Women
: Portraits 1960-2000 is a new book of
photographs by Susan Wood. The book features fresh looks at some of the most
prominent and influential women in the latter part of the 20th century.
Long-unseen photographs of icons including Helen Gurley Brown, Julia Child,
Nora Ephron, Diane von Furstenberg, Jane Fonda, Betsey Johnson, Jayne
Mansfield, Yoko Ono, Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem, Martha Stewart, Cheryl
Tiegs, Alice Waters, Gloria Vanderbilt, and many others are featured. A lively
essay by Wood, entitled “Women Was My Beat” introduces the book.
Wood’s
photographs were made during years of great social change, and her own career
followed a similar trajectory. A born and bred New Yorker, she was involved
with the original “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue and later won a Clio, the most
sought-after award in advertising. In
1954 her photographs appeared in the premier issue of Sports Illustrated.
Mademoiselle chose her as one of their “Ten Young Women of the Year” in 1961. Throughout
the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, her photographs could be seen in Vogue, Life, People
and New York magazines. She was a regular contributor to Look magazine, most
notably for a 1969 cover story on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Wood is also noted
for her movie stills. Under contract to Paramount Pictures, United Artists and
20th Century Fox, she was on set during the filming of movies that defined the
1960s such as Easy Rider and Hatari.
Writes
Wood, now 84, in the book’s introduction, "I’m a working woman from an age
when women still wondered if we could and/or should work. I remember a woman
scientist’s graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College in 1953 recommending
we graduates keep some part of our brain actively engaged in an intellectual
project even if we visited it only occasionally. 'Picking up knitting' was her
analogy. Can you imagine the catcalls and boos someone today would get in
response?"
Susan
Wood's iconic portraits of the most influential women from the 1960s onwards.
By Katy Cowan. Creative Boom , August
15, 2018. With a fine selection of photos
Although I was getting work from
such fashion magazines as Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and McCall’s, and did
human interest and working women stories for Mademoiselle, Glamour, Ladies’
Home Journal, and other women’s service magazines, my goal was to do picture
stories involving people, places, and events. This was being done almost
exclusively at Look and Life. I kept bringing around new portfolios, had no
luck with Life (which was run like a boys’ fraternity house), but I was pulled
into Look by a woman editor, Betty Leavitt. She was the picture editor who
dealt with freelance photographers, and when I came to her with my portfolio
and story suggestions, she came through with assignments. Look was not a
self-satisfied Old Boys‘ culture. Gardner Cowles, Jr., owned it, and he was
supportive of women’s creativity. Evidence is in the graphically advanced
magazine, Flair, he created for his very talented and creative wife, Fleur
Cowles. The top editorial position at Look was held by Dan D. Mich, a
sympathetic, thoughtfully free-spirited man who had put a woman—Patricia
Carbine—into a high executive position as managing editor. Patricia, Betty, and
I interacted well, and they assigned me to some wonderful stories.
I became a regular contributor to
Look, my most notable work being a 1969 cover story on John Lennon and Yoko Ono
at their home in England. Betty Rollin, a good friend, and a writer with a dry
wit and a sharp tongue who was a friend of Yoko’s at Sarah Lawrence, made the
connection, and the art director at Look whom I called to suggest I be the photographer
accepted my offer. My first photographs of Yoko were in a hospital, John
staying with her while she rested quietly as she was trying to stave off a
miscarriage, or was recovering from one. The rest of our story took place soon
after, while Yoko was taking it easy at home, with John.
For me, they were a couple in love
doing ordinary things. I did some photographs of them shopping and then
arranged to come to their house in the country the next day and see what could
be done to take varied and interesting pictures that would make the editors at
Look want to give them lots of space. As I was living in London at the time, I
could meet them for an event when it was actually happening.
At their house, they got creative,
getting into the bathtub together, while the bedroom seemed natural for a bed
scene, “Why don’t we do a picture of you in bed?” I asked. So I was the first
to photograph them in a bed and they went on to do a bed-in for peace and so
on. They had fun with the idea and began to enjoy making pictures. I wanted to
give a sense of them as a loving couple. I met Yoko and John a few more times
and, with their cooperation, creativity, and John’s impish sense of humor and
body language, we made an interesting cover story for Look. Like most of my
photo sessions, making the story relied upon the joint effort and contributions
of the subjects as well as my ability to draw out the creative spirit in making
the shoot lively.
[…]
It turned out that Women had
become my “beat.” Beat as in a police officer on his or her beat. Beat as in a
drumbeat, because this thread of subject matter—women—had grown from a pulse
beat into a resounding and insistent drumbeat for women’s rights to opportunity
and achievement. It is also my beat, as in heartbeat, as I am heartened by how
far we have come. It wasn’t something I planned. I saw my photography as a mix
of art form and journalism, and women one of its many subjects. But in going
through my archives, I came to discover that women were my main subject matter
for more than 60 years. These were the noteworthy women of the Sixties and into
the first 15 years of the 21st century: Achievers, trailblazers, glass-ceiling
breakers, femme fatales, or individuals whom I chose to photograph or was asked
to do so by the editors of magazines, the companies who hired me, or the
friends who chose me to take their portraits for their book jackets or for
other personal reasons. Was I a feminist? At the time, I thought of myself
simply as a working woman pursuing a career. I knew many feminist leaders, and
I was friends with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. While I was uneasy with
the label of feminist, I eventually accepted it with pride.
Betty could be abrasive,
pugnacious, imperious, and grumpy. She might scream and seem to consider
decorum bourgeois. But she was never like that with me. Well, maybe once, but
that was when I disputed a medical fact about women and she interpreted it as
making women look weaker than men—and she would have none of that.
Right or wrong, I backed off. I
didn’t want this minor detail damaging our friendship—a friendship that was of
the old-fashioned girlfriend sort. We gossiped, talked about men and love,
drank together, and laughed at the absurdities of life. We liked going to
parties, especially A-list ones. Sometimes we barely touched down. Betty had a
slight vision problem so I drove. She loved my second husband, Joe Haggerty,
and came to keep him company in his final days, and spoke at his funeral. Her
opening line was, “I loved Joe.”
For the first 10 years of my
career, despite having the big names of feminism as friends, I never thought
that being a woman, and getting assignments to photograph women, had anything
to do with being a woman photographer. But it did, because men dominated hard
news. And though men controlled most editorial jobs, the few women editors
among them were as macho as the guys. Nevertheless, the handful in “soft” news,
and the good art directors, men or women, would give a talented woman a break,
an assignment here and there. Working women, subjects associated with women,
and home life such as food, fashion, children, marriage, family, and home
furnishings, were “soft news” for ‘the women’s page’ of newspapers and women’s
service magazines.
Unseen Pictures of Female Icons:
An Exclusive Excerpt of “Women Was My Beat” by Susan Wood. A Women’s Thing , August 16, 2018
“The 1960s and 70s were a pivotal
time for women,” recalls veteran photographer Susan Wood, who has spent decades
immortalising some of the world’s most prominent female figures, capturing
their nuances and singularity in the process. “It was a period when women were
starting to come out of their shell; they were no longer background figures.
Celebrating their inherent strength and poise has always been my primary
focus.”
The feminist ethos has always been
at the core of Wood’s practice – yet, she admits, her affiliation with the
movement wasn’t set in motion by personal struggle as much as by a deep sense
of solidarity. “I’d always been aware of all the limitations that women were
facing, but I was lucky enough to get work and decent opportunities despite the
general climate,” Wood remembers. “Knowing Gloria [Steinem] and Betty [Friedan]
really changed my perspective and made me understand how deep and systemic the
discrimination actually was. I’ve been involved in the feminist fight for
equality ever since.”
Wood unapologetically channeled
her sociopolitical sympathies into her visual work by capturing strength,
humour and wit while at the same time embracing sensuality. “There is a lot of
sensuality, beauty and sexiness in these images, but none of it is obvious,”
the photographer concludes. “When men are behind the lens, they are so taken
with the female beauty at face value, that they don’t notice all the small
details that come across through her personality, the charisma, the
intelligence… Women photographers find sensuality in so many different places.
There is this unspoken recognition of something that we women know, a certain
empathy and understanding that really come across in the imagery. Unearthing
this has always been my motivation.”
The Photographer Celebrating her
Luminary Circle of Female Friends. By Irina Baconsky
Another Magazine , August 17, 2018
Figuring out the right way to
depict women, to emphasise their strength, was always complex. It was a battle
between showing them looking “desirable” and showing them looking professional
(her images mostly veer towards the latter). “Many women have college degrees
from fine institutions,” she notes, “but it seemed as though that wasn’t
important to the men.”
Wood chose a photograph of
supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, for her book’s cover. It was taken in California in
1970, for a spa story in Vogue. “It’s not a ‘feminist’ point of view,” Wood
says of the shot, which shows the model and fashion designer dressed in a satin
robe and idling among newspapers and fruit on a hotel bed. “But it grabs the
attention. You want someone to pick up the book and look at it.” It is also
worth mentioning that Tiegs’ burly husband, who spans the other half of the
photo, is relegated to the book’s back cover.
(…)
Has much changed since 1967? In the age of #MeToo,
Wood’s portraits still have plenty to tell us about how women are portrayed,
how they think about themselves, the opportunities they’re presented with, how
they overcome deeply sexist odds to make it in the professional world.
One of the great pleasures of the book is how
mischievous Wood can be. She is asked to portray a certain subject “as a Marie
Antoinette – a ‘let-’em-eat-cake’ rich bitch”. But instead, she puts the woman
in a man’s three-dollar T-shirt, and has her communing with a snake. This, she
muses, “was far more interesting”. Quite.
The high-fliers club: how Susan
Wood captured the original rebel girls. By Sarah Moroz. The Guardian ,
September 28, 2018.
Also of interest :
Susan Wood: from
Easy Rider’s difficult shoot to clicking with John and Yoko. By Una Mullally.
The Irish Times , February 7 , 2014. On
photographing John Lennon and Yoko One and as on-set photographer during the
shooting of Easy Rider.
A collection of
Susan Wood's work, on exhibition in association with the Irish Georgian Society
and curated by Deirdre Brennan, represents a number of milestones in American
photography over a period of more than 30 years.
Although her most
famous magazine cover is an iconic photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, she
is best known for her movie stills. Under contract to Paramount Pictures,
United Artists and 20th Century Fox, Ms Wood was on set and on location during
the filming of movies which defined the 1960s, like Leo the Last, Easy Rider
and Modesty Blaise. Her assignments allowed her to capture remarkable,
unrehearsed shots of some of that era's most unforgettable actors like Peter
Fonda, Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn -- on display as a group, here for the
first time ever.
Close
Up Susan Wood Movie stills from the
sixties.
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