The "photographic world seemed encapsulated within those few blocks around our studio," recalls photographer Kathryn "Fuffy" McLaughlin Abbe (1919-2014) in Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines, in which journalist Carol Kino faithfully and doggedly conjures Fuffy's arty little mid-century enclave.
The book centers on Fuffy and her fellow-photographer twin, Frances "Franny" McLaughlin-Gill, who were raised in Connecticut by their style-conscious widowed mother. In 1937, the McLaughlins began studying at New York's Pratt Institute, where they were introduced to the mid-century-Manhattan art scene and lost their hearts to photography. After graduating, the sisters secured lower-level work in their field but ultimately made their marks: in 1943, Franny became a photographer for Vogue, and Fuffy stayed equally busy working for less marquee-name periodicals and developing a specialty in photographing children.
Kino takes readers through the world of women's magazines during World War II, when women were offered better jobs than they would have if more men had been home to take them. Woven through Kino's accounts of the twins' professional and romantic dramas are diverting detours into the lives of some of their better-known colleagues, among them Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. If Kino doesn't presume to know the twins' innermost thoughts ("One might expect Franny to have been disturbed by this turn of events, but perhaps she didn't much mind"), it's because Double Click isn't a conventional up-close-and-personal biography: it's really a group portrait with a winning ensemble cast, albeit one boasting two standout performers. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer