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Description: Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion
~The camera, like the airplane, is in a state of dynamic growth.
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.99-137
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00209.004
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Chapter 3. Arrivals and Departures: Photojournalism and the Making of the Jet Set
The camera, like the airplane, is in a state of dynamic growth.
—Wilson Hicks, executive editor, Life magazine
The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence.
—Berenice Abbott, photographer
In 1963, audiences broke records at the Empire Leicester Square in London and all across the United States in theaters showing The VIPs, one of the highest-earning films of the year. As its trailer exclaimed, the film would depict the “famous and the near-famous” in a very modern crisis: stranded at the airport because their transatlantic flight was grounded by weather. The film starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, whose real-life affair, recently begun on the set of Cleopatra, had made them the most infamous couple in the world, exhaustively covered in the tabloids. The film’s publicity underscored its “real-life” drama by using a red and white Life magazine–style banner for the film’s title in its trailer (fig. 3.1).
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Description: The VIPs, trailer by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Fig. 3.1 Trailer, The VIPs, directed by Anthony Asquith, 1963. MGM/Warner Bros. DVD screen capture
The VIPs was not casually set in an airport. These VIPS were part of an incipient social group so closely identified with the jet that they became known as the jet set. It was shaped by a culture of photo magazines that had itself resulted from the development of such modern modes of transport as trains, cars, and ocean liners. Jet transport created a life dedicated to arriving and departing, defining this new elite. In this chapter I consider the origin of the jet set, which, as depicted in the film, was as much a loose assemblage of images as made up of actual people. The grounded passengers, juxtaposed in no particular order, shuffled around like pictures in a magazine, were a mere depiction made possible by visual media as much as they were a sociological category or lived identity. The jet-setters’ mobility was as dependent on the circulation of pictures in magazines as it was on the jets that took them from place to place and on which they had come to rely. In this chapter I describe the importance of circulation and the temporality of the news, and the relation of both to the history of magazine photography and its production to argue that it was their intersection that produced the jet set.
The press and especially the photo magazine had long evolved in sync with modern modes of transport, but air travel imposed a complex relation between the material changes of the “modern” world and its experiences, sensations, and new forms of mobility and their representation that led photographers to play an important new social role. Magazines, which were themselves a product of a culture tied to circulation, glamorized people who were mobile, and they also used a pictorial culture deeply connected to mechanized transport to extend experience to readers. The press also aestheticized motion in a number of ways. By taking a close look at this moment, perhaps the last time the photo magazine would wield such singular influence, and situating it in relation to other media, such as film and television, we will see how magazine images that could obviously circulate more easily than people played a key role in the creation of a jet age aesthetic. While claiming to connect to the real world through their news content and through their relentless ambition to present the present, they did not just “thematize” ideas about the jet age but also became a mechanism by which viewers could toggle between the pictorial world on the page and the material world through which they were being asked to move with greater fluidity.
Great care went into the construction of the set for The VIPs, a double of the newly opened Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport. The film’s screenwriter, Terence Rattigan, had proposed International Grand Hotel as the film’s alternate working title, to make clear that this film “updated” an older one. In The International Nomads, published a few years after this film debuted, public relations man Lanfranco Rasponi noted that airports had become what grand hotels had once been. “It did not take me long to discover that the Ritz Hotel bar is no longer the place to feel the throbbing pulse of people in motion but Orly Airport. There in the space of an hour, one runs into numerous members of this shifting society, either arriving or departing.”1Lanfranco Rasponi, The International Nomads (New York: Putnam, 1966), 11. The film follows an unconnected group of orphans in the storm who represented the kind of international nomads about whom Rasponi wrote, reinforcing the notion that the jet life was a glamorous one, except when nature might trump the facility and ease of the best new-fangled systems and technologies. Such were the perfect plots of jet age melodrama.
In the cast assembled, as well as in the characters they played, the airport became a New World crossroads. Orson Welles played a Hungarian (read Jewish) tax-dodging film director who needs to keep moving for financial reasons. He is accompanied by his Italian starlet, played by Elsa Martinelli. Louis Jourdan plays Elizabeth Taylor’s French lover. Taylor and Burton depict a British couple. The Australian Rod Taylor is cast as a troubled businessman helped by his loyal English secretary, played by the then unknown Maggie Smith. Finally, there is a characteristically penniless British duchess played by Margaret Rutherford, who was in the colonial service on her last trip out of the country. Here she is to take her first flight in order to assume a job at a hotel in Miami Beach so that she can afford to run her ancestral home in the Old Country. Even the aristocracy must take to the road for New World glitz if they want to save the old manor. There is no staying anchored and rooted forever.
The publicity campaign framed the film as a contemporary “real-life” drama. Its trailer opens with a series of newspaper headlines followed by magazine covers flashing across the screen. These images capitalized, no doubt, on the real-life notoriety of Taylor and Burton’s romance. The film’s credit sequence also unfurls slowly, as if cut and laid out from a newsmagazine. The film begins by introducing its stars. Each major player is photographed in what might be referred to as environmental portraiture, framed in an appropriate setting: Taylor in a tiara and fur collar on a yacht with Burton (her husband) on a phone; Jourdan as the playboy-lover surrounded by women in a casino; the businessman, a proud captain of industry, assuming a pose as he receives a delivery of a group of his tractors. The opening credits evoke the kind of magazine photographic work of Arnold Newman, who had taken the sensational portrait of Robert Moses suspended over the East River in 1959 in what became a quintessential example of the genre (figs. 3.2, 3.3).2For more on Arnold Newman and environmental portraiture, see Arnold Newman, Artists: Portraits from Four Decades (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); Roger Clark, “Arnold Newman,” British Journal of Photography 128, no. 6332 (1981); Véronique Vienne, “Arnold Newman: Historical View,” Graphis, no. 328 (2000): 102–11; Arnold Newman, Arnold Newman (Cologne: Taschen, 2000); and William A. Ewing, Masterclass: Arnold Newman (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 1268–71, 1282.
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Description: Rod Taylor from opening titles, The VIPs by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Fig. 3.2 Rod Taylor from opening titles, The VIPs. DVD screen capture
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Description: Environmental portrait of Robert Moses by Newman, Arnold
Fig. 3.3 Environmental portrait of Robert Moses, 1959. Arnold Newman, photographer
After the introduction of the cast, a red carpet unfurls, thus symbolically welcoming the audience to a VIP “movie” experience, but the magazine analogy visually persists as the credits continue to invoke a mid-century modern magazine layout. Against sleekly stark saturated rectangles of color, the credits continue and découpéd luxury objects associated with advertising oriented to a mobile elite appear. In the first sequence, a Rolls-Royce grille pops onto the screen front and center, is multiplied, and then a photo of the latest Mini is added as a fourth vehicle over the name David Frost, the young British television personality (fig. 3.4). The next sequence looks like an ad for liquor or cigarettes: it features anonymous male and female legs hanging beneath barstools with briefcases at their feet, framed on top by a saturated band of red (fig. 3.5). The image introduces those who travel for work and leads to a series of flashes of saturated color followed by several frames of press cameras flashing in and out. The next several frames consist of furs, Champagne magnums on ice, airline bags lined up on a carousel (fig. 3.6), a top hat, crowns, a martini glass, a box of cigars.
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Description: Opening titles, The VIPs by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
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Description: Opening titles, The VIPs by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
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Description: Opening titles, The VIPs by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Figs. 3.4–3.6 Opening titles, The VIPs. DVD screen capture
As the credits end and the film begins, the music indicates a shift in pace. A speed-up and frenzy sets the tone as we view a car from behind approaching an airport terminal and its departure sign. Rather than one of the luxurious cars we have already seen, a late 1950s Cadillac Fleetwood Limousine, series 75, with aerodynamic fins (a car that creates a jet effect) delivers chauffeured clients greeted by a pack of photographers jostling one another for a photo of these important arriving passengers (fig. 3.7). They are the movie director and starlet. As they exit the car and enter the terminal, she stops to pose with the terminal as decor. On one side, newspaper and magazine vendors hover behind her: W. H. Smith and Time’s brightly lit signs directly flank one side of the airport (fig. 3.8). The camera photographs the actress from the opposite angle to reveal that across from the press purveyors, airlines announce themselves: El Al and Qantas—denoting such far-flung and exotic places as Israel and Australia. The film’s dialogue moves to an agent who serves as a VIP handler for the British national carrier, BOAC, helping manage the flight that will be the film’s subject. Above the BOAC counter a world map depicts Heathrow as a global air hub in a connected air network.
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Description: Terminal, The VIPs by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Fig. 3.7 Terminal, The VIPs. DVD screen capture
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Description: Terminal, The VIPs by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Fig. 3.8 Terminal, The VIPs. DVD screen capture
The film may have struck a chord in 1963 not simply because of its airport setting and plot, which seemed right for its moment, but also because it established its narrative by using visual devices that linked the film to the photo magazines that had become the most pervasive mode of representation for visually narrating contemporary society to an eager general public. Although the cinema’s ubiquity had, by mid-century, made it a master storytelling idiom for all kinds of narratives, the magazine’s periodical nature and its tie to the press model of consistent and regular delivery of current events kept it more tethered to ideas of novelty, contemporary life, and the latest trends than did film, which covered a broader range of times and places.
This chapter links the history of the production and circulation of magazine images with the creation and glorification of this new group of international nomads: the Beautiful People. The jet set’s identity was amorphous, though, in that it did not really exist in any measurable or structural way; rather, it was depicted photographically, and those images were arranged and rearranged in alluring glossy newsmagazines. Such pictures were hardly simple portraits, nor were they high-end postcards from the places they went. Magazines did not offer a form of armchair tourism; they were not merely vehicles through which to create social aspiration while promoting the sale of airline tickets.3See William Stadiem, Jet Set: The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation’s Glory Years (New York: Ballantine, 2014), for a very good descriptive portrait of the social group. Instead, the jet set invoked a new social type as part of the glamorization of motion itself. In the process, it placed a premium on Nowism—which is to say, on a sense of living in the moment, which news photography enshrined.4For the phrase Nowism, see Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). The jet set constituted a newly physically mobile elite who symbolized what it meant to be the latest, the hippest, and the most of their moment—they were the social cutting edge in the way that the jet age denoted the technological cutting edge. For the first time, being a social elite meant being one step more in the present than others, while simultaneously acknowledging that such a distinction might be ephemeral. Although we may think of photography as capturing a moment for all time, magazine photography, despite the enormous capital investment in it, relished its ephemerality and its sense that it would be of its moment, and then be replaced by the next issue, the next fashion. It would move on to new people and topics, which is precisely why magazines have become so useful in historical research. The key is to not look right through them but rather at them, which is what people in the jet age started to understand.
Although in the nineteenth century Charles Baudelaire had already called the sketch reporter Constantin Guys the “painter of modern life,” by the mid-twentieth century magazine photojournalism had become the most up-to-date mode of depicting “modern life,” not only because it presented the news on a regular basis but also because it projected the dynamic quality of contemporary life, especially by giving a sense of movement to its photography and layout. Airplanes and eventually the jet—the mode of transport par excellence that had sped things up as “the latest” in technology—produced a consistent flow of news by materially changing the production of magazines, transforming key photographic practices. Additionally, while migration and mobility had characterized much of the history of the western world since the mid-nineteenth century, never had red carpets welcomed the displacement or movement of peoples. At the same time that planes and magazines were glamorizing both images and mobility, the social status of photographers themselves, who lived like the international nomads they photographed, rose as they joined the new elite whose image they had helped to create.
THE IMAGE
Longstanding social hierarchies dissolved during the period after the Second World War, as did longstanding ideas of social deference. For some observers, the culture of the mass press played a fundamental role in such transformations. In his 1956 book The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills observed that “printer’s ink has replaced blue blood.” Mills mostly looked at institutions like the military and corporations as responsible for such changes, but he also described the emergence of other kinds of elites and especially noted the rise of celebrities whom he described as “the somebodies who are held to be worthy of notice: now they are news, later they will be history.”5C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 73, 93.
Press photography played more than an incidental role in these developments. Even before the war the press had begun to erode the privilege of traditional elites by subjecting them to the invasive roving eyes of their photographers, as the takedown of Edward VIII over his relationship with Wallis Simpson right before the outbreak of the war had made clear. This episode—and King Edward’s eventual abdication of the throne in order to marry the divorced American—was not only a turning point in the history of the monarchy, in which the photographic image contributed to the downfall of a king, but it was also a fundamental moment that reflected how photography more broadly had been key in the democratizing force of the press and its general erosion of social privilege. Additionally, physical access to the elite itself via the photographic image became hotly contested, and press photographers were themselves subject to public discussion and scrutiny. They were alternatively treated as folk heroes and as voyeuristic social menaces, as Peeping Toms wielding blinding flashes in the battle to construct the modern category of the “intimate stranger.”6See Ryan Linkof, Public Images: Celebrity, Photojournalism and the Making of the Tabloid Press (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). There is a long history of the press and access. See Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 22–44, on the history of the interview; Thierry Gervais, “Interview of Chevreul, France, 1886,” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, ed. Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 35–37; Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Kate Flint, Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
While the press helped remake social hierarchies through its fundamental contribution to creating a more democratic and accessible public sphere, intellectuals also began to consider “low culture” as a realm for serious scrutiny. Between 1955 and 1962, many pathbreaking studies regarding the power of mass media, and especially its image culture, were published on both sides of the Atlantic.7It is noted that 1962 is in fact a key year in Peter Simonson et al., “The History of Communication History,” in The Handbook of Communication History, ed. Simonson et al. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 30. In France in 1957, such intellectuals as Roland Barthes, whose columns for Les Lettres Nouvelles were collected as Mythologies, and Edgar Morin, who published Les Stars, made film and photography the subjects of critical and sociological scrutiny. In England, young critics such as Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham at the Institute for Contemporary Art analyzed mass culture as well and went beyond Marxist notions of understanding such culture as merely reflecting the relations of economic production. In his essay “The Long Front of Culture,” Alloway identified what he called a cultural continuum or flatbed visual field, which he saw as replacing older forms of cultural hierarchies and becoming an “expendable multitude of signs.”8Lawrence Alloway, “The Long Front of Culture,” in Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, ed. Richard Kalina (London: Routledge, 2006), 61; Ben Highmore, “Brutalist Wallpaper and the Independent Group,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 2 (August 2013): 211. As a flatbed visual field, the mass arts could be considered to be spatially laid out the way images were laid out in magazines.
Within this developing discourse, one study stands out as a landmark. In the United States, Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America diagnosed with insight the changes wrought by mass-media society. Boorstin, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, had made his name writing about American politics and went on to write the Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Americans. Though working in a traditional field, and later known as a conservative for renouncing his early leftist leanings and naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Boorstin was in the 1960s remarkably ahead of his time as an historian. He had identified the central role played by media technologies in shaping every arena of modern life, no doubt owing to his early Marxism, which led him to focus on technology and the material dimensions of how ideas are produced and disseminated.
Boorstin’s book received a chorus of mixed reviews on its publication in 1961, yet it has never been out of print. The Image offers the kind of critique of mass-media society that could be shared by people across a broad political spectrum. In what amounted to a condemnation of contemporary culture whose inauthenticity, Boorstin argued, had been created by a revolution in print and graphics, he asked readers to contemplate the changes wrought by numerous technological developments in representational media in a short period of time. He marveled at what he established as the basic framework: that the country had witnessed, “in less than a century,” the advent of everything from the daguerreotype to the color television.9Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 13. The study has been largely undervalued, and certain important aspects disregarded; when the text is examined closely, however, we will see how even during the period, connections between magazine images and the jet could be made and how this link came to play a critical role in fabricating the jet set.
Boorstin’s analysis narrates the rise of the mass media and especially press illustration, which in the early 1960s were undergoing transformations. Television combined the absolute immediacy of radio transmission with the pictorial storytelling of photojournalism and newsreels. The illustrated press in nineteenth-century Europe and America, as well as the influence of photography since the advent of the halftone, had played crucial roles in shaping not only what people knew about the modern world but also how fast they could obtain that knowledge. By the time Boorstin was writing, something had changed so fundamentally that critics could start to think of the world as being not so much reported by the image as being produced by it.10See Neil Harris, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Halftone Effect” (1979), in Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 304–317; Thierry Gervais and Gaëlle Morel, The Making of Visual News: A History of Photography in the Press (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). In particular, Boorstin identified the role the press played in illusion-making, coining the term “pseudo-event.” He argued that “we risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so realistic that they . . . are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.”11Boorstin, Image, 240. As he put it, “The power to make a reportable event is the power to make experience.”12Boorstin, Image, 10. Boorstin also saw in the condition of modern media the potential for an extreme form of democratization via the image, and he argued that images desacralized power through their dissemination in the press; in that way he shared views with such contemporaries as Mills.
Although it may seem odd to twenty-first-century readers, Boorstin made such arguments about illusions and images without referring to actual pictures. He employed the term “image” to mean any representation—something that was visible or to be looked at and seen—but he did not analyze actual pictures or the act of making them. At the same time, he carefully explained such media revolutions as the printing press, the daguerreotype, and the halftone (which reproduced photography in news media), and he even went so far as to denounce photography as a form of “narcissism.”13Boorstin, Image, 257. While he thus appeared to understand that the history and problem he identified were pictorial in nature, he had neither the tools nor the inclination to address what was specifically visual.
But this was the age of photojournalism, and Boorstin was also clearly alluding to its power. Magazines became a major mass-media vehicle in what Wilson Hicks, Life’s picture editor and subsequently executive editor, from 1937 to 1951, called the Age of the Visual Image.14Wilson Hicks, Words and Pictures: An Introduction to Photojournalism (New York: Harper Brothers, 1952), xv. Hicks’s phrase was not just self-serving guff. Museum professionals also understood similar forces to be at work. The curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, William M. Ivins, wrote Prints and Visual Communication (1953), in which he had already argued that images alone could express certain ideas and that their exact reproducibility in print was the basis of their power as vehicles of communication.15See Peter Parshall, “The Education of a Curator: William Mills Ivins Jr. at the Met,” in Freyda Spira and Peter Parshall, The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor (New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2016), 13–25.
The notion that the image had come to dominate the age had been evolving over the course of a century—since the advent of reproductive technologies such as lithography and photography—and had taken on new power in the twentieth century with the rise of advertising and public relations, on the one hand, and wartime propaganda, on the other. It was not just that more images could be more readily disseminated. The artists and intellectuals associated with the New Bauhaus who had made their way from Central Europe to the United States also argued that thought itself was visually organized, as had been promoted by Gestalt principles as early as the 1920s.
Boorstin seems to echo press insiders and intellectuals about the pictorial fabrication of the news rather than its mere reporting. While contemporary academic reviewers disagreed on what was most important in Boorstin’s study (some praised his emphasis on technology and others his overall pessimism at the condition of America), all agreed that he had more or less keenly caught the spirit of the times. None, however, noted or complained about his generalized and metaphoric use of the term “image.” They, after all, used the term in the same way.
Additionally, none of the reviewers addressed what, in retrospect, is the striking originality of his discussion of the rise of tourism. Today we may understand the link between tourism and the mass media, but in 1962 the two were not as obviously linked.16The literature on the subject is vast. Additionally, the link between photography and tourism has its own history. Art photographers who portrayed transport are Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. See Lee Friedlander and Alex Harris, eds., Arrivals and Departures: The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand (New York: Steidl, DAP, 2004). Boorstin counted tourism as part of the host of pseudo-experiences that he described. He was one of the earliest critics to observe that the mass development of travel homogenized experience. He linked the circulation of people with the circulation of images, arguing that image culture reified experience, so that by the time people visited the real thing they could judge it only in relation to its familiar picture.
But even more interesting than this early observation regarding tourism as a part of commodity spectacle, which goes as far back as Victorian armchair travel, Boorstin also tied this reflection specifically to the advent of jet travel and even more so to the experience of flying in a jet. Like many period observers, he noted how little experience one had in a jet plane. Jets, he said, deprived those who flew in them of sensory experience. “The newest and most popular means of passenger transportation to foreign parts is the most insulating known to man. There is nothing to see but the weather; since we had no weather, nothing to see at all. I had not flown through space but through time. My passage through space was unnoticeable and effortless. The airplane robbed me of the landscape.”17Boorstin, Image, 94.
The nonexperience described by Boorstin is more than mere midair boredom. Airlines had already begun combatting the tedium with a variety of distractions such as meals and lounges, and in 1961 they began showing feature films on board.18Stephen Groening, “Aerial Screens,” History and Technology 29, no. 3 (September 2013): 281–300. He proposed that rather than seeing the world framed as a picture below, which the “aerial view” had done, the jet created significant consequences regarding passengers’ experiences of time and space. Boorstin observed that travel through space served as the universal metaphor for change, and without a sense of moving through it, individuals would not experience the passage of time or of change, thus depriving them of a sense of the past itself. “No longer do we move through space as we once did,” he explained. “Moving only through time, measuring our distances in homogeneous ticks of the clock, we are at a loss to explain to ourselves what we are doing, where, or even whether we are going.” He believed that we would eventually simply be measuring time against itself. He concluded, “We look into a mirror instead of out a window, and we see only ourselves.”19Boorstin, Image, 115, 117. Not only did the jet condemn people to live without history, but they would be increasingly condemned to live as narcissists as jet travel increased.
The myth of Narcissus haunts Boorstin’s study because he also put responsibility for the negative condition he analyzed on individuals. Unlike many other interpreters of his era, he did not blame capitalism, the press, advertisers, and press agents—people that sociologists such as Vance Packard had identified as manipulators, as the creators of these contemporary problems.20Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay, 1957). Instead, Boorstin focused on the individual reception and response to the Graphic Revolution, suggesting that individuals were personally responsible for valuing, consuming, enjoying, or rejecting the culture that the media offered up as a matter of taste that they could control themselves.
No group of individuals seemed to stand for the enjoyment and pleasures of the era as much as the jet set. Although they would seem to represent exactly what Boorstin was worried about, their very mobility functioned as an antidote to his concerns by offering a contemporary and utopian recasting of the ancient cautionary tale of Narcissus on which Boorstin had fixated. These colorful individuals became a loose social configuration; a “set” who, like the jet, were of the moment, and came and went at a moment’s notice. The jet literally gave this “set” wings by flying them around the world. To be a part of the jet set meant to be always arriving or departing. Magazine photography played an important role in creating this identity by circulating it in a form that emphasized mobility. By depicting them they would never end the way Narcissus did: frozen, motionless, and dying, transfixed by their own reflections. Like so many pictures in a magazine, and the photographers who took them, they were always on the move and in circulation.
THE MOBILE ELITE
Igor Cassini, brother of fashion designer to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Oleg Cassini, is credited with introducing the term “jet set” into general use. There are a few uses of the phrase before Cassini made it part of the lingua franca, but those early examples refer to the idea of being airborne and swooping in from above rather than to being a part of a newly mobile social elite. Cassini was a faded Russian aristocrat turned society columnist for Hearst publications who regularly reported on the activities of the group he helped christen.21I. Willis Russell, “Among the New Words,” American Speech 41, no. 2 (May 1966): 139–40. Cassini had boasted that his newspaper column could stand as useful evidence of how a “certain part of life was,” should an atom bomb drop and people find the column a thousand years later—he was chronicler and participant in one. Another observer was less kind, arguing that “if you took a year’s supply of them [Cassini’s columns] and put them on a pair of old-fashioned scales against a piece of tissue paper, the tissue paper would weigh more.”22Peter Mass, “Boswell of the Jet Set,” Saturday Evening Post, January 19, 1963, 33. In 1962, the New York Times credited Cassini with inventing the term “jet set” and summarized the qualities of the group: “The jet set is people who live fast, move fast, know the latest thing and do the unusual and the unorthodox. . . . The jet set has no fixed rules and standards.”23Arthur Herzog, “It’s the Innest, It’s the Jet Set,” New York Times, October 28, 1962. The jet set might have been a class, except that they broke the rules of class, rules and customs that had been as impenetrable as the castles and estates that aristocracy had inhabited for centuries. They might instead be thought of as a modern tribe bound by shared rites, habits, dress, rituals, and migration patterns.
Although pundits may have named them, defining exactly who belonged was a struggle because nothing about them seemed particularly stable. Instead, most chroniclers agreed that what jet setters shared was related to the way they defined the changing times. They stood as evidence that now Old World elites would mix with and be reconstituted through the best that the new-fangled nomadism had to offer. The definition of the group was mobile as well: it was unsure, in flux, and variable. The jet set was known to be on the go, leaving town in search of such things as better weather. This was not a frivolous pursuit; it defined the powers that moderns had at their disposal. As Mills described in The Power Elite, “All over the world, like lords of creation, are those who, by travel, command the seasons and, by many houses, the very landscape they will see each morning or afternoon they are awakened.”24Mills, Power Elite, 92. Older elites had punctuated their rhythms seasonally, much like all people in traditional societies, and they left their cold homes for milder climates in winter (which is how places like the South of France first become resorts—in winter), but that meant decamping for months at a time. The jet set came and went as it pleased because its members were never stuck in any place or weather for long; being stuck at the airport in a storm unleashed enough of a crisis that one could build a narrative around it, as The VIPs depicted. As one observer joked, the jet set always risked arriving somewhere and phoning their friends to learn that they had gone elsewhere. The New York Times could describe them only as a motley, if elite, group: “businessmen and people with titles, models, social climbers, people successful in the commercial arts and touted as geniuses, foreigners and everyone with a nickname: Meet Kiki, Gigi, Ollie, Foozie, Flukie, Susie, Squeekie, Shugsie and Soupy.”25Herzog, “It’s the Innest.” As social observer Philippa Pullar noted, “There was a new class image. . . . The whole of society was mostly made up of restless, rootless people with no connection to the soil.”26Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 286. Gundle argues that glamour itself, which he takes to be a modern concept, always involves people who make “entrances and exits,” which I think is an important observation. Or, perhaps, to the ground. The jet had introduced the idea that nomadism was appealing and even glamorous, which was a boon to people without old money and estates, or even without money at all: talent and genius, performers and pretenders mixed in a way that was possible only because of the random encounters of a nomadic and rootless culture.
The jet set would not exist without the press and people like Cassini. They had easy access to old elites and constantly met new people. Before the war and the jet, reporters had written for the closed world of “class publications” such as Vogue and for society gossip columns. Cassini himself had been part of the generation of White Russian emigrants whose Russian-Italian family fled to Italy after the revolution in 1917; he then made his way to the United States and into wealthy marriages. Another such PR man was Lanfranco Rasponi, the son of an Italian aristocratic father and an American mother, raised in Italy but educated at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1930s. Rasponi wrote two books in the 1960s: The International Nomads (1966) and The Golden Oases (1968). Cassini and Rasponi ended their careers amid financial scandals, in part because they had no real basis from which to make a living in a post-aristocratic society.27On the mishaps of Cassini, see Stadiem, Jet Set. Rasponi’s disdain and anxiety regarding money is clear in his justification for the importance of books such as his own. He explained that because of the changing media environment of the times, “two-thirds of our knowledge of that past has come down to us through letters. Of our era, all that will remain will be the reporting in the press, radio and television. . . . Archives of families will be strangely empty except for the bills and bank statements, and future Stendhals will find nothing of interest.”28Rasponi, International Nomads, 44–45. Rasponi indicated a great deal in this observation. He implied that elites no longer corresponded through letter-writing, a practice that previously had afforded glimpses into how they lived. But it is not only the time and space that separated them that was changing in the jet age, but also the intimacy and audience. Whereas families and small circles of friends once operated in entirely closed worlds, Rasponi suggested that they would now be known, even to their descendants, only if their actions or lives had been publicized or the subject of media coverage. With that justification, Rasponi set out to paint a collective social portrait.
Jet setters might come and go as they pleased, thanks to jet transport itself, but many who would be identified as jet setters were also geographically displaced to begin with. They had been “put on the road” by circumstances beyond their control. They represented the glamorous high-end of the remarkable migration in Europe and across the globe that had put some 40 million people in transit after World War II. They were not described as refugees, even though many had left home for good. Their status as transients was not only part of their celebrity and cachet but also the basis of their own social interconnection.29Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 337. They were people like Rudolf Nureyev, who would go on to become the century’s best-known male ballet dancer. Nureyev made a spectacular leap to worldwide fame at Le Bourget airport in June 1961 when at the age of twenty-three he refused to go with his KGB bodyguards, who had been instructed to take him back to Moscow from the Kirov tour in Paris.30Julie Kavanaugh, Nureyev: The Life (New York: Pantheon, 2007). Nureyev had been aided in his defection by another jet setter, a young woman he had just met in Paris: Clara Saint, the daughter of a wealthy Chilean artist living in France. Just a month before, she had suffered the loss of her fiancée, Vincent, the son of the French minister of culture, André Malraux, when he and his brother died together in a car accident. Saint later went on to work in promotion for yet another jet setter, fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent, and was a close friend of Andy Warhol, who, of course, in 1967 said everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes but also admitted that he was “embarrassed that I don’t like to fly because I love to be modern.”31Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 160.
Among those people associated with the jet set were wealthy expatriates who were members of the ruling classes adrift in a decolonizing world. They simply chose not to repatriate to “mother” countries they hardly knew. Instead, they met each other in different “exotic” locales. We might call them “cosmopolitans.” For example, John Paul Getty II, who moved to Rome from Los Angeles, married one such figure: model-actress Talitha Pol (fig. 3.9). Pol was born in Indonesia to Dutch parents and imprisoned in a Japanese detention camp during the war; she grew up in London. She counted Nureyev among her very close friends in the years after his arrival in Europe (he had said he wanted to marry her). She and Getty were also close with Saint-Laurent and his lover and business partner Pierre Bergé, as they often visited each other in Morocco, where they all had houses. Pol died in Rome of a heroin overdose in 1971. As Bergé put it, “People like Talitha, Rudolf, Yves have the same flair—the same perception of life, more or less the same behavior. It’s a decadence, a mix of Burne-Jones and Rossetti. For these people the rest of the world is square” (figs. 3.10, 3.11).32Kavanaugh, Nureyev, 352. Although Bergé may have anchored his references in an earlier age of aesthetes, what could have been more of his moment than to label the rest of the world as square? That their hipness involved a good deal of drug use was unmentioned, but it ended Pol’s life and nearly ended Saint-Laurent’s several times; drugs no doubt provided one of the many appeals of jetting around to places such as Morocco, where they were easier to come by than in the metropole.
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Description: John Paul Getty II and Talitha Pol in Marrakesh by Unknown
Fig. 3.9 John Paul Getty II and Talitha Pol, 1969, Marrakesh. Paul Litchfeld, photographer
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Description: Yves Saint-Laurent and Betty Catroux in Marrakesh by Unknown
Fig. 3.10 Yves Saint-Laurent and Betty Catroux in Marrakesh, 1960s
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Description: Yves Saint-Laurent on bicycle in Marrakesh by Bergé, Pierre
Fig. 3.11 Yves Saint-Laurent on bicycle in Marrakesh, 1960s. Photo by Pierre Bergé
If the jet set consisted of displaced people who never really settled in one place, they also cultivated idiosyncrasy (“the rest of the world is square”), which combatted the supposed standardization that the era of mass media had created. And of course many of them, such as the fashion designers and photographers, were themselves instrumentally involved in creating that style. In 1956, Americans may have been discussing the joyless social conformity described in William H. Whyte’s Organization Man and Sloan Wilson’s novel Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, but the men of the jet set were anything but colorless and conformist. They weren’t gray; many were gay—aesthetes, eccentrics, and dandies who cared about how they looked and what they wore. They were an antidote to the homogenization and standardization of culture that so many critics feared democratization was creating. As period chronicler Anthony Haden-Guest fretted in 1965 about the standardization of contemporary travel, “[We] reduce the actual traveling time to a well-lubricated circuit of airline terminals, customized limousines and internationalized hotels so that the individual characteristics of the country in question flatten out, emerge as a brightly-colored backcloth, identifiable only by examining the currency with which the steaks and Scotch are paid for.”33Nicholas Coleridge and Stephen Quinn, eds., The Sixties in Queen (London: Ebury, 1987), 142–43. To such notions, Alexander Plunket Greene, husband of London fashion designer Mary Quant, offered himself and his wife as counterevidence: “We spend money more on traveling, spending weekends in the obscure places of the world.”34Marylin Bender, The Beautiful People (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967), 190.
“Obscure” is hardly a precise geographic term, but the jet set did come and go in a nonchalant manner to and from places that might have once seemed impossible journeys. This notion of obscurity also preserved the idea that such places somehow remained remote enough that people who wanted to “get away from it all” could do so and then quickly return to their busy lives. One could argue that the idea of the jet set articulated a vision of the world that in some sense extended colonial living during the era of decolonization. Jet access to most places that were “obscure” ran through former colonial routes, where certain infrastructural preconditions existed. For example, Air India was the first all-jet airline of a non-American carrier. Other airlines, such as Royal Air Maroc, bought a number of French Caravelles in the 1960s, although the distance between France and Morocco hardly called for jet service. Morocco, which had been a French protectorate since 1912 and became technically independent in 1955, cultivated French and Francophone visitors. Their numbers grew after the Algerian War sent over a million people from Algeria to France in 1962, including the family of Yves Saint-Laurent, who was born and raised in Oran. He and Bergé began going to Morocco in 1966, and Saint-Laurent spent the rest of his career shuttling between Paris and Marrakesh. It reminded him of Oran, he said, a “cosmopolis of trading people from all over.”35Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, Vogue on Yves Saint Laurent (New York: Abrams Image, 2015), 18. In other words, he valued the idea of being in a place that represented an international crossroads, and he never spoke of the place as if it were different, exotic, or as having “Oriental” qualities, for example. He felt very much at home there, and that is the point about what it means to be a member of the jet set.
The jet set determined the social pace by being wealthy and nomadic. As fashion writer Marylin Bender put it, “To be in fashion means to be on the go. . . . The important thing is to keep moving, to arrive after everyone has heard of the place but before everyone has been there: Acapulco, Antigua, Gstaad, Hawaii, the Greek Islands have all had their moment of glory.”36Bender, Beautiful People, 301. To be fast meant getting there, anywhere, first. But the jet age made remote places such as islands easier to access—not only because one necessarily “flew in” but also because jets, as we have seen, were part of a larger network of transportation. One could afford the time to sail to Capri if one had first flown from Rome to Naples. By virtue of the ever-shifting nature of their social composition and their youth and their association with the cutting-edge of culture, jet setters were utopian and forward-looking rather than decadent. As Arthur Herzog offered with a bemused tone, “Here were people who knew what to do with free time: jet setters found new places, invented new pastimes and generally had a ball. Perhaps the jet set is the forerunner of the leisure-time world of tomorrow in which problems of distribution and consumption have been solved and everybody can begin to dance.”37Herzog, “It’s the Innest.”
The jet set came into focus in images that turned their hedonistic mobility into an object for consideration as magazines showcased beautiful people in far-off beautiful places. Magazines extended the experience of the photographers’ circulation with that of their subjects’, and a vast image culture propped up this class of jet setters, as “beautiful people.” That term is attributed to a copyreader working with Diana Vreeland, who had become editor of Vogue in 1962 after years of working at rival publication Harper’s Bazaar. Bender, citing Vreeland, selected the name for her own book, Beautiful People: “We mean people who are beautiful to look at. It’s been taken up to mean people who are rich. We mean the charmers but there is no harm to be rich.”38Bender, Beautiful People, 24, 77. Rasponi had included such people in his list of jet setters, noting, “Mannequins and cameramen are forever traveling. Clothes have become so dull that they are again and again no longer photographed in a studio but against Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, the teeming bazaars of Marrakesh.”39Rasponi, International Nomads, 30. But such models were the most “of their moment” as well. As Bender explained, “To be in fashion means to try hard to make the clock stand still. Arrested development is the essential of pop fashion.” The jet set demanded that every moment be the present so they could always be in fashion, in both senses of the phrase; the meaning of “beautiful people” was both literal and figurative. Magazine photography gave them form and perpetuated their seemingly easy mobility into another type of seemingly easy mobility: physical circulation as pictures in magazines.
As the film The VIPs depicts, airports had become the new points for arrivals and departures, and the more important one was, the more frequently one would be in one. Photographers lurked at airports hoping to snatch images. Celebrities mostly cooperated. As Mary Quant explains in her memoir, the chief steward spoke to her as their plane was about to land in Washington, D.C.: “We have received a radio. . . . They have asked that you should be the first to step off the plane so that the television cameras and photographers can get pictures.”40Mary Quant, Quant by Quant: The Autobiography of Mary Quant (London: V and A, 2012), 106. The airlines also benefitted from the presence of their well-known passengers and created press operations whose sole function was taking photographs on the tarmac. A selection of images from the Air France press archive suggests how such photos could “elevate” the person being pictured, despite their already elevated status. The photos capture the fact that the celebrity would, like a god, ascend to and descend from the skies. Such images emphasized the arrival or departure rather than transit itself. These are stopped images of a life that seemed otherwise always in motion, thus making the person special. Additionally, the prominence of the plane itself allowed viewers to appreciate the beauty of the new-fangled transport vehicle while associating travelers and such new technologies. As the genre developed, judging from the archive, images evolved in style from a basic portrait of a celebrity at the opening of the plane door, as in a 1957 photo of Yves Saint-Laurent (fig. 3.12), to compositions that became more visually sophisticated and playful, as in a 1965 image of Maria Callas with the airport in the background (fig. 3.13). In 1966, Françoise Hardy seems to be enveloped by the wings of the plane and its jet engine (fig. 3.14). Airports accommodated the culture of arrivals and departures by establishing press lounges, where stars would be interviewed upon arrival. In fact, Brigitte Bardot never left the airport in New York in December 1965 when she did a press appearance for the Louis Malle film in which she costarred with Jeanne Moreau, Viva Maria! (fig. 3.15).
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Description: Yves Saint-Laurent at an open plane door by Unknown
Fig. 3.12 Yves Saint-Laurent at an open plane door, 1958. Photo by Roland Briens
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Description: Maria Callas boarding a plane by Unknown
Fig. 3.13 Maria Callas boarding a plane, 1965
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Description: Françoise Hardy enveloped by a plane by Unknown
Fig. 3.14 Françoise Hardy enveloped by a plane, 1965
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Description: Brigitte Bardot arriving at JFK Airport for Viva Maria! tour by Unknown
Fig. 3.15 Brigitte Bardot arriving at JFK Airport for Viva Maria! tour, 1965. Photo by Patrice Habans
Even before the era of security threats, airport authorities needed to establish press operations to control paparazzi and the mobs of fans waiting to catch a glimpse of someone famous. In other words, airports had become photo-op venues. One early example of jet age airport mobbing happened when the Beatles came to the United States in 1964. Their first visit, in February, was to New York. As one of the flight attendants put it, there were “thousands of fans awaiting us . . . 5000–15,000. I am not good at judging numbers, but it was a giant sea of people.”41Gillian L’Eplattenier [Jill Kellogg], “Jill Kellogg and the Beatles: Recap of Beatles Trip to US on PAA Flight 101, London–New York, February 7, 1964,” Pan Am Historical Foundation, last modified January 2019, https://panam.org/the-jetage/367-jll-kellogg-the-beatles-2. Newsreels estimate that three thousand people came to the airport; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgEwZ1qw5I. On the Beatles’ second visit, that summer, the Los Angeles Airport authorities decided that there were “not enough police in all of Southern California to control the thousands who were planning to come to the airport.” An internal memo described “three B-days” in 1964 that “touched off a James Bond thriller as airport officials plotted to separate the fans from their mop-topped idols.”42Memo from Peggy Hereford, PR director, to Don Dwiggins, September 28, 1964, 1. Flight Path Learning Center, LAX, Ethel Pattison personal files. Airport authorities begged the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, to use a charter and not announce the arrival. Having lost that battle, the airport managed the three entries and exits as undercover missions, and only the first leg of their arrival, on a Pan Am flight, included a press conference. The Fab Four were shuttled off their flight on August 18, 1964, through immigration, and to a “remote corner of the lower level where 75 members of the press, ready with cameras, questions and teen-age assistants to properly record this historic event . . . the first formal press conference for the Beatles on U.S. soil.” An hour later they headed to San Francisco. The second arrival happened at 3:45 A.M. to avoid the mayhem, and their departure was from an undisclosed terminal. The memo concluded, “The mission was successful. No crushed ribs. No children crowding onto runways.” It boasted that New York authorities had adopted the same method of separating fans from the Beatles “and have made this a permanent procedure for handling of highly publicized celebrity arrivals and departures which characteristically attract large groups of young people, sometimes numbering thousands, and endanger the public.” In other words, suppressing a photo opportunity became as important as producing one. Suppressed or published, pictures of the new mobile elite meant that there was someone on the other side of the camera on whom the subjects depended: the press photographer.
THE PRESS PHOTOGRAPHER JOINS THE JET SET
Photography, of course, has a significant history independent of magazines. But as Mary Panzer has argued, magazines, with their “big shiny pages,” exposed and disseminated photographs of many kinds—fine art, advertising, and news—before there were many other venues where they could be seen as such, although photography was already ubiquitous as a form of illustration in brochures and books, and in film strips.43Mary Panzer, “State of Emergency,” in Avedon: Murals and Portraits, ed. Panzer et al. (New York: Abrams, 2012), 13. Until recently, the study of the visual dimension and production of news pictures has been dedicated less to understanding magazine images per se and more to canonizing “great” photographers, whose magazine work is often viewed in the context of his or her broader artistic output or as an (often formative) moment on the creative journey. Instead, it is important to consider that a vast network of people produced magazines. The paper trail left by such institutions as the cooperative photo agency Magnum, for example, sheds light on the central role played by photo editors, like Wilson Hicks of Life, in creating photo essay ideas, assigning photos, and laying out pages. Many people were involved in producing the images we see in magazines, not just the photographers.44See the work of Nadya Bair, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020); Nadya Bair, “The Decisive Network: Producing Henri Cartier-Bresson at Mid-Century,” History of Photography 40, no. 2 (June 2016): 146–66; and Nadya Bair, “Their Daily Bread: American Sponsorship and Magnum Photos’ Global Network,” American Art 31, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 109–17. Also, the recent acquisition of the Time-Life Inc. Archive at the New-York Historical Society is making important new archives available.
Photographers were constrained in terms of what they could photograph because of the cameras they used, how fast they could get somewhere, and what lab conditions existed for reproducing images. Thus, production history, the history of picture-taking and picture-making, puts the literal travel of both the photographer and his film on display as much as it depicts the position of the eyewitness reporter through images. Robert Park, the Chicago School sociologist and early theorist of the value of the news, observed in 1940 that the press served “to orient man and society in an actual world”; one could rephrase this point to say that photo news functioned to establish that man’s place was all over the world.45Robert E. Park, “News as a Form of Knowledge: A Chapter on the Sociology of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology 45, no. 5 (March 1940): 685. Mass visual media such as the photo press did not simply offer vicarious travel, they also transmitted to viewers a form of physical displacement—displacement by the image of the reporter, who had been moved or displaced by speedy transport.
Images are a way we know the world and are not simply a mirror of it; they are a tool for grabbing hold of it, however imperfectly. Wittgenstein’s powerfully enigmatic “picture theory of meaning” reminds us that images are crucial to any and all forms of knowledge. Wittgenstein’s metaphor was that a picture “reaches right out” to reality; that “it is laid against reality like a measure.”46Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1974), 2, 1511, 1512. Vision and interpretation are themselves embodied and kinesthetic.47This text also appears in Lynn Hunt and Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Introduction—Capturing the Moment: Images and Eyewitnessing in History,” in Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (December 2010): 259–71. I am indebted to Hunt for her insights into Wittgenstein as a way of thinking about embodied vision. They are extensions of human actions and experiences. Thinking of the image as a form of embodied knowledge while also detailing the social and collective histories of photojournalism allow us to comprehend the materiality of images in magazines. That materiality is not simply attached to the photographic object; in addition, its circulation is tied to mechanized transport. Finally, those images are also the experiences of the people who journeyed to make them. They do not simply offer “virtual voyages” for readers, however, what would be the dangerous mirrors that Boorstin described in his conception of jet age tourism. The way images work to extend experience and the key roles played by speed, circulation, and mobility attest to the notion that, rather than false reflections, the jet age offered new arrangements for experiencing the material world and its representations.
Speed and pace have always been a fundamental part of the story of the modern press. As it regarded the production of images, however, the faster the news cycle, the harder it was to produce quality images, and so speed became as valuable to the news image as it was to the daily news report itself. One way that newspapers addressed the challenge of producing news images was to offer their own illustrated weeklies and pictorial supplements; other publications, what we would call magazines, either weeklies or monthlies, expanded the reportorial and expositional horizon of illustration of all kinds, from caricature to sketch reporting to photography. In compensation for a slower news cycle, they created “higher” visual production values.
The mobility embedded in news photography has its historical roots in such important nineteenth-century transformations as the mechanization of transportation. While the era of European expansion that had begun in the late fifteenth century introduced a degree and scale of travel previously unknown, no one would say it was speedy. Mechanization enhanced and promoted the value of speed. Such summary nineteenth-century images as Currier and Ives’ “The Progress of the Century,” made for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, portrays the dynamism of mechanization in which communication and transport are tied, complete with a metaphor of the transparency of an “open window” (fig. 3.16). The image emblematizes many of the well-known technological advances of the century. The mechanized printing press (first used by The London Times in 1814) revolutionized the speed and volume of the printed newspaper. At the same time, the establishment of the telegraph in mid-century (featured prominently here with a tape of homilies about national unity as well as peace on earth—already a global vision) transcribed signals into words.
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Description: The progress of the century - the lightning steam press, the electric telegraph, the...
Fig. 3.16 Currier and Ives, The Progress of the Century, 1876. Color lithograph. Library of Congress
The history of communication was especially complicated as it relates to the distribution of images. Photographs in the early decades of the medium’s history could neither be printed in newspapers nor transmitted otherwise. Most historians focus on the advent of the halftone process of the late 1870s and 1880s as a turning point for photojournalism, but it would be a long time before the London-based Daily Mirror became an all-photo illustrated paper in 1904. Exposure times were long in early photographic processes, and thus anything that moved would not even appear in a photo. Developing images was a complicated and delicate operation; the wet plate process used until well into the 1870s required photographers to have their own traveling darkrooms (fig. 3.17). Images made at a distance could not be transmitted until the Bélinographe in 1914; radio-photo served as a proto-fax in the 1940s. None of these technologies of photo delivery at a distance was good enough for reproduction without massive retouching and enhancement, and this process did not, in any event, mitigate the photographer’s journey.48See Jason E. Hill, “On the Efficacy of Artifice: PM, Radiophoto, and the Journalistic Discourse of Photographic Objectivity,” Études Photographiques 26 (November 2010): 51–85; Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, “A Short History of Wire Service Photography,” in Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 206–11; Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); and Jonathan Dentler, “Wiring the World Picture: Wire Photography as an Interwar Global Information Technology,” in Transbordeur—Photographie, histoire, société, no. 3 (2019).
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Description: The artist's van by Fenton, Roger
Fig. 3.17 The photographic van with Marcus Sparling on the box, 1855. Roger Fenton photographer. Library of Congress
Baudelaire had also identified the mobility of the modern observer in his “Painter of Modern Life” essay, as noted earlier. Of Constantin Guys, the sketch artist, Baudelaire wrote that “he wants to know, understand and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe” and that his goal was “to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.”49Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 9. Photojournalists, however, did the opposite—testifying by proximity—which is why photojournalist Robert Capa became associated with the phrase, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”50This phrase is widely attributed to Robert Capa and yet no one has been able to trace its origin. As the Magnum photo agency’s executive editor John Morris explained, “Unlike a reporter, who can piece together a story from a certain distance, a photographer must get to the scene of the action. . . . He must absolutely be in the right place at the right time.”51John Morris, Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9. Henri Cartier-Bresson boiled it down to this: photojournalists needed “an eye, a finger and two legs.”52Clément Chéroux, Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 95. In other words, while images might circulate and breach distance, they also stand in for the photojournalist’s mobility, and the photographer, in turn, stands in for the viewer.
A photographer’s mobility depended on changes in equipment as much as on modes of transport. Photography became a more portable medium after the invention of smaller lightweight cameras, such as the Leica in 1925 and the Rolleiflex in 1929. By using perforated film rather than light-sensitive plates, and wider aperture lenses and flashbulbs, photographers could make more spontaneous news photographs.53Douglas Collins, The Story of Kodak (New York: Abrams, 1990). Photographers could move more easily and quickly, and capture more action with their cameras. Such portability was linked, above all else, not simply to a notion of breaching distance and getting closer to the object worth photographing but to capturing and reproducing the news more quickly.
But such proximity and mobility required mechanized transport. As Capa’s friend and collaborator in the field, Irwin Shaw, put it, “He always rode towards the sound of the guns.”54Jordan Bear, “Magnum Orbis: Photographs from the End(s) of the Earth,” Journal of Visual Studies 25, no. 2 (September 2010): 113. There are, not surprisingly, many photos of Capa posed “en route” (fig. 3.18). As the profession of photojournalism developed, the mobility of both the image and the photographer remained at the heart of the news picture narrative and of the narratives related to their production, which were always part of news reporting itself. For example, in the 1940s, the celebrated crime and street photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig) boasted of his specially equipped car (fig. 3.19). In Europe, when the term paparazzo first came into use, such photographers always seemed to ride motor scooters (fig. 3.20). American paparazzo of the next generation, Ron Galella, perhaps best known for his lawsuit against Jacqueline (Kennedy) Onassis, referred in interviews to a “paparazzo traffic lane,” which he identified as the rightmost one, used for making quick turns in vehicular chases.55Regarding vehicles: on Weegee, see Christopher Bonanos, Flash: The Making of Weegee, The Famous (New York: Holt, 2018); on paparazzi, see Kim McNamara, Paparazzi: Media Practices and Celebrity Culture (Cambridge: Malden, 2016); on Ron Gallela, see the film Smash His Camera, directed by Leon Gast (Magnolia, 2010). Until the digital era rendered the production and dissemination of the physical photographic image immaterial, photojournalists depended on modern mechanized transport. Nevertheless, even with technological changes, nothing has challenged the value attributed to the physical displacement and mobility of the news photographer to get the picture—even as surveillance cameras have rendered the photographic news record automatic.56Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017). Greater attention to the automatic nature of digital photography has led us to consider the centrality of concepts such as mediation, but such attention to the position of the photojournalist offers us a way to think more seriously about how transport helps to define media and mediation.
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Description: Robert Capa before parachuting into Germany with American forces by Unknown
Fig. 3.18 Robert Capa before parachuting into Germany with American forces, March 23, 1945
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Description: Weegee at his typewriter in the trunk of his 1938 Chevy by Unknown
Fig. 3.19 Weegee’s special car, circa 1940
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Description: Tazio Secchiaroli and Luciano Mellace in Rome by Pinna, Franco
Fig. 3.20 Tazio Secchiaroli and Luciano Mellace, Rome, 1952. Franco Pinna photographer
Transport played a key role in facilitating the travel of photographers and their exposed film. As A. J. Ezickson, a photo editor, wrote in Get That Picture! (1938), successful reporting hinged on the way publications got the “cameraman to the scene and back with the pictures to the office.”57A. J. Ezickson, Get That Picture! The Story of the News Cameraman (New York: National Library, 1938), 34–35. For more on the speed of the image, see also Jason Hill, “Snap-Shot: After Bullet Hit Gaynor” in Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 190–97. They used various time-saving tactics: giving the film to a stranger on a train, who would be met at the station by someone from the newspaper, or meeting a suburban train with a motorcyclist who could rush the film to the newspaper office—every moment counted. The advent of airmail in 1927 resulted in faster speeds and new routes. Although telegraphic relay, on which the written press had long relied, could not translate high-quality photographic images, it was used to produce fast images for “hot news” items. Ezickson described the escalation of the speed of film delivery as critical to pictorial journalism’s rise:
From the first days of the news picture, the newspapers and picture syndicates have utilized every means of conveyance to bring the reproduction of the event before the eyes of the reader: from the interior of China the donkey and jinrikishaw have brought the flood and famine pictures; the carrier pigeon carried the film in Japan; native runners brought the pictures from the jungle interiors; dog sleds bore the negatives from the Arctic wastes; every known vehicle in Europe and America has expedited the photograph, the automobile, train, speedboat, airplane, dirigible, motorcycle . . .58Ezickson, Get That Picture! 33.
According to this history of the profession, chartering boats and trains became common for one reason alone: “Speed, speed, more speed became the shibboleth and battle cry of a score of editors.”59Ezickson, Get That Picture! 34. The picture became the proof of a fast journey as much as a depiction of the news.
When planes became the fastest form of transport, even before the advent of the jet, journalists were early adopters. Photojournalists used strangers as couriers for photos and undeveloped film, as they had on trains. They would hand the materials over, and couriers would be met at the other end by representatives of a publication or agency who would then rush the packages to the appropriate labs, or to editorial offices for story layout and mock-up. Redistribution for printing and publication would follow, then further redistribution to subscribers and newsstands. Life’s picture bureau, for example, was responsible for chartering the plane for and negotiating the price of the rushed photos of film star Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan’s 1949 wedding in France.60FYI, June 10, 1949. Box 531, Time-Life Inc. Archive, NYHS.
Magazines and agencies worked behind the scenes so that photographers could be among the first group of frequent flyers. As Margot Shore, director of Magnum’s Paris office, wrote to photographer Ernst Haas, dispatching him to Pakistan in 1954 for the celebration of the Aga Khan’s jubilee, “Magnum is great friends with Air India, both through Werner’s [Bischof] work there last year, and through the fact that Susie [Marquis] has given them pictures they wanted. So perhaps for the film shipment it would be best for you to talk to AIR INDIA soon as you get to Karachi, make a date and a place where you will give them all you shoot and have it well arranged in advance.”61Margot Shore to Ernst Haas, December 21, 1953. Ernst Haas Archive, Getty Images, London. Eventually, photo agencies such as Magnum contracted a standing service with multiple airlines.62Memo from temporary Paris bureau chief to John Morris, April 17, 1955. Magnum Memos, Archives of John G. Morris. As one memo noted, Magnum added an account with Pan Am to their Air France account in 1955 for a daily flight between Paris and New York because one left two hours later than the other, giving them additional flexibility.
Planes also changed the organization of picture-taking in the field. They made it possible for an international group of people to work together by sending personnel and material into the field before wireless signals made the transmission of images truly possible.63See Dentler, “Wiring the World Picture,” and Gürsel, “Short History of Wire Service Photography,” 206–11. Agencies complained when photojournalists did not comply with directions to use prescheduled flights. As one Magnum memo writer griped, “Sometimes, the photographer, in spite of detailed, carefully worked out schedules prepared by the office, will be tempted into following last-minute inspirations about the best way of shipping the story: as poor Marc Riboud did in the case of the Coronation of the King of Nepal when, instead of airfreighting as we had specified, he gave his film to a rival reporter-photographer who deliberately held them back until all his own material had been distributed.”64Trudy Feliu, 1956 Magnum European Distribution Report. Archives of John G. Morris. Eventually, the increasing efficiency of air transport led big magazines such as Life to reduce the number of staff photographers. As John Loengard explained, as he considered changes in the field of photojournalism, “The ubiquity and reliability of jet aircraft . . . allowed photographers to reach most places on the globe within twenty-four hours, and meant that free-lance talent, concentrated in New York and Paris could move anywhere with ease and speed.”65John Loengard, Life Photographers: What They Saw (Boston: Bulfinch, 1998), 8.
Planes also played a role in one of the great media spectacles of the mid-century period: the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953—the first such ancient ritual televised for a mass audience—20 million people in Britain alone.66Gundle, Glamour: A History, 207. The event was also filmed in color and played as A Queen Is Crowned in theaters for more than a year. Although the coronation has been singled out for this TV first, by reinserting it into a system of media that produced the “spectacle of the Coronation,” and thereby focusing on the connection between transport and the speed and quality of image production, we can see how a larger system defined the meaning and shaped the look of the coronation itself, not just the television broadcast.
Television transmitted only in black and white, and only those hundreds of thousands of dedicated onlookers who lined the coronation path could take in the full colorful spectacle. This gave magazines the opportunity to step into the breach and communicate the event in all its colors. They would vaunt beauty over speed. If magazines specialized in distributing high-quality images, especially compared with the images in daily newspapers, once television came on the scene magazines would continue to mark their comparative advantage and distinction as being of high visual quality, this time by adding color to the mix. The movie industry had also begun to combat the competition from television, real or imagined, with a similar formula by embracing Technicolor and a host of wide-screen formats to distinguish the movies from the fuzzy pictures on the little box in people’s homes or in town bars. Paris Match, for example, printed news of the coronation twice—once in an article that also reported that it had been televised in a sort of reportorial mise-en-abyme in black and white images and then two weeks later in color. The periodical’s editors eagerly sought to exploit their advantage over the American press, with whom they regularly competed for photo scoops; the Americans’ distance from the place of the coronation meant that they had to fly the film across the Atlantic, and no matter how fast that transit was in relation to the boat, European publications would be able to publish images before the Americans could.
Life, operating with the same “lemons into lemonade” logic, decided that it would turn its own production challenges into news stories.67See Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture. For the way publications engaged readers in matters of visual literacy in particular, see Jason E. Hill, Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). Editors engaged readers in a drama about whether they would be able to break the magazine’s own records by using the power of air transport to produce color images faster than they had ever done up to that time. The June 8, 1953, issue of Life inserted a rather hastily pasted together announcement promising an attempt for next week’s issue with a map route from London to various air stops (Gander, Newfoundland, for refueling, and then Boston, the closest point in the United States, followed by New York, Chicago, Los Angeles). The pieces of the magazine would be flown to those cities in order to construct the fastest color news story ever delivered by Life. After explaining the complex variables and factors with a series of contingencies and “Ifs,” the note from publisher Andrew Heiskell warned, “At this point, your guess is as good as ours as to what kind of Coronation story you will see in LIFE next week” (fig. 3.21).68“In Next Week’s Life,” Life, June 8, 1953, 118. By using airplanes, the magazine reduced what normally took seven weeks to just ten days for its post-coronation black-and-white printing (although the cover date was June 15, almost two weeks after the event, the actual date of the coronation was never mentioned). The magazine accomplished this by shooting exclusively in Ektachrome film (rather than in 35mm color, which would have taken longer to develop) and through a record-breaking transfer to metal engraving and printing in Chicago. But a story later published about the successful timely production pointed out that the two key moments of shooting and transfer had hinged on the overnight plane transport of the Ektachrome rolls and their delivery to the Life offices at 7:00 A.M. the day after the coronation. The speedy delivery made it possible to immediately develop the transparencies and create the layout, followed by the rapid airborne transfer to Chicago. The article also details the unprecedented airlift of the color photo sections from the plant in Chicago; these sections were usually sent by rail to be joined to the black-and-white sections printed in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Instead, with the help of TWA, United, and American Airlines, the color photo sections were transported over three days and on ninety-one flights so that the magazine could be assembled and distributed as “fast news” (figs. 3.223.24). Life printed reader appreciation two weeks later: “After reading, June 8, about all the odds against getting the color pictures into the next issue, I could not help but cross my fingers. . . . They just had to come through. It wouldn’t have been Life if they hadn’t.” From another reader: “No stretch of the imagination could color the radio or television portrayals as do these clear and brilliant pictures of such an inspiring and heart-warming occasion.”69Both letters from Life, July 6, 1953, 4.
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Description: In Next Week’s Life map of coronation film route by Unknown
Fig. 3.21 “In Next Week’s Life,” map of coronation film route, Life, June 8, 1953
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Description: Production history of the coronation told as How a Record Was Set in Color Printing...
Fig. 3.22 Production history of the coronation told as “How a Record Was Set in Color Printing,” in Stanley Rayfield, How Life Gets the Story: Behind the Scenes in Photo-Journalism (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 76
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Description: Production history of the coronation told as How a Record Was Set in Color Printing...
Fig. 3.23 Production history of the coronation told as “How a Record Was Set in Color Printing,” in Stanley Rayfield, How Life Gets the Story: Behind the Scenes in Photo-Journalism (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 77
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Description: Early color went by rail, but for 3 days, 34 day and night flights out of Chicago...
Fig. 3.24 (detail of fig. 3.23) “Early color went by rail, but for 3 days, 34 day and night flights out of Chicago rushed 91,400 pounds of LIFE color to east and west coasts. All shipments arrived on time, all production schedules were met.”
The June 15, 1953, issue of Life featured the story of the coronation (fig. 3.25), and only in passing, in the editor’s note titled “Dangerous Living by Editors and Climbers” (about the coronation and Mount Everest), is there a mention of the gamble they had taken by promising what amounted to a miracle in printing.70“Dangerous Living by Editors and Climbers,” Life, June 15, 1953, 25. Perhaps to extol the value of magazine coverage, Life also printed a comical article recounting the various false starts and failed attempts by American television in covering the event.
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Description: Coronation of Elizabeth II explaining the sped-up pace of production by Unknown
Fig. 3.25 Coronation photograph of Elizabeth II explaining the sped-up pace of production. From Rayfield, “How a Record Was Set”
Airplanes were thus the latest way that transport had revolutionized where photojournalists could go to get a picture and how quickly readers would see that image. Airplanes may have sped the pace of magazine production, but they did so at a time when it was obvious that television would eventually deliver the news more quickly than print magazines would be able to—although a difference in pace had always distinguished weekly and daily photo work.
The jet may have improved upon the actual speed of the airplane, but its impact on magazine photography went well beyond the possibility of getting photo-reporters, their film, and their magazines around the world faster. The same quality of motion that made the jet so seductive and that produced the jet set was what made the postwar magazine the ideal venue for supporting this flimsy and beautiful new social world. Lifestyle magazines emerged as sites for the glorification of international nomadism, and photographs circulated with greater ease as they were delivered more quickly. The increased physical mobility of both image and image-takers elevated photojournalists into the glamorous new crowd of jet setters they had helped to create.
Postwar lifestyle magazines such as Holiday, founded in 1946, became forces for innovation and displays of cultural trends. One might even consider that publications such as Holiday were largely responsible for creating what journalist Horace Sutton would describe in a 1967 special issue of the Saturday Review dedicated to developments in travel over the preceding twenty years as going from “Motion to Mobilism.”71Horace Sutton, “From Motion to Mobilism,” Saturday Review, April 22, 1967, 27. Holiday reported on Europe’s slow recovery from war and, over time, its more glamorous elements, such as ski resorts, Paris fashion, the Riviera.72See Richard K. Popp, The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), and Bair, Decisive Network. It also reported on many American destinations, addressing an audience that it presumed would be on the move. Holiday seemed to have no actual generic precedent, which has led photo historian Mary Panzer to describe it as “part-Fortune, part-National Geographic, part-New Yorker, and part-Gourmet.”73Mary Panzer, “On Holiday,” Aperture 198 (Spring 2010): 50. Holiday was founded on a large budget by Curtis Publications of Philadelphia, the publisher of Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post.
Holiday’s main editorial staff had been Madison Avenue types involved in the Office of War Information who then transitioned back to magazine editing as their peacetime work. Powerhouses of prose such as E. B. White, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck wrote articles for the publication, which were sometimes illustrated by the photographs of well-known photo-reporters such as Robert Capa. Magazines such as Holiday would pay expenses and then some as photojournalists developed their own stories from the European recovery as well as from emerging conflicts—the wars of decolonization and independence, and civil wars in the Middle East, India, Asia, and Latin America.74See Bair, Decisive Network.
The design and style of lifestyle magazines were as important as their travel content. Many analysts of magazine culture reduce magazine aesthetics to their status as vehicles for advertising, but magazines have functioned that way from their inception, so it is not as simple as saying that they became a richer and more varied venue for sales over time. Instead, such periodicals increasingly became vehicles for the work of art directors, photo editors, and photographers due to an increasing sense of the power of visual communication in the wake of the Second World War.75For an excellent explanation of such media transformations, see Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Yet magazines such as Holiday are part of the longer history of what publisher Condé Nast dubbed “class publications” at the turn of the century. As he explained in 1913, “A class publication is nothing more nor less than a publication that looks for its circulation only to those having in common a certain characteristic marked enough to group them into a class.”76Alberto Oliva and Norberto Angeletti, In Vogue: An Illustrated History of the World’s Most Famous Fashion Magazine (New York: Rizzoli, 2012), 19. Nast had made Vogue into the “society” publication par excellence—one written by and for the four hundred people who would fit into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom in New York. In 1913, William Randolph Hearst bought Harper’s Bazaar and created a rivalry with Vogue that more or less continues to this day; it is a rivalry whose history is also a lesson in the early competition and distinction through visual style and graphic design—what we might call branding. Nast believed that advertisers were much better served by niche marketing than by casting about for the vague and perhaps even then unimaginable common tastes of a “general audience.”77Nast was among the first American publishers to create foreign editions with British Vogue (1912) and Spanish Vogue (1918–23, a failure), French Vogue (1920), and German Vogue (1928–29). See Angeletti and Oliva, In Vogue, 26–27. Subsequently, general weekly photograph driven newsmagazines developed in Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s with their storytelling capacities and audiences primed, I would suggest, by the development of the movies.78I took these issues up in Spectacular Realities, where I also linked the issue to the rise of cinema. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities. See also Gervais and Morel, Making of Visual News. Linkof, Public Images, rightly argues that the pictorial news itself appeared in the dailies long before the magazine format.
The fashion press is as old as the periodical press itself and was dominated by illustration from the start. It shared with the news a logic of novelty and a need for reportorial accuracy via illustration. Images in the fashion press were in effect drawn to be used as guides for copying the clothing.79Justine de Young, “Not Just a Pretty Picture,” in Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 109–15. While early fashion periodicals made sophisticated use of illustration, they also turned to photography early and often. Deeply invested in the consumer culture associated with “capitalist modernity,” yet socially elitist, the magazines were no doubt precursors, especially formally, of how photographic magazines would serve and be in dialogue with the dynamic world of the spectacular fashion shows on which they reported, vexed no doubt by whether the rise of cinema would eventually replace them altogether.80Caroline Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 243.
Perhaps nothing changed, and saved, fashion magazines more than the course of World War II. The Occupation of France meant the end of the fashion business as it had been known; the exchange between France and America on which the industry relied was dramatically impeded; and the wartime conditions of bombing and rationing in London also checked opulent spending. Publications such as Vogue turned to American fashion and also, with their vast expertise and network in Europe, to hard news, reporting on wartime conditions overseas.
The work of model-turned-photographer Lee Miller is a flashpoint for the exceptional photojournalism generated during the war. Although some of her early war coverage in London suggests the sensibility of someone who had trained with the Surrealist Man Ray, her images from behind the lines are the sort of grainy news images associated with the best wartime photojournalists. The apex of her reporting came in June 1945 in her “Believe It” cables from Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp: “I hope Vogue will feel that it can publish these pictures.” The magazine was among the few to publish the photos of piles of corpses and a prisoner hanged (fig. 3.26).81See Mark Haworth-Booth, The Art of Lee Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Becky Conekin, Lee Miller in Fashion (New York: Monacelli, 2013). After the war, Vogue went back to its primary business of fashion, helping orchestrate the “recovery” of France, including Christian Dior’s “New Look.” Yet the war had produced a greater link between seemingly disparate kinds of magazines. Fashion magazines had covered the concentration camps. This increased overlapping and blurring of magazine genres was dominated by an aesthetic that embraced and reinforced what photography did, what magazines did, and what the jet did—and, importantly, what the jet set embodied: a world where people and things were on the move in a form of constant and seemingly unimpeded circulation and flow: arriving and departing with ease.
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Description: Believe It: Lee Miller Cables from Germany by Miller, Lee
Fig. 3.26 Lee Miller, “‘Believe It’ Lee Miller Cables from Germany.” Vogue, June 1945
This chapter has shown that the content of photojournalistic images was as often the story of the pace of their delivery, the way that the complex technologies of photography and transport and magazine production combined, or the interrelation between media forms. This photographic content also extended to the identity of the person taking the picture, whose very mobility was a fundamental part of the picture’s content and the viewer’s connection to it. In the 1950s and 1960s, to be known as a photographer meant working as a magazine photographer on the move. Of the list of ten of the world’s best photographers, compiled by Popular Photography in 1958 from a survey of “critics, teachers, editors, consultants, and working photographers,” only two were not regularly engaged in press photography: Ansel Adams and Yousuf Karsh. The latter, a portrait photographer, nevertheless had published twenty Life covers and therefore was hardly a stranger to the magazine world.82The other photographers were: Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Gjon Mili, Ernst Haas, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and Alfred Eisenstadt. “The World’s Best Photographers,” Popular Photography (March 1958): 63–85, 140.
Photojournalism’s significance was as much about the physical position of photographers as it was about the subject they photographed. In 1950, in the pages of Portfolio, a twenty-six-year-old Richard Avedon called photography a “double-sided mirror: the one side reflecting my subject, the other reflecting myself.”83“Photography in Fashion, Fashion in Photography,” Portfolio 1, no. 1 (Winter 1950). Such mirrors provided viewers a self-conscious opportunity to look at the photographer and his work. Magazine photography allowed viewers to experience the world through pictures and the operations behind photographic production, especially the constant circulation and mobility of photographs and photographers, eased by the fluid motion of the jet age.
To the editor of Holiday magazine, Ted Patrick, the cosmopolitan photographers of the Magnum photo agency epitomized “truly international, truly modern men who had the world not only as their beat but as their living room. They were at home, sympathetically at home, wherever they opened their cameras and suitcases.”84Panzer, “On Holiday,” 52. As Life photo editor Ray Mackland echoed, “It is indeed glamorous, but make no mistake about it, it is a job. He is the envy of all of us for the places he visits and the people he meets.”85Ray Mackland, 1957, 8–9. Box 11, Wilson Hicks Conference Tapes and Transcripts Collection, 1957–73, Special Collections of the University of Miami Libraries. The photographers’ prestige, like that of the other jet setters, inhered in their association with far-flung places, even though they had to work when they were there. As Frank Zachary, art director of Holiday complained, “Our photographers turn down assignments because they’re not far away enough. They always want to go to Africa or Burma.”86Frank Zachary, 1964, 16. Box 11, Wilson Hicks Conference Tapes and Transcripts Collection, 1957–73, Special Collections of the University of Miami Libraries. Life staff photographer Eliot Elisofon boasted of how lucky photographers were to enjoy the lives and work they did: “Who but photographers meet the people we do, go to the places we do, control situations the way we do. . . . I am rich beyond belief, not in money but in friends, in places I’ve seen, experiences I’ve had. And I think that is an opportunity open to anyone. . . . Practically the only new professions are nuclear scientists and photojournalists.”87Eliot Elisofon, 1957, 2. Box 11, Wilson Hicks Conference Tapes and Transcripts Collection, 1957–73, Special Collections of the University of Miami Libraries.
The very public marriage of the magazine and portrait photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones to Princess Margaret in 1960 also elevated a photographer—by catapulting him into the royal family. Cecil Beaton, who had been the royal family photographer for many years, had been annoyed when the young Queen Elizabeth commissioned Armstrong-Jones, a man of her own generation, to take her family photographs. But Beaton, having introduced Jones into the royal household in the first place, seemed relieved regarding the marriage. He assumed that the marriage would mean the end of Armstrong-Jones’s working career, as it was inconceivable for someone of Beaton’s generation to imagine a working photographer in the royal family. He thanked Princess Margaret for “removing my most dangerous rival.” To which she replied, “What makes you think Tony is going to give up work?”88Anne De Courcy, Snowdon: The Biography (London: Phoenix, 2008), 101.
Photographers everywhere took note of the impact the marriage had on the status of their profession. As an internal memo of the Magnum photo agency explained, France Soir recently published a cartoon: “One sees a picture editor in a magazine looking at a picture of a photographer. Finally, the picture editor says, ‘These are very good pictures! But, please understand my problem: what are your nobility titles?’ Conclusion: we strongly urge all Magnum photographers to title themselves to compete with Lord Snowden! How about Lord Erwitt, Baron Burton de Glinn. . . . Il faut se défendre.”89Magnum Photos Internal memos and logs, Magnum Photo Collection, 1959–90, AG104: 2/1, February 1962, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. As Beaton noted, “When I began, a photographer had no sort of social position at all; he was sort of an inferior tradesman. . . . But now photographers can go anywhere.”90David Bailey and Martin Harrison, Black and White Memories: Photographs, 1948–1969 (London: Dent, 1983), 25.
David Bailey is a quintessential photographer of the period whose celebrity has often seemed to suggest frivolity. This image was probably not helped by the callous portrayal of the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow Up, allegedly based on Bailey. Born to working-class parents in East London, Bailey worked during his teen years at menial jobs in the Fleet Street press culture. During his stint in the Royal Air Force in Singapore he picked up a camera and subsequently never put it down.91Bailey and Harrison, Black and White Memories, 27. Bailey’s style of picture-taking reveled in the energy and youth of the fashion photography of an earlier generation, including work by Avedon, but he went even further, as did others, such as Gordon Parks, cultivating glamorous location shoots and the casual snapshot aesthetic (figs. 3.27, 3.28). He was himself an even more glamorous figure. He slept with his models, such as Jean Shrimpton, and married a movie star, Catherine Deneuve (fig. 3.29). Rock star Mick Jagger was best man at the wedding. In sum, as photographers joined the jet set, one married a princess and another a movie star. Bailey described photographers in a remarkable echo of Baudelaire’s painter of modern life, now updated and transformed as a jet setter: “the first completely modern people. . . . He makes a fortune, he’s always surrounded by beautiful girls, he travels a lot and he’s always living off his nerves in a big-time world.”92Bailey and Harrison, Black and White Memories, 27. Bailey does not even mention the ability to take or make pictures; his social status instead entitled him to the role of picture-maker.
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Description: A Cuban Way with Styles by Unknown
Fig. 3.27 “A Cuban Way with Styles,” Life, May 5, 1968. Gordon Parks, photographer
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Description: Jean Shrimpton in New York by Bailey, David
Fig. 3.28 Jean Shrimpton in New York, British Vogue, April 1, 1962. David Bailey, photographer
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Description: Civil marriage of Catherine Deneuve and David Bailey by Unknown
Fig. 3.29 Civil marriage of Catherine Deneuve and David Bailey, 1965. Patrice Habans, photographer
In 1965, Tom Wolfe wrote “Pariah Styles: Radical Chic” for the April issue of Harper’s Bazaar, which was under the editorial direction of Avedon. The changing fortunes of photographers had become clear. The article locates a photographer’s studio as the ultimate chic setting, concluding, “This after all, is the age of Pop Society, and people like photographers are artists today, the Braques of our era. They are no longer merely the beggar boy servants of the fashion and magazine industries, the little box with a lens does it all, the whole thing. What the hell kind of notion was that! Incredible.”93Tom Wolfe, “Pariah Styles: Radical Chic,” Harper’s Bazaar, April 1965, 235. Wolfe’s half-ironic tone suggests he was trying to laugh off the truths of Pop Society as much as Boorstin had been startled by them. For both, magazine photography seemed to play an outsized role in what seemed new about their age, and yet photography itself had been around for more than a century.
To Boorstin, the danger of the moment he associated with the coming of the jet lay in the crossroads produced when a certain kind of image culture was crossed with this new transport experience to create what he called the “spaceless age” in a rather brilliant pun on yet another transport mode on the horizon—but one that always remained a frontier rather than a space of transport.94Boorstin, Image, 115. Boorstin had also invoked the mirror metaphor and fretted that “we look into a mirror instead of out of a window, and we see only ourselves.” But the jet set and the picture world of which they were a part circulated so fast that they would simply be a blur on a mirror. Magazine pictures operated to capture a different kind of “flight” and motion, and in so doing reinforced the values of circulation and circulating. The impact of the jet was not simply in the expansion of travel but in the visualization of motion and the circulation of images of the jet set. Magazine photography had always been an ambulant form of picture-taking, but it comes as no surprise that the heyday of the picture magazine coincided with the jet age. Airplanes transformed magazines by allowing them to combine the values of speed with their traditional emphasis on the quality of the photographic image. At the same time, airplanes and magazines, through the promotion of constant motion and circulation, glamorized motion itself by dissolving the boundaries between the motion of traveling in a jet and the images made by and of those who did.
Disneyland may have offered everyone a chance to ride, but the construction of the jet set and the magazines of the period provided a pictorial experience of circulation and fluid motion. Rather than creating a society of narcissists, as Avedon implied and Boorstin claimed, magazines celebrated movement, allowing readers to interact with the world outside their pages as in a two-way mirror. Magazines did not simply instruct readers in “liberal humanism” or teach them to assume their dominant role in the postwar world if they were Americans. Their images offered much more than their content.95Erika Doss, ed., Looking at Life Magazine (Washington: Smithsonian, 2001); Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); Liam Kennedy, Afterimages: Photography and U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). The photojournalists’ photographs offered magazine readers images that testified to their embodied experience elsewhere. Magazines drew attention to the fact that someone had journeyed somewhere and was also looking back; this experience gripped readers as if it were their own experience. Magazines, photographers, and their images constructed a new visual culture during the jet age in which motion and circulation undercut the potential dangers of a world constituted by photography’s mirror. The jet set’s motion transformed photography and photographers into the modern antidote to the myth of the immobile Narcissus. Photojournalism also took new form during this period as magazines transitioned to printing mostly color photography. How color became the period’s visual language for translating the experience of motion is the story we turn to next.
Epigraphs: The Wilson Hicks quotation is from Otha Spencer, “Twenty Years of Life: A Study of Time Inc.’s Picture Magazine and Its Contribution to Photojournalism” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1958), 412. Abbott is cited by Susan Sontag in On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 67.
 
1     Lanfranco Rasponi, The International Nomads (New York: Putnam, 1966), 11. »
2     For more on Arnold Newman and environmental portraiture, see Arnold Newman, Artists: Portraits from Four Decades (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); Roger Clark, “Arnold Newman,” British Journal of Photography 128, no. 6332 (1981); Véronique Vienne, “Arnold Newman: Historical View,” Graphis, no. 328 (2000): 102–11; Arnold Newman, Arnold Newman (Cologne: Taschen, 2000); and William A. Ewing, Masterclass: Arnold Newman (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 1268–71, 1282. »
3     See William Stadiem, Jet Set: The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation’s Glory Years (New York: Ballantine, 2014), for a very good descriptive portrait of the social group. »
4     For the phrase Nowism, see Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). »
5     C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 73, 93. »
6     See Ryan Linkof, Public Images: Celebrity, Photojournalism and the Making of the Tabloid Press (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). There is a long history of the press and access. See Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 22–44, on the history of the interview; Thierry Gervais, “Interview of Chevreul, France, 1886,” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, ed. Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 35–37; Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Kate Flint, Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). »
7     It is noted that 1962 is in fact a key year in Peter Simonson et al., “The History of Communication History,” in The Handbook of Communication History, ed. Simonson et al. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 30. »
8     Lawrence Alloway, “The Long Front of Culture,” in Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, ed. Richard Kalina (London: Routledge, 2006), 61; Ben Highmore, “Brutalist Wallpaper and the Independent Group,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 2 (August 2013): 211. »
9     Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 13. »
10     See Neil Harris, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Halftone Effect” (1979), in Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 304–317; Thierry Gervais and Gaëlle Morel, The Making of Visual News: A History of Photography in the Press (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). »
11     Boorstin, Image, 240. »
12     Boorstin, Image, 10. »
13     Boorstin, Image, 257. »
14     Wilson Hicks, Words and Pictures: An Introduction to Photojournalism (New York: Harper Brothers, 1952), xv. »
15     See Peter Parshall, “The Education of a Curator: William Mills Ivins Jr. at the Met,” in Freyda Spira and Peter Parshall, The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor (New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2016), 13–25. »
16     The literature on the subject is vast. Additionally, the link between photography and tourism has its own history. Art photographers who portrayed transport are Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. See Lee Friedlander and Alex Harris, eds., Arrivals and Departures: The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand (New York: Steidl, DAP, 2004). »
17     Boorstin, Image, 94. »
18     Stephen Groening, “Aerial Screens,” History and Technology 29, no. 3 (September 2013): 281–300. »
19     Boorstin, Image, 115, 117. »
20     Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay, 1957). »
21     I. Willis Russell, “Among the New Words,” American Speech 41, no. 2 (May 1966): 139–40. »
22     Peter Mass, “Boswell of the Jet Set,” Saturday Evening Post, January 19, 1963, 33. »
23     Arthur Herzog, “It’s the Innest, It’s the Jet Set,” New York Times, October 28, 1962. »
24     Mills, Power Elite, 92. »
25     Herzog, “It’s the Innest.” »
26     Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 286. Gundle argues that glamour itself, which he takes to be a modern concept, always involves people who make “entrances and exits,” which I think is an important observation. »
27     On the mishaps of Cassini, see Stadiem, Jet Set»
28     Rasponi, International Nomads, 44–45. »
29     Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 337. »
30     Julie Kavanaugh, Nureyev: The Life (New York: Pantheon, 2007). »
31     Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 160. »
32     Kavanaugh, Nureyev, 352. »
33     Nicholas Coleridge and Stephen Quinn, eds., The Sixties in Queen (London: Ebury, 1987), 142–43. »
34     Marylin Bender, The Beautiful People (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967), 190. »
35     Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, Vogue on Yves Saint Laurent (New York: Abrams Image, 2015), 18. »
36     Bender, Beautiful People, 301. »
37     Herzog, “It’s the Innest.” »
38     Bender, Beautiful People, 24, 77. »
39     Rasponi, International Nomads, 30. »
40     Mary Quant, Quant by Quant: The Autobiography of Mary Quant (London: V and A, 2012), 106. »
41     Gillian L’Eplattenier [Jill Kellogg], “Jill Kellogg and the Beatles: Recap of Beatles Trip to US on PAA Flight 101, London–New York, February 7, 1964,” Pan Am Historical Foundation, last modified January 2019, https://panam.org/the-jetage/367-jll-kellogg-the-beatles-2. Newsreels estimate that three thousand people came to the airport; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgEwZ1qw5I»
42     Memo from Peggy Hereford, PR director, to Don Dwiggins, September 28, 1964, 1. Flight Path Learning Center, LAX, Ethel Pattison personal files. »
43     Mary Panzer, “State of Emergency,” in Avedon: Murals and Portraits, ed. Panzer et al. (New York: Abrams, 2012), 13. »
44     See the work of Nadya Bair, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020); Nadya Bair, “The Decisive Network: Producing Henri Cartier-Bresson at Mid-Century,” History of Photography 40, no. 2 (June 2016): 146–66; and Nadya Bair, “Their Daily Bread: American Sponsorship and Magnum Photos’ Global Network,” American Art 31, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 109–17. Also, the recent acquisition of the Time-Life Inc. Archive at the New-York Historical Society is making important new archives available. »
45     Robert E. Park, “News as a Form of Knowledge: A Chapter on the Sociology of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology 45, no. 5 (March 1940): 685. »
46     Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1974), 2, 1511, 1512. »
47     This text also appears in Lynn Hunt and Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Introduction—Capturing the Moment: Images and Eyewitnessing in History,” in Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (December 2010): 259–71. I am indebted to Hunt for her insights into Wittgenstein as a way of thinking about embodied vision. »
48     See Jason E. Hill, “On the Efficacy of Artifice: PM, Radiophoto, and the Journalistic Discourse of Photographic Objectivity,” Études Photographiques 26 (November 2010): 51–85; Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, “A Short History of Wire Service Photography,” in Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 206–11; Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); and Jonathan Dentler, “Wiring the World Picture: Wire Photography as an Interwar Global Information Technology,” in Transbordeur—Photographie, histoire, société, no. 3 (2019). »
49     Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 9. »
50     This phrase is widely attributed to Robert Capa and yet no one has been able to trace its origin. »
51     John Morris, Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9. »
52     Clément Chéroux, Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 95. »
53     Douglas Collins, The Story of Kodak (New York: Abrams, 1990). »
54     Jordan Bear, “Magnum Orbis: Photographs from the End(s) of the Earth,” Journal of Visual Studies 25, no. 2 (September 2010): 113. »
55     Regarding vehicles: on Weegee, see Christopher Bonanos, Flash: The Making of Weegee, The Famous (New York: Holt, 2018); on paparazzi, see Kim McNamara, Paparazzi: Media Practices and Celebrity Culture (Cambridge: Malden, 2016); on Ron Gallela, see the film Smash His Camera, directed by Leon Gast (Magnolia, 2010). »
56     Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017). »
57     A. J. Ezickson, Get That Picture! The Story of the News Cameraman (New York: National Library, 1938), 34–35. For more on the speed of the image, see also Jason Hill, “Snap-Shot: After Bullet Hit Gaynor” in Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 190–97. »
58     Ezickson, Get That Picture! 33. »
59     Ezickson, Get That Picture! 34. »
60     FYI, June 10, 1949. Box 531, Time-Life Inc. Archive, NYHS. »
61     Margot Shore to Ernst Haas, December 21, 1953. Ernst Haas Archive, Getty Images, London. »
62     Memo from temporary Paris bureau chief to John Morris, April 17, 1955. Magnum Memos, Archives of John G. Morris. As one memo noted, Magnum added an account with Pan Am to their Air France account in 1955 for a daily flight between Paris and New York because one left two hours later than the other, giving them additional flexibility. »
63     See Dentler, “Wiring the World Picture,” and Gürsel, “Short History of Wire Service Photography,” 206–11. »
64     Trudy Feliu, 1956 Magnum European Distribution Report. Archives of John G. Morris. »
65     John Loengard, Life Photographers: What They Saw (Boston: Bulfinch, 1998), 8. »
66     Gundle, Glamour: A History, 207. The event was also filmed in color and played as A Queen Is Crowned in theaters for more than a year. »
67     See Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture. For the way publications engaged readers in matters of visual literacy in particular, see Jason E. Hill, Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). »
68     “In Next Week’s Life,” Life, June 8, 1953, 118. »
69     Both letters from Life, July 6, 1953, 4. »
70     “Dangerous Living by Editors and Climbers,” Life, June 15, 1953, 25. »
71     Horace Sutton, “From Motion to Mobilism,” Saturday Review, April 22, 1967, 27. »
72     See Richard K. Popp, The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), and Bair, Decisive Network»
73     Mary Panzer, “On Holiday,” Aperture 198 (Spring 2010): 50. Holiday was founded on a large budget by Curtis Publications of Philadelphia, the publisher of Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post»
74     See Bair, Decisive Network»
75     For an excellent explanation of such media transformations, see Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). »
76     Alberto Oliva and Norberto Angeletti, In Vogue: An Illustrated History of the World’s Most Famous Fashion Magazine (New York: Rizzoli, 2012), 19. »
77     Nast was among the first American publishers to create foreign editions with British Vogue (1912) and Spanish Vogue (1918–23, a failure), French Vogue (1920), and German Vogue (1928–29). See Angeletti and Oliva, In Vogue, 26–27. »
78     I took these issues up in Spectacular Realities, where I also linked the issue to the rise of cinema. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities. See also Gervais and Morel, Making of Visual News. Linkof, Public Images, rightly argues that the pictorial news itself appeared in the dailies long before the magazine format. »
79     Justine de Young, “Not Just a Pretty Picture,” in Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 109–15. »
80     Caroline Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 243. »
81     See Mark Haworth-Booth, The Art of Lee Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Becky Conekin, Lee Miller in Fashion (New York: Monacelli, 2013). »
82     The other photographers were: Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Gjon Mili, Ernst Haas, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and Alfred Eisenstadt. “The World’s Best Photographers,” Popular Photography (March 1958): 63–85, 140. »
83     “Photography in Fashion, Fashion in Photography,” Portfolio 1, no. 1 (Winter 1950). »
84     Panzer, “On Holiday,” 52. »
85     Ray Mackland, 1957, 8–9. Box 11, Wilson Hicks Conference Tapes and Transcripts Collection, 1957–73, Special Collections of the University of Miami Libraries. »
86     Frank Zachary, 1964, 16. Box 11, Wilson Hicks Conference Tapes and Transcripts Collection, 1957–73, Special Collections of the University of Miami Libraries. »
87     Eliot Elisofon, 1957, 2. Box 11, Wilson Hicks Conference Tapes and Transcripts Collection, 1957–73, Special Collections of the University of Miami Libraries. »
88     Anne De Courcy, Snowdon: The Biography (London: Phoenix, 2008), 101. »
89     Magnum Photos Internal memos and logs, Magnum Photo Collection, 1959–90, AG104: 2/1, February 1962, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. »
90     David Bailey and Martin Harrison, Black and White Memories: Photographs, 1948–1969 (London: Dent, 1983), 25. »
91     Bailey and Harrison, Black and White Memories, 27. »
92     Bailey and Harrison, Black and White Memories, 27. »
93     Tom Wolfe, “Pariah Styles: Radical Chic,” Harper’s Bazaar, April 1965, 235. »
94     Boorstin, Image, 115. »
95     Erika Doss, ed., Looking at Life Magazine (Washington: Smithsonian, 2001); Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); Liam Kennedy, Afterimages: Photography and U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). »
Chapter 3. Arrivals and Departures: Photojournalism and the Making of the Jet Set
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