A Town & Country Must-Read Book of Spring 2024
"Fashion, photography, and pop culture aficionados will be captivated" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) by this riveting dual biography of the McLaughlins-identical twin sisters who became groundbreaking magazine photographers in New York during the glamorous golden age of the 1930s and '40s. In Double Click, author Carol Kino "has interwoven a biography of the McLaughlins with an authoritative, detailed history of fashion, the art world and photography in midcentury New York" (The Wall Street Journal).
The McLaughlin twins were trailblazing female photographers, celebrated in their time as stars in their respective fields, but have largely been forgotten since. Here, in Double Click, Carol Kino brings these two brilliant women and their remarkable accomplishments to vivid life.
Frances was the only female photographer on staff in Condé Nast's photo studio, hired just after Irving Penn, and became known for streetwise, cinema verité-style work, which appeared in the pages of Glamour and Vogue. Her sister Kathryn's surrealistic portraits filled the era's new "career girl" magazines, including Charm and Mademoiselle. Both twins married Harper's Bazaar photographers and socialized with a glittering crowd that included the supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and the photographer Richard Avedon. Kino uses their careers to illuminate the lives of young women during this time, an early 20th-century moment marked by proto-feminist thinking, excitement about photography's burgeoning creative potential, and the ferment of wartime New York. Toward the end of the 1940s, and moving into the early 1950s, conventionality took over, women were pushed back into the home, and the window of opportunity began to close. Kino renders this fleeting moment of possibility in gleaming multi-color, so that the reader cherishes its abundance, mourns its passing, and gains new appreciation for the talent that was fostered at its peak.
Pulling back the curtain on an electric, creative time in New York's history, and rich with original research, Double Click is cultural reportage and biography at its finest. Carol Kino's writing about art, artists, the art world, and contemporary culture has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Town & Country, and just about every major art magazine. She was formerly a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library and the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program. She grew up on the Stanford campus in Northern California and lives in Manhattan. Double Click is her first book. "The fashion magazine industry of the 1940s is wonderfully realized by Carlotta Brentan's energetic, intelligent performance...Brentan's polished narration captures a moment in time when photography was becoming part of mainstream media."
