Greenwich Historical Society Exhibit Features 6 Women Photographers Whose Iconic Images for LIFE Magazine Helped Create Modern Journalism

Via Greenwich Free Press

February 29, 2024


Six pioneering women whose photographs for LIFE magazine skillfully captured events on a quickly evolving world stage will be the subject of Greenwich Historical Society’s new exhibition to debut March 6. These photographers enabled the public “to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events,” as described by LIFE magazine founder and editor-in-chief Henry Luce.

Martha Holmes, photograph from “Mr. B.,” LIFE, April 24, 1950 © LIFE Picture Collection, Dotdash Meredith Corp. Martha Holmes began photographing for LIFE in 1944. On view in the exhibition are Holmes’s 1950 photographs of mixed-race singer Billy Eckstine, including one of Eckstine being embraced by a white fan—a provocative image that Holmes felt was one of her best because she felt that it “told just what the world should be like.” Henry Luce supported this opinion.


LIFE: Six Women Photographers features iconic images from these talented women who helped create modern photojournalism through their work as featured in the pages of LIFE magazine.

On view through July 7, 2024, the exhibition presents more than 70 photographs by Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), Marie Hansen (1918-1969), Martha Holmes (1923-2006), Lisa Larsen (ca. 1925-1959), Nina Leen (ca. 1909-1995) and Hansel Mieth (1909-1998).

“We are thrilled to showcase the works of these talented photographers who were on the vanguard of a transformative change in how twentieth-century Americans received and understood global cultural and political events,” said Maggie Dimock, curator of exhibitions and collections at Greenwich Historical Society.

“This insightful exhibition offers a glimpse into how each of these remarkable women used their camera to capture topics that dominated American discourse through the last century, including U.S. industrial strength, the role of women and the family in modern American society, race relations, World War II, labor movements and the Cold War.”

A long-time Greenwich resident, Henry Luce (1898 – 1967) was convinced that American political, economic, and cultural power would, and should, dominate the era and that photojournalism, or “photo essays” as he coined them, could effectively shape America as an international power, inspiring its people, in his words, “to live and work and fight with vigor and enthusiasm.”

For decades, Americans saw the world through the lens of the photographers at LIFE, and the magazine’s innovative photo essays became the publication’s trademark.

Of the 101 photographers on staff at LIFE during the magazine’s run as a weekly, only six full-time photographers were women. LIFE: Six Women Photographers highlights the work of these photographers while providing insight into the process through which they worked with editors to create visual stories, through the inclusion of photographs, vintage prints, copy prints and contact sheets. Published and unpublished photographs along with select memos, correspondence and other items from Time Inc. records show the editing process behind the final, published stories.

“The topic will provide fascinating historical context to the enormous changes underway today in media,” said Greenwich Historical Society Executive Director and CEO Debra Mecky. “And it will enable us to further our mission to strengthen the community’s connection to our past, to each other and to our future. Henry Luce was a Greenwich resident during the time he was arguably the most influential media figure in the twentieth century and one of the country’s most prominent citizens.”

LIFE: Six Women Photographers has been organized by the New-York Historical Society. The exhibition is curated by Marilyn Satin Kushner, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections; and Sarah Gordon, curatorial scholar in women’s history, Center for Women’s History; with Erin Levitsky, Ryerson University; and William J. Simmons, Andrew Mellon Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Center for Women’s History. The New-York Historical Society holds the research archive of Time Inc., which was acquired by the Meredith Corporation (now Dotdash Meredith Corp.) in 2018.

A series of lectures, workshops and discussions, film screenings and other activity related to the exhibition will be presented by Greenwich Historical Society throughout the duration of the exhibition, beginning with two in March:

Women of Photos and Letters: Margaret Bourke-White, Clare Booth Luce and Annie Leibovitz
Thursday, March 14 from 6:00 – 7:00 pm


In honor of Women’s History Month, Louisa Iacurci of the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame will explore the inspiring histories of Hall of Fame inductees whose work and lives are intertwined with social advocacy and journalistic activism, including photographers Margaret Bourke-White and Annie Leibovitz and writer, journalist and politician Clare Booth Luce.

LIFE: Six Women Photographers: A Lecture with Curator Marilyn Satin Kushner

Thursday, March 21 from 6:00 – 7:00 pm

In an illustrated lecture, Dr. Marilyn Satin Kushner, Curator and Head of the Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections at New-York Historical Society, will expand on the curatorial process for LIFE: Six Women Photographers.

The full program schedule is available online: https://greenwichhistory.org/life-six-women-photographers/

Guided Gallery Tours:
Tours will be offered on select Sundays through June, from 1:00 – 1:30pm. Free with admission, participants will enjoy an in-depth docent-led discussion of LIFE: Six Women Photographers, that shares insightful interpretation of the photographs on view, and a modern perspective to understanding the complex social backdrop in which they would have originally been seen by magazine readers.

Dates: March 10, 24; April 7, 21; May 5, 19; June 2, 16, 30.

For more information: https://greenwichhistory.org/event/guided-gallery-tour/.

Margaret Bourke-White, photograph from “Franklin Roosevelt’s Wild West,” LIFE, November 23, 1936 © LIFE Picture Collection, Dotdash Meredith Corp. Margaret Bourke-White became one of the first four staff photographers at LIFE in 1936.

This exhibition has been generously supported by Joyce B. Cowin, with additional support from Sara Lee Schupf, Jerry Speyer, Robert A.M. Stern and Northern Trust.

Support for this exhibition at the Greenwich Historical Society has been generously provided by Josie Merck and annual donors to the Greenwich Historic Trust.

 

BYU Museum of Art debuts new exhibit ‘Life: Six Women Photographers’

Via The Daily Universe

Oct. 26, 2023

BYU’s Museum of Art debuted its new exhibit “Life: Six Women Photographers” earlier this month, highlighting six influential women photographers’ work from the 1930s to the 1970s.

The exhibit features the work of photojournalists Margaret Bourke-White, Hansel Mieth, Marie Hansen, Nina Leen, Martha Holmes and Lisa Larsen.

Featured within the new installation are a variety of photos, such as Marie Hansen’s photo essay showcasing the 20th century Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, and Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs depicting the impact of the American economic depression on the people of the 1930s. Photographer Nina Leen highlights the work of women and mothers, while portraits of Hollywood personalities are featured in Martha Holmes’ photos of Billy Eckstine. Hansel Mieth’s photos focus on depicting the reality of labor forces and the experiences of the general public.

BYU students, local community members and visitors now have the opportunity to visit the Museum of Art’s new exhibit and appreciate the talent of these six female photojournalist pioneers.

“I think it’s cool that we’re honoring female photographers,” Sally Bradshaw, a BYU junior, said.

Bradshaw continued to describe the photos in the exhibit as “down to earth.”

“They capture very emotional moments, it seems. It’s pretty inspirational,” BYU student Logan Berry said.

Life Magazine, which ran weekly from 1883 to 1972 and monthly from 1978 to 2000, focused on showing “The Most Iconic Photographs of All Time,” according to Life Magazine‘s website.

The “Life: Six Women Photographers” exhibit at the BYU Museum of Art gives visitors the opportunity to witness for themselves the photographs of the six featured photographers. The exhibit displays photos both published and unpublished by Life.

“It’s like a crazy cool opportunity to be able to see these things that at one point were just in a magazine but are now really important,” BYU student Katy Turner said.

Turner continued to express interest in the past and future BYU Museum of Art photography shows because of the focus on important events.

“A lot of times we try to make it a focus and like a point to remember prominent women in history or maybe women in history who were amazing but we don’t really know about,” Bradshaw said. “I think it’s really cool that BYU wants to give a space to that because we’re all about honoring amazing people.”

“Life: Six Women Photographers” was organized by the New-York Historical Society and will be on display in the BYU Museum of Art until Feb. 3, 2024.

There will be a panel discussion discussing the exhibit and photography, art history and journalism on Thursday, Oct. 26 at the Museum of Art. BYU professors and faculty members Heather Belnap, Melissa Gibbs and Paul Adams will be presenting.

Museum of Art educator Liz Donakey will also host a gallery talk regarding the exhibit on Wednesday, Nov. 29.

Students can schedule a tour of the exhibit on the Museum of Art website.

Related exhibit: The LIFE Photographers

REMEMBERING THE RADICAL WOMEN OF NEW YORK'S PHOTO LEAGUE

 Via Huck Magazine

April 26, 2023

By Miss Rosen

A new exhibition revisits the work of Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman, who devoted themselves to social justice and chronicling daily city life as part of one of the most progressive art collectives in US history.

In 1936, a group of predominantly Jewish-American photographers in New York City came together to form The Photo League, dedicating themselves to using the camera in the ongoing fight for social change. By the ‘40s, the League’s roster included luminaries like W. Eugene Smith, Berenice Abbott, Paul Strand, Lisette Model and Weegee, with women accounting for more than a third of their membership at a time when gender equity in the industry was extremely rare.

Standing at the vanguard of art and activism, the League was dedicated to supporting the struggles of American workers through the Depression and the start of the post-war boom – only to be targeted by the FBI during the early years of the Red Scare. In 1947, the US Department of Justice blacklisted the Photo League as a “subversive organisation,” putting members at risk of government persecution.

The League rallied but was ultimately no match for the state, which used a paid informant to destroy the photography collective in court. Although the League finally disbanded in 1951, its legacy lives on in both the work of its members and their shared commitment to human rights.

Sonia Handelman Meyer

Sharp dressers on the corner, Spanish Harlem (1946-1950) 

In a new exhibition, gallerists Sid and Michelle Monroe revisit the groundbreaking work of two photographers whose work as gone unrecognised until recent years: Ida Wyman (1926-2019) and Sonia Handelman Meyer (1920-1922).

Joe Meyer, manager of the Sonia Handelman Meyer Estate, remembers his mother as an artist and activist who first took interest in social issues as a teen. “When she joined the Photo League in her mid-20s, she found a new medium to share her radical ideals with an even broader audience,” he says.

Handelman Meyer attended rallies and participated in boycotts, devoting herself to civil rights, environmental and anti-war causes. Standing at the frontlines, she was tear gassed during protests in Washington D.C., charged by a mounted policeman in New York, and had rocks thrown at her during the 1949 Peekskill Riot.

In an artist statement written in her later years, Handelman Meyer recounted her work for the League photographing at an anti-lynching rally in Madison Square Park, at a Jehovah’s Witness convention in Yankee Stadium, and at the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, as well as chronicling daily life in New York, which she descried as “rough-edged, tender and very beautiful in its diversity.”

After the League shut down, Handelman Meyer packed up her prints and negatives and went underground for three years, fearing repercussions of her involvement. She lost track of League members, focusing her energy on raising a family and photographing nature instead.

After a series of events brought her work back into the public eye in 2007, Handelman Meyer, then 87, was finally able to receive the recognition she deserved. Charged with purpose, she picked up where she left off, passing along the mission of the Photo League to a new generation of photographers.

Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman: Pioneering Women of the Photo League is on view April 21 – June 18, 2023, at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Capturing Humanity: Photography exhibit explores snapshots of New York’s ordinary people

 

Via The Albuquerque Journal

BY KATHALEEN ROBERTS / JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

Sunday, April 23, 2023

Two pioneering women photographers who were blacklisted by the Red Scare share wall space at Santa Fe’s Monroe Gallery of Photography.

Both Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman were members of the Photo League. The league was a collective of photographers active from 1936-1951, who believed their work could change poor social conditions and champion photography as an art form. It thrived as one of the most progressive, dynamic and creative centers for photography in the country. About one-third of its members were women.

Handelman Meyer and Wyman roamed the streets of New York, capturing the humanity of ordinary people. In some ways, their gender helped them remain invisible to the people they photographed.

“There was a great advantage to being a woman at that time, to be considered as no consequence,” gallery co-owner Michelle Monroe said.

Handelman Meyer learned about socially engaged photography in workshops by one of the Photo League founders Sid Grossman.

She captured three boys affecting tough guy poses after chasing her down the streets of Spanish Harlem demanding that she photograph them. She also shot “Boy Wearing Mask, New York City” (1946-1950), an image less mysterious that it seems.

“He was playing cops and robbers,” Monroe said. “The way he’s looking at her; there’s a lot of ambiguities about that child. Was he playing? Is it mistrust? Was it just an interruption from an adult? He’s just playing.”

Wyman photographed for Life and Business Week magazines, as well as her own enjoyment. Her work went unheralded for decades.

She was 19 and working in Manhattan as a photo printer for the Acme Newspictures agency when she photographed several men in Manhattan’s garment district in April 1945. One held up a copy of The Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish-language newspaper, as the others read about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. Wyman’s “Looking East on 41st Street, NYC” (1947) down a canyon of skyscrapers captures the majesty and industry of the city.

“Men of the Garment District Read of President Roosevelt’s Death, NYC, 1945,” Ida Wyman. (Courtesy of Monroe Gallery)

Before Handelman Meyer and Wyman, women were often assigned to shoot department store openings, Monroe said.

In 1947, the Photo League appeared on a long list of organizations identified with the Communist Party. Efforts to counter the allegation included a large exhibition, “This Is the Photo League.” But in 1949, Angela Calomiris, a Photo League member and F.B.I. informant, publicly testified that members of the organization were Communists. The League disbanded in 1951, a casualty of the Red Scare.

The league’s secretary at the time, Handelman Meyer answered the office phone when requests for comment about the accusations poured in from the media. She also received threatening calls.

“It got to be too much,” she told The New York Times. “They were blacklisting people. There were photographers who could not get their passports for overseas jobs. Little by little, it dissolved.”

When the league closed, Handelman Meyer put her photos and negatives in boxes and moved on with her life. They wouldn’t be opened for many years.

In the early 1940s, the list of notable photographers who were active in the league or supported their activities also included Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, Helen Levitt, Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein, Beaumont Newhall, Nancy Newhall, Richard Avedon, Weegee, Robert Frank, Harold Feinstein, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Minor White.

‘Two Pioneering Women Photographers of the Photo League’

Sonia Handelman Meyer and Ida Wyman

WHEN: Through June 18

WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., Santa Fe

CONTACT: 505-992-0800, monroegallery.com

ICP Book Event: Women Photograph—“What We See: Women & Nonbinary Perspectives Through the Lens” with Nina Berman

 

March 11, 2023  1-2 PM

International Center of Photography & Online

Women Photograph, a global organization dedicated to elevating the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists celebrates its new publication, What We See: Women & Nonbinary Perspectives Through the Lens.

Sara Ickow, Exhibitions & Special Projects for Women Photograph and Senior Manager of Exhibitions and Collections at ICP, will lead a conversation with Women Photograph founder Daniella Zalcman and photographers Nina Berman and Kholood Eid centered on the new publication as well as the importance of representation resources within the field.

About the Book

Open your eyes to a new world view with 100 women and nonbinary photojournalists’ stories from behind the lens.

85% of photojournalists are men. That means almost everything that is reported in the world is seen through men’s eyes. Similarly, spaces and communities men don’t have access to are left undocumented and forgotten. With the camera limited to the hands of one gender, photographic ‘truth’ is more subjective than it seems. To answer this serious ethical problem, Women Photograph flips that bias on its head to show what and how women and nonbinary photojournalists see.

From documenting major events such as 9/11 to capturing unseen and misrepresented communities, this book presents a revisionist contemporary history: pore over 50 years of women’s dispatches in 100 photographs. Each image is accompanied by 200 words from the photographer about the experience and the subject, offering fresh insights and a much-needed perspective.

Until we have balanced, representative reporting the camera cannot offer a mirror to our global society. To get the full picture, we need a diverse range of people behind the lens. This book offers a first step.

Relearn how to see with this evergreen catalogue that elevates the voices of women and nonbinary visual storytellers.

This event is free with museum admission. This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online.

International Center of Photography & Online

79 Essex Street, New York, NY 10002

Tickets

More about the book here.

In a League of Her Own: Ida Wyman, Girl Photographer in a World of Men

 

Via Blind

By Miss Rosen

March 17, 2021

A new exhibition looks at rare color photographs of documentary photographer Ida Wyman made on the streets of New York in the 1940s.

American photographer Ida Wyman (1926–2019) achieved her every dream except one — the opportunity to publish her illustrated memoir Girl Photographer: From the Bronx to Hollywood and Back before she died. Though Wyman was humble, she never lacked for confidence or nerve, becoming one of the few women photographers working for Look and Life magazines in the 1940s.

 

 

Park Avenue Archway, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

As with many things, Wyman was ahead of the times. “She never wanted to be the most famous,” says Heather Garrison, her granddaughter and executor of the Ida Wyman Estate. “I think in her later years she finally understood how important her journey was as a woman in a male dominated industry. She took meticulous notes and records, and had her archive well organized. She wanted to put it all into one piece.”

Despite the fact Wyman did not live to see her book published, her work is receiving its proper due in the new exhibition in Santa Fe, Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color, which showcases a recently discovered collection of Ektachtomes Wyman made at the age of 21. The only color body of work from the period, Wyman’s photographs offer a poignant portrait of working class life in New York after the war. Neither activist nor ethnologist, Wyman was a humanist with a profound love for street portraiture. She eschewed the term “street photography,” seeing it as an anachronistic term to describe the documentation of urban life.

 

Street scene in East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

A Magical Process

Born to Askenazi Jews who immigrated to the United States, Wyman was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and raised in the Bronx, where her family ran a small grocery store. “Ida was very practical and frugal, and a lot of that came out of necessity, how her parents raised her, and the era she grew up in,” Garrison says of Wyman’s childhood throughout the Great Depression. “She had a lust for life, and found that in normal, accessible ways: laughter, music, dancing, and beauty in the most ordinary things.”

 

The shoe shine man, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

At the age of 14, Wyman bought a camera and immediately got to work documenting her community and joined the Walton High School Camera Club, where she learned to develop and print photographs. “[Photography] seemed like a magical process, allowing me to hold forever on film what my eyes saw and my heart felt, as I explored the various neighborhoods of New York City,” Wyman wrote in an artist statement.

Bernard Hoffman, a staff photographer at LIFE magazine, met with students of the camera club, and encouraged Wyman to pursue her dream of becoming a professional photographer. After graduating high school in 1943, Wyman took a job at age 16 as the first “girl” mailroom boy at Acme Newspictures. After being promoted to printer, Wyman purchased a 3¼ x 4¼ Graflex Speed Camera, loaded up her film holders, and took to the street during her lunch break.

 

Guess your age, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

The Keymaker, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

After three years at Acme, Wyman came to understand her true passion was not in news photography but in making photo essays and telling stories of daily life. She created assignments for herself, crafting a body of work that she could sell to picture magazines. In 1945, Wyman sold her first story to Look. It was fortuitous timing, for that fall she lost her job at Acme after the company dismissed her in order to give her position to a returning military veteran.

“Photography has enabled me to understand the lives of others, lives different in experience and age from my own.”

A League of Her Own

In 1946 Wyman married Acme staff photographer Simon Nathan, who introduced her to Morris Engel, a member of the illustrious New York Photo League. “I considered myself a documentary photographer, and the League’s philosophy of honest photography appealed to me,” Wyman wrote in Girl Photographer. “I also began to understand the power of photographs to help improve the social order by showing the conditions under which many people lived and worked. Even after leaving the League the following year, I continued to emphasize visual and social realities in my straightforward photographs.”

Stickball on St. Nicholas East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

Wyman’s photographs in East Harlem are a testament to a shared vision of photography as a tool to amplify the political, economic, and social issues of the times. But Wyman was not overtly political with her work; she sought to tell a story without using it as a cudgel. Her vibrant color photographs of working class life are empathetic but devoid of a moralizing tone; she sees her subject as equals worthy of veneration as individuals, rather than objects to serve a larger agenda.

“Everyday life and where it was happening was what interested me,” Wyman said in her artist statement. “Taking pictures enabled me to hear the stories of the people I photographed, which satisfied an immense curiosity to learn and understand the lives of others, lives different in experience and age from my own.”

Man with guitar, East Harlem, 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

Bobby Soxer Makes Good

Although Wyman could be shy, the camera afforded her the ability to engage with people and connect, creating a space for mutual recognition. Her photographs are imbued with tenderness and intimacy, in no small part due to the fact that she sought to obtain her subjects’ consent before making the photograph.

“She would introduce herself and ask permission,” Garrison says. “She was able to connect with people and put them at ease. Even though the photograph was candid and unposed, she was never trying to surprise them or grab the shot. Connecting with people brought her a lot of joy.”

Man on Fire Hydrant, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

The stringless Banjo, East Harlem, NY 1947

© Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography

As one of the few professional women photographers working at the time, Wyman could move through the streets openly without catching people off guard; that they may have underestimated her worked to her advantage every time. Garrison explains, “She was a girl in bobby socks taking pictures and I think people were endeared to that. They would relax because it was a girl taking pictures — no big deal, no stress, no high stakes. She got better photos because people were at ease and not putting on airs for the photograph.”



By Miss Rosen

Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer focusing on art, photography, and culture. Her work has been published in books, magazines, and websites including Time, Vogue, Artsy, Aperture, Dazed, and Vice, among others.


Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color
Through April 11, 2011
Monroe Gallery, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
https://www.monroegallery.com/

Ektachrome moments: The color work of Ida Wyman

 Via Pasatiempo

March 5, 2021

By Michael Abatemarco

Ida Wyman with two of her cameras in an undated photograph

The golden age of street photography, photojournalism, and documentary photography lasted from the 1930s to the 1950s. It was an era that saw the birth of a number of influential photography agencies and collectives, including Magnum, founded in Paris in 1947, and New York’s Photo League, founded in 1936. Many of their number were among the most respected photographers of their day, including Magnum’s Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Photo League’s Paul Strand and Arthur Leipzig.

Most of the images that came out of the era were in black and white, partly because color printing was more expensive and less stable, and most news agencies and magazines only printed in black and white. “Color negates all of photography’s three-dimensional values,” claimed Cartier-Bresson.

Stickball on St. Nicholas Avenue, East Harlem, 1947

Ida Wyman: East Harlem, 1947 in Color is a selection of 14 photographs on exhibit at Monroe Gallery drawn from a series called Lost Ektachromes. The photographer, who was a member of the league, came across the negatives sometime around 2010. They remained undeveloped until then because Wyman, who was proficient at printing in black and white, lacked the expertise to do her own color printing. She needed to find someone she could trust who could print them with fidelity and under her supervision.

“She was already in her 80s,” says Wyman’s granddaughter Heather Garrison, who manages the estate. “She always said she wanted to do an exhibit on this work. And as we catalogued it, we found additional pieces.”

Wyman (1926-2019) was “no slouch,” says Michelle Monroe, co-owner of Monroe Gallery of Photography, adding that she shot more than 100 assignments for Life magazine throughout her career as a freelance photographer. Her work exemplified the cooperative’s focus on capturing the human condition in America’s urban and rural settings at mid-century.

“It was really one of the first movements to use photography as a social documentary tool,” says gallery co-owner Sidney Monroe.

The work in the show includes portraits, street scenes, and candid images of people. Some are street vendors selling their wares. Some sit on stoops engaged in conversation, and some are merely walking or otherwise going about their day. As a whole, it’s a simple snapshot of life in the city.

The Key Maker, East Harlem, 1947

East Harlem was a neighborhood of immigrants and the working class poor. As a photographer, she had an ethos in line with that of the Photo League, although she was not yet a member at the time the photos were taken. And none of them were shot as an assignment but purely to indulge her own enthusiasm for the medium. Wyman was also experimenting with a new kind of film. Ektachrome was only developed in the early 1940s. The work languished in her archives, in part because Wyman never achieved the notoriety of her contemporaries until late in life, and she was never focused on showing her work publicly in galleries or museums.

“Ms. Wyman — whose work for Life, Look and other magazines went largely unheralded for decades — discovered what she called a ‘special kind of happiness’ in photographing subjects like a little girl wearing curlers, a peddler hauling a block of ice from a horse-drawn cart and four boys holding dolls, pretending to be the plastic girls’ fathers,” wrote Richard Sandomir in Wyman’s New York Times obituary (“Ida Wyman, Whose Camera Captured Ordinary People, Dies at 93”). Perhaps that’s because Wyman, like many of the subjects she photographed, came from a working-class family. Her parents were Jewish immigrants in Malden, Massachusetts, who later owned a small grocery store in the Bronx.

Soon after graduating from high school in 1943, Wyman started working in the mailroom at Acme Newspictures. Eventually, she was promoted to photo printer. Her intention was to spend a year working before starting nursing school. “She was always fascinated by science and medicine,” Garrison says of Wyman, who got her first box camera at 14. But in the interim, her love of photography superseded other ambitions.

Wyman spent her earnings on film and processing. “On her lunch breaks and in her spare time she just loved to walk the city and take pictures,” Garrison says. “Then she would have a body of work that she could show.” Determined to land assignments, she reserved these bodies of work to show to editors.

Wyman had no job security at Acme. When the men came back from the war, Wyman and women like her were out of a job.

However, her career in photography was just beginning.

The Shoe Shine Man, East Harlem, 1947

Over the course of the next six years, she worked as a freelancer, taking assignments for Fortune, Look, Life, and Parade, among other publications. “She had the usual soft assignments, like for the Saturday Evening Post,” Michelle Monroe says. “If there was a grocery store opening, ‘send the woman.’ She wasn’t picky. She wanted the work. I think it was very hardscrabble working as a woman without the affiliation of a publication directly.”

But Wyman was motivated. Garrison says she landed assignments through sheer perseverance. “I give her a lot of credit, a young girl — 18, 19, 20, 21 — especially in a man’s world, walking into these offices and self-advocating,” Garrison says.

Wyman was encouraged to join the Photo League on the advice of her husband, photographer Simon Nathan, but in the early 1950s, the demands of family life temporarily curtailed her career. When she returned to photography in the 1960s, it was as a photographer in medical fields. She was chief photographer at the department of pathology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1968 until 1983 when she returned to freelancing.

“Her varied assignments always focused on human interest stories, which have become a hallmark of her work,” Garrison says.

That’s what we see in her black-and-white photographs, but also in the Ektachromes. And like her monochromatic work, the contrasts are stark, the shadows deep and rich, befitting, perhaps, the work of one who’s not used to shooting in color. The palette is muted, giving them the appearance of hand-colored photographs, a technique that was common since the early days of photography. And they weave a similar kind of nostalgic spell. But unlike hand-coloring, their ethereal and dreamlike quality, says Michelle Monroe, was due in part to the city’s pollution.

The stringless banjo, East Harlem, 1947

“Most cities in, say, like the 1920s through the 1960s, were powered by coal,” she says. “There’s a lot of diffused light. Coal hung around the lower city so much. There’s such a softening of the air from that particulate. Margaret Bourke-White taught us that — not directly, but in studying her work.”

But it’s the joyous aspects of the familiar and the sense of commonality that also make them captivating.

“She always had an eye for people,” Garrison says. “She loved to connect with people, and I think that’s what made her photos so wonderful.” 

details

Ida Wyman: East Harlem, 1947 in Color

Through April 11

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., 505-992-0800, monroegallery.com

Video: Ida Wyman, East Harlem, 1947 in Color

 

View the exhibition on-line here

International Acclaim For the Exhibition "Ida Wyman: Life with a camera"

Ida Wyman: Man looking in wastebasket, Coney Island, New York, 1945

Today, March 7, would have been Ida Wyman's 94th birthday. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ida Wyman was born March 7, 1926 in Malden, Massachusetts. The family soon moved to New York, where her parents ran a small grocery store in the Bronx. Her parents bought her a box camera when she was 14, and she joined the camera club at Walton High School, honing her skills at taking and printing pictures. By the time Wyman was 16, she know that she wanted to work as a photographer.

Opportunities then were few for women photographers, but in 1943 Wyman joined Acme Newspictures as a mail room ‘boy’; pulling prints and captioning them for clients.

When the war ended, Acme's only female printer was fired so a man could have her job. Wyman set out on her own to begin free-lance work for magazines, and her first photo story was published in LOOK magazine the same year. By 1948 she was in Los Angeles, working on assignments for LIFE magazine. She would eventually cover over 100 assignments for LIFE.

For the next several years, Wyman covered assignments for LIFE, Fortune, Saturday Evening Post, Parade, and many other leading publications of the time. Ida Wyman passed away in July, 2019. Although not as famous as some of her contemporaries, Ida was one of the defining artists of early street photography that helped shape how we look at our world.

HUCK Magazine

The unsung photographer of the 20th century: Celebrating Ida Wyman

The Daily Mail

The best photographer you never heard of: Ida Wyman captured 1950s American street life, Hollywood glamour and the euphoria of the Allied victory over Japan - now it's all rolled into one glorious exhibition

Ida Wyman: Life with a camera continues through April 19, and selection from the exhibit will be on view in our booth #A1 during Paris Photo New York Presented by AIPAD at Pier 94 in New York, April 2-5.

IDA WYMAN - HEART AND MIND

Ida Wyman: Heart and Mind

September 9 – October 5

The Crossman Gallery at the University of Wisconsin n-Whitewater
800 W. Main Street
Whitewater, WI 53190-1790

Reception: September 9 from 5-7pm

"I want to photograph a certain synchrony of heart, eye, and brain." -Ida Wyman


Ida Wyman was one of the fascinating artists in photography today. When Ms. Wyman first started her career in the 1940s as a magazine photographer, an industry that was almost exclusively male at the time, she started out as a "girl" mailroom boy at Acme News pictures (later UPI) and worked her way up from there. A trailblazing and innovative photographer, Ida has inspired many photographers, both male and female.


Ida strives to capture everyday life of everyday people in all its frustrating, illogical and banal glory. From her classic Girl with Curlers photograph of a little girl on the street in LA staring defiantly at the viewer to the delicate symmetrical composition of Wrought Iron with Snow, Ida photographed what moved and inspired her.


You can easily connect the dots between many artists photographing today with Ida Wyman. Her unique brand of street photography helped define a fledgling style still trying to establish itself. Street photography has since evolved, but the roots Ida helped lay with others such as Arthur Fellig, Ruth Orkin and Arthur Leipzig are still visible. Although not as famous as some of her contemporaries, Ida was one of the defining artists of early street photography that helped shape how we look at our world.

Thanks to Professor Melanie Herzog for this quote from Chords of Memory

Installation photo by Erica DeGlopper

Ida Wyman recently passed away at the age of 93. Monroe Gallery of Photography will present a major retrospective exhibit of her photography February 7 - April 19, 2020.

LIFE: Six Women Photographers

Margaret Bourke-White, photograph from “Franklin Roosevelt’s Wild West,” LIFE, November 23, 1936

© LIFE Picture Collection, Meredith Corporation

Via The New York Historical Society

For the editors of LIFE—the first magazine to tell stories with photographs rather than text—the camera was not merely a reporter, but also a potent commentator with the power to frame news and events for a popular audience. For decades, Americans saw the world through the lens of the magazine’s photographers. Between the late 1930s and the early 1970s, LIFE magazine retained few women photographers as full-time staff or on a semi-permanent basis. LIFE: Six Women Photographers showcases the work of some of those women and how their work contributed to LIFE’s pursuit of American identity through photojournalism. The exhibition features more than 70 images showcasing the extraordinary work created by Margaret Bourke-White, Hansel Mieth, Marie Hansen, Martha Holmes, Nina Leen, and Lisa Larsen.

How were these women part of a larger editorial vision? What topics did they cover, and how did their work reflect—and sometimes expand—the mission of the magazine? The exhibit reveals these photographers’ important role in creating modern photojournalism and defining what LIFE editor-in-chief Henry Luce called the “American Century.” Curated by Sarah Gordon, curatorial scholar in women’s history, Center for Women’s History, and Marilyn Satin Kushner, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections; with Erin Levitsky, Ryerson University; and William J. Simmons, Andrew Mellon Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Center for Women’s History.

LIFE: Six Women Photographers is proudly sponsored by Northern Trust. Generous support provided by Joyce B. Cowin, with additional support from Sara Lee Schup and Jerry Speyer. Exhibitions at New-York Historical are made possible by Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang, the Saunders Trust for American History, the Seymour Neuman Endowed Fund, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. WNET is the media sponsor.

June 28 – October 6, 2019

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street)
New York, NY 10024

Phone (212) 873-3400

Related: The Guardian

'Just the tip of the iceberg': revealing Life's early female photographers

REVIEW: Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photographer

Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, silver gelatin photograph, 14” x 11”, 1936

THE Magazine
June, 2015

IMAGINE, IF YOU CAN, A WORLD IN WHICH PHOTOGRAPHS WERE A RARE FORM

 of artistic documentation whose workings few understood. Imagine the United States in the first third of the twentieth century, with illiteracy and poverty key defining characteristics of the pitiable lives led by you and most everyone you knew. Images had nearly the power and drama, then, that they did during the Counter-Reformation in Europe, when the Catholic Church fought back against dull Protestantism with paintings as theatrical as opera sets, their shadowy depths filled with depictions of gruesome martyrdom—lit only at the moment of a would-be saint’s transmutation from agonizingly human into gloriously divine. Radiant sculptural forms of gold and silver reflected not merely the material wealth but the spiritual wealth of a religion that had dominated that part of the world for roughly a millennium. Bring yourself back now, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and from Europe to the United States, populated by the shell-shocked heroes of the Great War dancing with pretty little flappers, their bobbed hairdos gleaming, and the gangsters, with their molls, who kept the country’s beak wet during Prohibition; imagine, finally, on a late fall day in 1929, stock-market millions vanishing within hours, heartlessly slamming shut the doors to the anything-goes twenties. (While you’re at it, imagine the unthinkable: Wall Street investors with such an overwhelming sense of responsibility that they jumped out of skyscrapers rather than face their own— and their clients’—financial ruin. Incomprehensible!) Meanwhile, the Great Depression loomed in the drought-stricken plains of America’s heartland. In the mind’s eye, these times could only have existed in grayed-out shades of black and white. Color, it seems, had been forgotten.

 

Unlike now, when anybody with a cell phone can, and unfortunately does, take pictures of everything from their breakfast to their genitalia—and makes them available to an unwitting public—only a very few of those initiated into the science of the lens and the alchemy of the darkroom were able to make photographs in the 1930s. Margaret Bourke-White was one of the few, and she led a charge of firsts: the first woman to photograph for LIFE magazine (for you post-Millennials, sort of the Internet of its time), the first accredited female war photographer (in World War II), and the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union to record the proletariat’s triumph of mega-industry over the ease and comfort of privileged individuals.

 

In that heyday of pioneering photographers whom Bourke-White epitomized, black-and-white photography equaled photojournalism, which equaled truth with a capital T. This Truth was on a par with the same truth Americans revered in Norman Rockwell’s “real-life” scenes lifted straight out of a Mayberry without the laugh track, long before there was a Sheriff Taylor, Opie, Deputy Fife, or Aunt Bee. Or even television, for that matter. When images were few and far between, they had a credibility that is lost today in a thick overlay of irony and sheer disbelief. In the 1930s, if it appeared in LIFE magazine, or the Saturday Evening Post, or the newspaper, it was flat-out real.

Viewers lacked the objectivity to read meaning into a photograph as social commentary, for example, any more than the illiterate could read the black marks scratched into the white page.

The always-excellent Monroe Gallery presented their exhibition of silver gelatin photographs by Margaret Bourke-White as art, finding that, for her “as an artist,” photography served “as an instrument to examine social issues from a humanitarian perspective. She witnessed and documented some of the twentieth century’s most notable moments, including the liberation of German concentration camps by General Patton in 1945...” Bourke-White’s picture, “German civilians made to look at instruments of torture and execution at Buchenwald concentration camp, 1945,” is hardly an icon of objectivity. Nor should it be; some truths are beyond apprehension. Not to quibble with our dearly held ideals of photojournalism as an act of witnessing and documenting, but black-and-white imagery exists, among other reasons, when color cannot hold the entirety of its content. We demand this state of in-between-ness from art when what it depicts is too awful for mere reproduction.

While today you can find images of gore online anytime you choose to search for them, that they are not generally reproduced ad infinitum speaks to our understanding of the power of imagery. What Warhol repeated in a nightmarish grid (Jackie’s grief-stricken face on Air Force One en route from Dallas), and Picasso abstracted in his Guernica, Bourke-White reflected in the faces of her “German civilians” at Buchenwald.

Finally, when her country needed shoring up in 1936, during the height of the Depression, LIFE, a burgeoning publication that would become our society’s pocket mirror for at least a couple of decades, chose for its very first cover Bourke-White’s symbol of capitalism’s ultimate success. Her Fort Peck dam picture, all art-deco curves and fat-cat angles, describes more than the enormous potential for hydroelectric power: It is an image of America rediscovering her own righteous might, an America that, like the photographer “Maggie the Indestructible,” would liberate us from ourselves. There was the evidence, right in front of us in it-must­be-true black and white. —Kathryn M Davis

Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, silver gelatin photograph, 14” x 11”, 1936 ©Time Inc.

 

--The exhibition continues through June 28, 2015

 

 

Eve Arnold: Born 21 April 1912; Died 4 January 2012

Eve Arnold: Marilyn Monroe rehearsing lines on the set of "The Misfits", 1960

"Her intimate, sensitive and compassionate ten year collaboration with Marilyn Monroe has cemented her as one of the most iconic portrait photographers of our time, but it is the long term reportage stories that drove Arnold's curiosity and passion."--Magnum Photos agency



The Guardian: The big picture: Bar Girl in a Brothel in the Red Light District, Havana, 1954



The Independant:  All about Eve: photographer blazed a bold, beautiful trail with pictures


La Lettre de la Photographie: The death of Eve Arnold, by former Director of Magnum, Jimmy Fox



Financial Times: American photographer Eve Arnold dies aged 99

BBC: Photojournalist Eve Arnold dies aged 99

BBC Slideshow: In pictures: The work of photographer Eve Arnold


Los Angeles Times: Eve Arnold dies at 99; pioneering photojournalist

NPR The Picture Show: Photojournalist Eve Arnold Dies At 99

TIME Light Box: Eve Arnold: April 12, 1912—January 4, 2012


New York Times: Photojournalist Eve Arnold Dies at 99


NY Times Lens Blog: Parting Glance: Eve Arnold


The Guardian: Eve Arnold Celebrated Magnum photographer who documented the stars, 'the poor, the old and the underdog'


The Telegraph: American photographer Eve Arnold dies aged 99

Associated Press: Photojournalist Eve Arnold dies at 99 (with video interview)


British Journal of Photography: Magnum photographer Eve Arnold dies

                                                   Magnum photographer Eve Arnold dies [update]

Photo District News: Photographer Eve Arnold Dies


Magnum: selection of UK press clippings, obits and  tributes to Eve Arnold

Magnum Slideshow


Bookmark this page for updates and more tributes.

2011: WOMEN IN PHOTOGRAPHY

Two seemingly disparate blog posts caught our attention today:

Hillary Clinton, Audrey Tomason go missing in Situation Room photo in Der Tzitung newspaper

The Washington Post
By Melissa Bell


Update: Der Tzitung responded in an emailed statement, that the photo editor did not read the fine print on the picture and the newspaper has since apologized to the White House and State Department. “In accord with our religious beliefs, we do not publish photos of women, which in no way relegates them to a lower status... Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive.” Read the full statement at the bottom of this post.



Why Is a Photojournalist’s Gender Relevant to Their Work?

Black Star Rising
by Paul Melcher
I’ve never been able to identify a photojournalist’s gender from the photos she takes. Have you?


When Margaret Bourke-White photographed the Nazi death camps for Life magazine, no one cared if she was a woman or not. Her images told the story and that was that.

So why is it so important for some photographers to define themselves as “women photojournalists,” rather than simply as “photojournalists”?   Full post here. One rebuke here.


We are not sure if there is a broader context to these two posts....your thoughts?