"Double Click," by Carol Kino

A new biography will delight lovers of photography, magazines, and American fashion.

I don’t usually publish on consecutive days, but I didn’t want to wait to tell you about an excellent new book that’s being published today: Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines, by Carol Kino.

The McLaughlin twins with Rolleiflex: The cover of my copy of Double Click.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Carol since we were copywriters at Banana Republic, back in the catalog days. (Another disclosure: I received a free advance copy of Double Click from the publisher, Scribner.) We’ve kept in touch since then, and I’ve followed her career as an art critic and reporter. Double Click is her first book, and I’m happy to tell you that it’s a terrific read. I zipped through it in three nights, decelerating only to jot down especially revealing passages.

The twin subjects of Double Click are in fact identical twins, Frances and Kathryn McLaughlin, known as Franny and Fuffy, born in Connecticut in 1919. Both sisters studied art and photography at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn; both immediately embarked on busy, visible, and lucrative careers as fashion photographers for a clutch of big-circulation magazines, including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Why are they less famous today than their contemporaries and colleagues Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, who also made their names at “women’s magazines”? That’s one of the questions Carol sets out to answer.

It certainly wasn’t for lack of talent and creative spark, as these photos by Franny in the 1940s amply demonstrate.

Those poses. Those backdrops. That saturated color. And — let’s face it — those gorgeous clothes.

As successful as the McLaughlin sisters were, their story is in some ways the least interesting part of the book. As Sarah Boxer put it in her review for the New York Times, the women were “twin Zeligs” — hard-working but rather bland¹, yet surrounded by fascinating people and historic events.

There was Cecil Beaton, the British society and fashion photographer “who had famously been taught to take photographs by his nanny” and who was forced to resign from Vogue “after he inserted two jokes that included the word kike in tiny letters into a drawing that accompanied a story about New York café society, neglecting to delete them even after an editor spotted them before they went to press.”

There was Morton Downey (unrelated to either of the Robert Downeys), who was the twins’ cousin and a famous singer in New York and Hollywood; he was also pals with Joseph Kennedy, and probably introduced the twins to Joe’s son Jack.

And there was Carmen Dell’Orefice, the “desperately poor” 14-year-old whom Franny photographed for a fashion portfolio and who later became one of the earliest supermodels. (She is still stunning, and still modeling, at 92.)

The twins came of age during the amateur-photography boom of the early 20th century, when a Brownie camera could be bought for $2.13 (“about $32 today, or somewhat the less than the price of a dinner at a good Brooklyn steak house,” Carol notes) and its devoted users were known as “Kodakfiends” and “snapshooters.” An aunt’s lavish high school graduation gift — an imported Voigtländer Brillant twin-lens (naturally) reflex camera — gave the sisters a head start on art-school and professional careers.

For me, the most interesting sections of Double Click cover the history of fashion magazines for teenage girls (Junior Bazaar, College Bazaar, Seventeen) and for their mothers and older sisters (Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar). Before the McLaughlin twins began their professional careers, hand-drawn illustrations had filled the magazines’ pages. Photography — first black and white, and eventually blazing color — revolutionized the industry and made fashion photographers sought after and highly paid: A good freelancer could earn the equivalent of $350,000 a year, with plenty of time off for vacations.

The only thing I wanted more of in Double Click, which boasts copious endnotes and a very good index, was photographs! Maybe Carol will bring some along on her publicity tour, which begins this evening at the Brooklyn Public Library. I’m looking forward to seeing her at the new and eclectic Clio’s Bookstore in my own Oakland neighborhood when she does a reading there on April 8. You’ll find a list of upcoming appearances here; Carol assures me that more dates will be added soon. In the meantime, buy the book!

1. Except for their very intriguing wartime ménage à trois with fellow photographer James Abbe, Jr., whose psychiatrist made him choose between the sisters. He chose Fuffy.