DOUBLE CLICK

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 Condé Nast Photo Studios, the lone woman “in a firmament of male stars” such as Irving Penn and André Kertész. 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 Condé 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.