Starred review from December 18, 2023
Art critic Kino debuts with an engrossing dual biography of Frances and Kathryn McLaughlin (1919–2014), twins who worked as fashion photographers during the glamorous 1940s heyday of American magazines and beyond. After an aunt gave them a camera for their high school graduation, the sisters nurtured a love for photography and in 1940 began modeling for and publishing snapshots in College Bazaar, the junior offshoot of Harper’s Bazaar. Following their senior year of college at the Pratt Institute, they were selected for Vogue’s Prix de Paris—a yearlong employment program with the magazine in Paris and New York—and rubbed elbows with such luminaries as Richard Avedon, André Kertész, and Lee Miller. In 1943, Frances joined the publishing company Condé Nast as the sole female photographer in a “firmament of male stars,” taking color and cinema verité shots for Vogue and Glamour. Meanwhile, Kathryn did evocative, “surrealism-inspired” fashion shoots with Charm, Mademoiselle, and Junior Bazaar, and later became a children’s photographer for such outlets as Parents. Plumbing the sisters’ archives and drawing on interviews with their family members, Kino paints a textured portrait of artists who came of age amid sea changes in magazine publishing and women’s cultural roles, and helped transform the way Americans consumed information and encountered fashion (“photography was a magic carpet, out of the Depression and into the future,” Kino writes). Fashion, photography, and pop culture aficionados will be captivated. Agent: Peter Steinberg, UTA.
January 1, 2024
The story of identical twins who forged bright careers as photographers. Arts journalist Kino makes her book debut with an engaging dual biography of Frances and Kathryn McLaughlin, notable photographers whose work both reflected and shaped women's changing lives. In their second year as art students at the Pratt Institute, both became enraptured by photography and took to the streets of New York with their cameras. Their first published photographs appeared in the 1940 edition of College Bazaar, one of many new magazines marketed for "fashionable and discerning coeds." A combination of talent, ambition, and luck marked their careers: At 23, Franny was hired as a staff photographer for Cond� Nast Photo Studios, the lone woman "in a firmament of male stars" such as Irving Penn and Andr� Kert�sz. Her sister, known as Fuffy, became the assistant of Toni Frissell, the only woman photographer at Vogue, who became an intrepid photojournalist. As Kino traces the twins' growing successes, she chronicles changes in fashion, women's roles and opportunities, magazine rivalries, and the effects of World War II on the profession of photography. After the war, "photography had fully infiltrated magazines, but America was no longer obsessed with college and career girls, and the swell of publications tied to the boundless opportunity symbolized by their youth, talent, and beauty was receding." Franny stayed at Cond� Nast, Fuffy turned to children's portraits, and their lives proceeded in twin trajectories. Both married New York photographers: Fuffy to "supersuccessful studio specialist" James Abbe, noted for his fashion and celebrity portraits, and Franny to Leslie Gill, "the father of modern American still life photography," for whom she'd worked as his girl Friday. They celebrated their successes in a joint autobiography, Twin Lives, and died within months of each other, in 2014. A colorful cultural history emerges from two eventful lives.
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March 29, 2024
How do you capture a changing America? For twin sisters Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn McLaughlin Abbe, born in Brooklyn in 1919, the answer lies in the framing of the lens. In her first book, arts and culture journalist Kino brings twentieth-century American history, culture, and gender roles into sharp focus as she recounts the remarkable story of these pioneering female photographers. Readers of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and other publications will delight in the close-up of two of print magazines' earliest stars, laced with the big names in fashion the McLaughlin twins brushed shoulders with throughout their careers. As Frances "Franny" McLaughlin says of her method, much like a dancer "whose hours of intensive practice in perfection of technique should not be apparent to the audience, the photographer should present to his audience the beauty and feeling, motion and emotion--not the technique." The same can be said of Kino's dual portrait, which deftly maneuvers the twins' lives, relationships, and artistry into a composite image that will engage and illuminate as much as it entertains.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.