Toni Frissell (1907-1988)

Toni Frissell is included in my list of famous women photo-graphers but nontheless she still deserves to be better known for her sheer diversity and prolific output which I hope you will find conveyed through the selection of images I have made for this page.

Frissell was a famous fashion photographer who worked for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.

Her fashion photography broke new ground as she created images of women that were active, often outdoors rather than in the studio, and employing unusual angles.

However, Frissell found fashion photography limiting and wanted to proved that she could do 'real' reporting jobs so she volunteered for the American Red Cross in 1941 and actively sought out war assingments at home and abroad although her family were not always happy about it.

The diversity of her work didn't end there though. Other topics of abiding interest included children, families, people eating and drinking, well-known people, and members of American and British upper classes.

One of her most well-known images is her 'Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida' (1947) shot which was used for several album covers including Undercurrent by Bill Evans and Jim Hall. Three books included her photographs as illustrations: "Mother Goose," "A Child's Garden of Verse" and "The Happy Island".

She was always interested in sport and was the first women to become a member of the staff of Sports Illustrated. Her work was selected for the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition "Man in Sport" (1968), the only woman selected to exhibit.

Her portraits of famous people such as Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy are also famous.

In 1970, Toni Frissell donated to the Library of Congress a huge collection of her photographic work covering a distinguished career of nearly forty years. The collection includes 42,000 colour transparencies, 25,000 prints, and 270,000 black-and-white negatives, however, only a few of Frissell's images have been digitized. Hopefully there will be more digitized in the near future as the photographs on this page show what a talented photographer she was.