Remembered today principally for her high-fashion photography for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, Toni Frissell (1907-1988) volunteered her photographic services to the American Red Cross, Women's Army Corps, and Eighth Army Air Force during WWII. On their behalf, she produced thousands of images of nurses, front-line soldiers, WACs, African-American airmen, and orphaned children.

Frissell's leap from fashion photography into war reportage echoed the desires of earlier generations of newswomen to move from "soft news" of fashion and society pages into the "hard news" of the front page. On volunteering for the American Red Cross in 1941, Frissell said: "I became so frustrated with fashions that I wanted to prove to myself that I could do a real reporting job." Frissell aggressively pursued wartime assignments at home and abroad, often over her family's objections.

Frissell documented women from all walks of life and in all situations, sometimes using them to comment on the human condition. Thus, in the single year of 1957, her work ranged from her quiet portrayal of an elderly African American woman enjoying a barefoot moment fishing in the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. to an intimate portrait of actress Elizabeth Taylor with her husband Mike Todd and their infant daughter to a lyrical depiction of two nuns clamming on Long Island to a shot of a woman taking a "snooze" on the beach at Waikiki.

This image is entitled, "Senora Maria Vial de Prieto petting the gaucho's horse 'Prique' in a wheat field in Chile." The record doesn't show the context of the shot but her photographic skills are well displayed. She is noted for taking fashion photography out of the studio into the outdoors, thus placing an accent on the active woman. She is also known for the imaginative angles, both physical and metaphorical, from which she covered her subjects.

Toni Frissell was born into a wealthy New York City family and took up fashion photography professionally only after she got fired as a caption writer for Vogue. Even though her work spans the spectrum from society photography (amongst others, the Kennedy - Bouvier wedding) to social issues to her war experiences, she is remembered as a fashion photographer. She is recognized for her stark imagery and as being among the first to take fashion models out of the studio into nature.

Toni Frissell donated her entire life's work to the Library of Congress. The Toni Frissell Collection consists of 340,000 items covering 1930-69.

Medium :The original is a photographic print : silver gelatin

Created/Published : 1940

Creator : Toni Frissell, photographer, 1907 - 1988

Part of the Toni Frissell Collection housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: cph3g12117