Double Click
Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Town & Country Must-Read Book of Spring 2024
“Fashion, photography, and pop culture aficionados will be captivated” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) by this riveting dual biography of the McLaughlins—identical twin sisters who became groundbreaking magazine photographers in New York during the glamorous golden age of the 1930s and ’40s. In Double Click, author Carol Kino “has interwoven a biography of the McLaughlins with an authoritative, detailed history of fashion, the art world and photography in midcentury New York” (The Wall Street Journal).
The McLaughlin twins were trailblazing female photographers, celebrated in their time as stars in their respective fields, but have largely been forgotten since. Here, in Double Click, Carol Kino brings these two brilliant women and their remarkable accomplishments to vivid life.
Frances was the only female photographer on staff in Condé Nast’s photo studio, hired just after Irving Penn, and became known for streetwise, cinema verité-style work, which appeared in the pages of Glamour and Vogue. Her sister Kathryn’s surrealistic portraits filled the era’s new “career girl” magazines, including Charm and Mademoiselle. Both twins married Harper’s Bazaar photographers and socialized with a glittering crowd that included the supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and the photographer Richard Avedon. Kino uses their careers to illuminate the lives of young women during this time, an early 20th-century moment marked by proto-feminist thinking, excitement about photography’s burgeoning creative potential, and the ferment of wartime New York. Toward the end of the 1940s, and moving into the early 1950s, conventionality took over, women were pushed back into the home, and the window of opportunity began to close. Kino renders this fleeting moment of possibility in gleaming multi-color, so that the reader cherishes its abundance, mourns its passing, and gains new appreciation for the talent that was fostered at its peak.
Pulling back the curtain on an electric, creative time in New York’s history, and rich with original research, Double Click is cultural reportage and biography at its finest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
