Toni Frissell
(1907 - 1988)
Toni Frissell was born Antoinette Frissell in New York City on March 10, 1907. In 1925, Frissell graduated from Miss Porter's School, Farmington, Connecticut. She worked as a caption writer for American Vogue in 1930, where she was encouraged by editor Carmel Snow to experiment with photography.
In 1931, her older brother Varick was lost at sea while making a documentary film. To take her mind off her grief, she took up photography seriously during the Depression years. Her fashion pictures began to appear in magazines such as Vogue and Town and Country.
Her first photographs, the series called "Beauties at Newport," were published in Town & Country in 1931. From then on she began working for Vogue for the next eleven years (1931-1942). Frissell covered the fashion pages for the magazine and took on general assignments. Her mentor at Vogue was Mr. Conde Nast, and she was advised by Edward Steichen, who suggested her apprenticeship with Cecil Beaton. Instead of using studio lights, Frissell took her models outside to natural settings even though they were dressed in furs or evening gowns, a revolutionary concept at the time. Frissell earned a reputation for her fashion, documentary, and sports images that appeared in top magazines.
Frissell married Francis McNeill ("Mac") Bacon III in 1932. In 1933, she had a son whom she named Varick, and in 1935 she had a second child; a daughter whom she named Sidney. During World War II from 1941-1943, Frissell became official photographer for Red Cross in the United States, England, and Scotland. From 1941 to 1950, she worked for Harper's Bazaar. In 1944, Frissell published and illustrated version of Robert Lewis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses; the illustrations were photographs of her children as they were growing up. Frissell also published The Happy Island, based on a trip to Bermuda in 1946. In 1945, Frissell toured Europe as photographer for the American Fifteenth Air Force Squadron; and official photographer for the Women's Army Corps; she also photographed for the Office of War Information.
In the 1960s and 1970s, her work appeared regularly in Life and Look. Her famous images include portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Winston Churchill, and the wedding of John F. and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Frissell favoured small cameras to achieve more natural, spontaneous results.
Frissell was recognized with the award of Distinctive Merit for the fashion photograph "The Floating Boat," which was taken in Jamaica. In 1953, Frissell was invited to photograph Sir Winston Churchill and began working for Sports Illustrated. In 1968, Tony Frissell was the only woman in a long list of photographers participating in the "Man in Sport" exhibition, in Baltimore's Museum of Art. In the 1970s as interest in fashion photography arose in the art world, her work was included in Fashion Photography: Six Decades, sponsored by the Emily Lowe Gallery, in Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, from 1975 to 1976; and the History of Fashion Photography, in the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York (and tour), from 1977 to 1978. Frissell was also a portrait photographer specializing in children.
Toni Frissell gave her collection of prints and negatives to the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. in 1970. The collection contains 340,000 items, including her own selection of her 1,800 best prints. She wanted people in centuries to come, to observe a segment of society as it was lived; a record of a vanished way of life. Frissell died in Saint James, New York in 1988.
