There are multiple pictures of strikers, and [Mieth] took more pictures of women and men at work than get published.” The emphasis of the resulting story is less about labor than it is about leisure. “The story is about all the advantages the union offers to its workers like a health clinic, a basketball team […] this summer camp they had in the Catskills. It’s positive towards the union, no question of that, but it’s also about wanting to be middle class, and using a union to help you with things like healthcare—not about collective action, or striking.” Like Henry Luce, the ILGWU’s head, David Dubinsky, “was a rabid anti-Communist,” Gordon explains. A story that depoliticized the union, that moved away from socialism toward social welfare, served the magazine’s interests along with the union’s: “they’re scratching each other’s backs with this kind of story.”
Like the union story, Marie Hansen’s story “The WAACs,” from 1942, had to strike a balance between showing the truth and selling an appealing story. “This was a new idea, to see women in military uniform, women soldiers wearing gas masks,” Gordon says. “They chose one where they’re all very regimented, like a robot army is coming. It’s a little terrifying.” But a different kind of cultural fear attached to photographs of women operating machinery, of images of competency and independence. As the display shows, those images did not make it into the final spread. “They didn’t show the picture of women learning how to fix a plane, but they bothered to include a picture of a woman ironing her uniform,” Gordon points out. “So there’s this push and pull, we’re going to be edgy, but not too edgy.”
To contemporary eyes, some choices seem bizarre. One photograph shows male officers parading behind a line of uniformed WAACs, inspecting to make sure their stockings are straight; their faces aren’t captured by the camera. “It’s kind of kinky—he gets to look at all their legs,” Gordon says. “But that was okay, somehow, in the magazine.” This often surprising interplay of what is included versus what is left out invites the reader to speculate on how the stories might have differed if the women photographers had free rein over their images, captions, and framing. It suggests how, even within the tight confines of a journalistic assignment, women photographers often captured a more complex, rounded vision of their female subjects than the magazine ultimately conveyed.
A panel display at the start of the show offers a brief introduction to the life stories of the six photographers, but their biographies aren’t the focus of the show. I ask Gordon whether this choice, to focus on work rather than character, indicates an evolution of women’s history away from its sometimes oppressive focus on biography. She explains that while the show certainly wants to create a wider awareness of these women’s work and their names, it is not just a question of establishing individual fame. At the Center for Women’s History, the goal is “to integrate women’s history into all of history.” The exhibition therefore aims to show how the photographers’ work fit into a larger frame, how it was “integral to LIFE, to Henry Luce’s vision of America, to this sharing of images and stories about American families, politics, culture, art, race, labor,” Gordon says. “It’s about their work, their connections to these themes, to these topics, more than their own biographies. That’s the women’s history, to me.”
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