Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines - Hardcover

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Carol Kino’s writing about art, artists, the art world, and contemporary culture has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Town & Country, and just about every major art magazine. She was formerly a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library and the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program. She grew up on the Stanford campus in Northern California and lives in Manhattan. Double Click is her first book.

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Chapter 1: World of Tomorrow

CHAPTER 1 World of Tomorrow

The McLaughlin twins decided they wanted to be photographers in their second year of art school at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, right after they had talked their way into part-time jobs as assistants in the photo lab. Franny had recognized her destiny as soon as she took her first picture of a Myrtle Avenue el train, thundering over the rusty steel tracks that cast bars of light and shadow onto the storefronts and people below. At that moment, she said, “I knew instantly I was hooked.” Kathryn, known to everyone as Fuffy, felt the thunderbolt the first time they walked into the studio. “Right from the beginning we somehow sensed that it would be our chosen career,” she recalled later. “It seemed to be the wave of the future.”

It’s hard to know with certainty what it was about photography that grabbed the twins, how they became “enslaved by the djinn in the black box,” as the photographer Lee Miller once put it. People didn’t make a habit of dissecting their emotions in those late-Depression years. But it probably had something to do with the puzzle-like challenge of figuring out how to compose a shot with the twin-lens reflex camera they had received as a high school graduation present and traded back and forth: when they peered down into the viewfinder, the camera returned a mirror image of the scene they were aiming at; there was no way for them to see what they’d captured the right way around until they developed the negatives. Then came the empowering transformation that they could bring about as they printed the pictures in the darkroom—the “magic of light and lens,” as Fuffy once described it—where a skillful deployment of chemistry, temperature, time, and light could change the way the final image came out.

There was also the sheer excitement of experiencing the luck involved in capturing the “decisive moment,” the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson later called it—being in the right place at the right time, as a group of teenagers walking in a park wheeled around to face the camera, or a mother and child stepped off a sidewalk onto a broad expanse of paving stones, or the instant the sun raked light across the brick walls of a factory at twilight as women poured out of its doors.

For the twins, who had already spent their teenage years making paintings, it must have been electrifying to suddenly be able to fix reality on the page in a more immediate way than by daubing oils on canvas. Among the American avant-garde of the time, the all-important task was to define an art that was their own and distinct from that of Europe, and some photographers felt they were working in the perfect medium to depict a country that was brash and new. In 1935, Dr. M. F. Agha, the longtime art director of Vogue, who had helped push photography onto the pages of that magazine, described photography as the quintessential American art form—“a Real American Native Art,” he called it—in the introduction to the first edition of U.S. Camera, an annual that compiled two hundred of the year’s best pictures.

“Romanticism in art is dead,” he wrote. “The skyscraper is the thing to admire.… The poster is better than the fresco; the saxophone is to be preferred to the hautbois; the movies to the theatre; the tap dancing to the ballet, and the photography to the painting.”

Sure, Agha was being somewhat arch and ironic—but he also meant it. Even then, in one of the worst years of the Great Depression, Americans were such passionate camera and photo buffs that the annual, filled with more than two hundred photos of every variety—nudes, tarantella dancers, stargazing couples, sailboats, carefully composed still lifes, landscapes, family scenes, fashion shots, in color as well as black and white—sold out its fifteen thousand copies, at $2.75 each (more than $60 today), in only a month. Its publication was followed by a U.S. Camera exhibition of seven hundred pictures that opened at Rockefeller Center, a glamorous new office complex of limestone towers that was rising in midtown Manhattan. The show attracted huge crowds and continued to draw hundreds of thousands more viewers as it toured, going on view in department stores and exhibition halls in seventy-five cities around the country. The display and its tour became an annual event.

More photography shows, annuals, and magazines followed. In 1937, the eight-year-old Museum of Modern Art opened a huge survey that put the medium of photography in historical perspective; it toured the country for two years. An even larger show, the International Photographic Exposition, arrived in 1938, across town at the Grand Central Palace near Grand Central Station, where during a single week over a hundred and ten thousand people came to see about three thousand pictures, ranging from Mathew Brady’s Civil War daguerreotypes to pictures of starving migrants by Dorothea Lange, who had been commissioned by the federal government to chronicle the ravages of the Depression.

Photography was also infiltrating American magazines, replacing etchings, watercolors, and woodcuts as the snappiest and most up-to-date way to illustrate anything, whether it was a newspaper story, a work of fiction, or a fashion spread. Soon a new sort of magazine that told stories in pictures instead of words became the rage. The first of these, Life—styled in its offering prospectus as “THE SHOW-BOOK OF THE WORLD”—was launched in 1936 by Henry Luce, the publisher and editor in chief of Time magazine, the year before the McLaughlin twins entered art school. Its opening cover pictorial focused on the gritty Wild West frontier towns that had sprung up in Montana around Fort Peck Dam, one of the great Depression-era work-relief projects on the Missouri River. It had been shot by an intrepid woman photojournalist, Margaret Bourke-White, who brought the hamlets’ sheriffs, mechanics, barkeeps, hash slingers, laundresses, and ladies of the night straight onto city newsstands and into American homes.

Life was followed by the pocket-size Coronet, which boasted thick portfolios of great historical artworks in color, brand-new black-and-white photographs, and thumbnail biographies of contemporary photographers and sold out its first quarter-million run in two days. In contrast to Life, which typically published all-American pictures, Coronet often featured works by Europeans, such as Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, and Erwin Blumenfeld, who used experimental developmental processes to create exhilaratingly arty shots of nude women, their bodies floating alluringly in water or veiled in clouds of tulle.

By 1938, the year the twins decided on their profession, the leading women’s magazines had also begun to feature photos of women, in color, on their covers—magazines such as Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Ladies’ Home Journal—so while walking past a newsstand, instead of seeing a watercolor of a lady lying on a chaise or peeking out from behind a bouquet, one saw a row of real faces looking back.

But perhaps the moment that most dramatically demonstrated photography’s importance, at least in New York City, was the opening of the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, an exposition designed to lift America out of the Depression and bring nations together under the theme “Building...