From Tuskegee Airmen to mermaids, photographer, Toni Frissell, captured the midcentury and shared it

In 1941, while under contact with Harper’s Bazaar, photographer Toni Frissell became the official photographer for the American Red Cross, and one of very few official photographers for the , which really meant the U.S. Office of War Information.

Publicity photos and/or propaganda, they are a tool of war, and Frissell used her brilliant eye to bring attention to the women and people of color who were serving their country without the same support enjoyed by other soldiers.

The Red Cross didn’t pay Frissell, she was a willing volunteer. The photographer aggressively sought wartime assignments, using her personal and family connections to get jobs in the US and abroad, even when her family objected. Maybe especially then.

Antoinette Frissell was born in 1907 to an Upper East-Side family from old Manhattan banking money; her father, Lewis Fox Frissell, was a physician, mom, Antoinette Wood Montgomery, a socialite. Algernon Sydney Frissell, the founder/president of the Fifth Avenue Bank of New York was her paternal grandfather; she was a great-grandchild of Missouri governor John C. Phelps, and an ancestor on that side of her family, Noah Phelps, was a Major General and celebrated hero of the American Revolutionary War.

The young Antoinette attended Miss Porter’s School, a fashionable (and fancy) institution which prepared young women of her social class for the lives they were expected to lead. But Frissell wanted to act. She got more than a few bit parts in Max Reinhardt productions, and spent the 1920s touring with his company. It is important to understand that her privileged background allowed Frissell the space and time to choose a life that she wanted to live.

I doubt very much that she was expected to have a career; women of her socio-economic background weren’t exactly encouraged to have jobs, even day-jobs, or chase vocations. But Frissell wanted to do work that would have a positive impact on the world.

Frissell had a brother named Verick, a documentary filmmaker, who died on the job in 1929, while filming in Labrador. This seems to have been a praxis; she decided to pursue a career as a photographer.

Supposedly, Carmel Snow encouraged her to pick up a camera; Frissell was essentially self taught, but in 1931 she apprenticed herself to Cecil Beaton, a mentorship situation which must have been a rather complete, if unexpected education, in basically any direction. She also spent time learning under Edward Steichen, which led to work for Frissell at Vogue before WWII. Frissell began with caption writing and worked her way in.

The photographer’s signature, the internal lens through which she documented the world, was a sharp departure from the more traditional, midcentury style. She liked to work outdoors, movement was important to capture, and spontaneous moments became her forte. The realism which came from her use of natural light made the work of her contemporaries feel staged, artificial in comparison.

“They finally fired me,” Frissell said later in life, “because I couldn’t spell.” She didn’t pose her subjects, instead, the photographer told multiple interviewers, she wanted models to look “like human beings.”

Starting in 1941, Frissell began to shoot for Harper’s Bazaar, though it seems she soon became bored with fashion photography, began dreaming of photojournalism.

Frissell approached the Red Cross with an offer to volunteer as their WWII photographic historian. She began with assignments covering the American Army Air Forces, and eventually became the official photographer for the Women’s Army Corps, employed by the Office of War Information, apparently over her family’s objections.

Frissell photographed the Tuskegee Airmen when no one else thought to, WAVES and WACS, even Winston Churchill. She visited the European Theater, went to the front at least twice, and her photograph of London post-blizkrieg (1942) became the first of her images published by LIFE Magazine.

The photo of Tuskegee Airmen in line, receiving small packages from a seated officer? It’s an image from 1945, in Italy, and the “escape kits” are being handed out to fighter pilots about to go on a mission. Escape, probably obviously, is a euphemism in this case, what they are receiving is cyanide capsules so that they can choose to end their lives should they be shot down or captured by the enemy.

Photographs like this one are incredibly important. Americans did not want to believe what was happening in Europe, they argued that accounts were overblown, that it couldn’t possibly be that bad. It was. It was actually worse than anyone could imagine.

For her service as a wartime correspondent, Toni Frissell received a star and two overseas stripes.

Frissell was the first female photographer to shoot for Sports Illustrated. Of that era of her life, the photographer later explained, “I was delighted to be paid to go photograph all the sports that interested me anyway. Sports photography is in itself a sport. I’d rather stalk with a camera than a gun. It really is a game to catch people unawares and talk them into forgetting they are being photographed.”

After the war Frissell continued working, became especially prolific, returning to her earlier fashion work, but now with the confidence to go full-on experimental.

Her photographs in Washington, DC, at some of the nation’s most famous monuments, had a special gravitas at the end of the 1940s.

Her work in Florida, especially those taken at Marineland, Florida, were especially challenging images to capture. There is no doubt that this work blurs the lines between the commercial image and photography as a fine art.

Frissell’s Enduring Legacy

She retired in 1967, and soon began to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease, which became her cause of death, Frissell died in 1988, at 81, in a nursing home in St. James, New York. If there is a theme throughout her body of work it is inclusion, documenting it, making sure there is a chance for Americans to see what women and people of color could achieve. She made the horrors of war real to Americans at home, showing them what the Blitz of London really looked like during an era when news mostly came over the radio.

The work of women like Toni Frissell forced Americans to confront the atrocities being committed during the Second World War, even as bigotry and sexism were preventing the American Armed Forces from having the best and brightest, regardless of gender or skin color. Yes, we had some great leadership, experienced generals who helped end the war. That doesn’t mean it was the best or only way for things to have been done.

We still don’t remember the Tuskegee Airmen, other soldiers of color, the WAVES or WACs as loudly as we should.

Frissell has been described, according to the Library of Congress, as “among the most valuable collaborators the Army Air Forces can number from all the ‘guests’ we have taken overseas to help us get our story not only told, but understood.”

We could not have understood, or have had the opportunity to understand, the horrors of WWII without the work of dedicated photographers like Antoinette “Toni” Frissell.

Curious about the P-51D, the variant of the American P-51 Mustang made famous by the heroic Tuskegee Airmen? In the video above, actual Tuskegee Airmen explain the aircraft and how they used it to help the Allied Nations win WWII.