This is one of Esther Bubley’s (1921-1998) best known photographs. It’s a moment of grace, strength, and great beauty, and, even though she was still in her mid-twenties when she made it, it’s the work of a fully mature artist.
Esther Bubley: Greyhound Terminal, West 50th Street, New York City, 1947. Photo courtesy of University of Louisville, Library, Special Collections and Archives, Standard Oil (New Jersey) collection.
In 1947, Bubley was working for Roy Stryker and his Standard Oil documentary photography archive. Stryker and Standard Oil was an unlikely pairing, but Stryker wanted to continue the documentary project that he had supervised at the Farm Security Administration [FSA] and Office of War Information [OWI], and Standard Oil wanted to remove some of the tarnish from its public image. Stryker’s goal was always to document and preserve for history the look of America. The connection between oil and buses being pretty obvious, it was easy to justify sending one of his photographers on a cross-country trip.
Not coincidentally, in 1943, Stryker had asked Bubley to do precisely the same thing. In that case, however, their employer had been the federal government’s OWI.
Esther Bubley: A Greyhound bus trip from Louisville, Kentucky, to Memphis, Tennessee, and the terminals. Waiting for the bus at the Memphis terminal. September 1943. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection. (Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)
As I mentioned in a previous post, Bubley first fell into Stryker’s orbit in 1942. She was then an aspiring photographer who was stuck in an uninspiring job at the National Archives. Stryker, who was running the photographic department at the OWI (a continuation of the documentary project that he had overseen at the FSA, to a large extent), hired her as a darkroom technician.
Eager to impress Stryker with her photographic skills and earn a promotion to field photographer, Bubley had begun to make photos on her on time, including a series exploring life in one of the many boarding houses in wartime Washington, DC. (I talk some of the boarding house photos, here.) Stryker liked what he saw and quickly decided that Bubley should be making photos, not just developing them.
One of her first assignments was a four-month cross-country Greyhound bus trip from DC to as far north as Chicago and as far south as Memphis and Chattanooga. The goal was to document bus travel, “which had dramatically increased with the [wartime] rationing of gasoline and tires.” (Bonnie Yochelson and Tracy A. Schmid, Esther Bubley: On Assignment.)
Esther Bubley: A Greyhound bus trip from Louisville, Kentucky, to Memphis, Tennessee, and the terminals. Bus passenger at Chattanooga, Tennessee. September 1943. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection.
Bubley served her photographic apprenticeship with Stryker at the OWI and Standard Oil, and that was precisely where she wanted to be. As a teenager in Wisconsin, she’d been inspired by the photojournalism that she saw in Life magazine and by the photographers of the FSA. She spent a year at the Minneapolis School of Art and had a brief, unsuccessful foray into the photographic world in New York. But she learned the art and craft of documentary photography from Stryker and FSA/OWI photographers, such as Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, and Ed and Louise Rosskam. She later called them “friends and, in a sense, teachers.” (Bonnie Yochelson and Tracy A. Schmid, Esther Bubley: On Assignment.)
Esther Bubley: A Greyhound bus trip from Louisville, Kentucky, to Memphis, Tennessee, and the terminals. Passengers standing in aisles on Memphis-Chattanooga Greyhound bus. September 1943. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection.
Bubley had a reputation for talking to the people that she photographed, establishing a relationship, loosening them up. In this photo, she’s managed to enlist someone to hold her off-camera flash.
Esther Bubley: Cincinnati, Ohio. A maid in the women's restroom at the Greyhound bus terminal. September 1943. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection.
This portrait has an unsentimental directness that’s almost haunting. On the whole, however, the photos that Bubley made on her cross-county bus trip, in 1943, are not as strong as the ones that she would make four years later. They’re good, no doubt about it. But they’re also those of an apprentice, someone who is still learning and still teaching herself how to make pictures.
Esther Bubley: Washington, D.C. A boy in the King's Court section. April 1943. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection.
The FSA/OWI collection at the Library of Congress contains a number of photos like this one and the two just below. Unlike the boarding house and bus trip photos, they’re not part of a larger project. Perhaps, she was documenting daily life in DC; perhaps, she was just practicing her art; perhaps, a little of both. In different ways, they each have a certain charm.
Esther Bubley: Washington, D.C. A Negro church [United House of Prayer for All People]. April 1943. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection.
A momentary digression on this photo: The charismatic Bishop Charles Manuel "Sweet Daddy" Grace had established the United House of Prayer for All People, in Massachusetts, in 1919, and brought it to DC, in 1927. The denomination, which began as a single parish, grew into a flourishing denomination. The church is especially known for its magnificent gospel brass bands. (You can see one of the bands in performance, at the White House, here, and at the Kennedy Center, here. You can find sound clips from a Smithsonian Institution CD, here.)
Esther Bubley: Washington, D.C. A sign at the National Zoological Park. May 1943. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection.
Bubley had a sense of humor. Elliot Erwitt would approve.
By the time that Bubley went to work for the OWI, 1942, it was already too late for her to be the first woman photographer (or even the second or third) doing just about anything. Even 70 years ago, there was nothing usual about a woman photographer. Yes, men did sometimes make life difficult for female photographers. (As late as 1968, the University of Michigan denied women photographers access to the field at its football stadium.) It’s also true that the gender expectation that women would do all of the domestic chores associated with housekeeping and childcare forced many women to choose between family life and professional life.
But what strikes me is the openness of photography to women, especially when photography is contrasted with the fine arts, such as painting and sculpture, and professions, such as medicine, law, and my own field of higher education, which were virtually closed to women prior to the 1970s. (Many people have noted that photography was also open to ethnic minorities, such as Jews, at a time when they faced determined discrimination in other fields.)
Before Bubley even graduated from high school, women photographers had established themselves in photojournalism (for instance, Margaret Bourke-White, whose photograph of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on the very first issue of Life magazine, in 1936, and who was one of the magazine’s original staff photographers), documentary photography (for instance, the FSA’s Dorothea Lange, Marjory Collins, and Marion Post Wolcott), and fine art photography (for instance, Gertrude Kasebier, who rose to fame in the 1890s). These examples, all from the United States, are just a few of many.
What accounts for photography’s openness to women? Most importantly, it was a new profession and had not been marked as the special preserve of men (or women, for that matter). That is, it wasn’t seen as a man’s job, unlike medicine or law enforcement, or a woman’s job, unlike nursing or housekeeping. It was gender neutral to a surprising degree. In addition, because photography was new, it lacked powerful institutional gatekeepers (professional associations, unions, etc.) that could regulate entry. Its newness also meant that it wasn’t yet a prestigious or highly paid paying calling that men might seek to monopolize. Finally, entry into it didn’t require formal training or a large financial investment.
I don’t mean to exaggerate photography’s openness. Black, Latino, and Asian photographers faced significant discrimination in the United States throughout the twentieth century. Institutional doors were (and, sometimes, continue to be) difficult for them to open. Bubley, however, had what it took to succeed in an arena where being a woman and being Jewish didn’t pose significant obstacles to entry. She was smart, talented, and hard-working. And she was lucky enough to have lived in a time and place where that’s what mattered the most.
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