I’m going to toss out some names: Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Erwin Blumenfeld, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lee Miller, Irving Penn, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Franny McLaughlin, Fuffy McLaughlin. If you recognize everyone but Franny and Fuffy, you know something about photography. And if, by chance, you recognize them all, then you’re probably Carol Kino, the author of “Double Click,” a book ostensibly about Franny and Fuffy.
Franny and Fuffy were identical twins born in Brooklyn in 1919. After their father, Frank, died in the flu pandemic, their mother, Kitty, “consecrated them to the Virgin Mary and dressed them up as living dolls, always in showy, perfectly matched clothes.” They were often photographed like that.
In one picture of the twins, aged 10, they pose “with an old Kodak, Fuffy holding it and smiling and Franny affecting a fashion model stance, with one hip jutting out.” This photo foretold the girls’ path. They spent their lives on both sides of the camera, having their pictures taken together, making portraits of each other and eventually working as fashion photographers. Fuffy, whose given name was Kathryn, became a freelance photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, Junior Bazaar, Charm and Mademoiselle. Franny was the first female staff photographer in the Condé Nast studio, working for Glamour and Vogue.
From birth to marriage, Franny and Fuffy led lives that were inseparable and practically indistinguishable. Both graduated at the top of their Connecticut high school class, befriended a young John F. Kennedy, and attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in an era when product design, corporate identity and Surrealism were all the rage. They had matching clothes and matching careers; before they made it as photographers, the twins even shared one camera, a Voigtlӓnder Brilliant. At one point, they also shared a boyfriend, “the sexy lensman Jimmy Abbe,” whom they both called “Daddy.” (His analyst made him pick one; he chose Fuffy.)
In Kino’s telling, Franny and Fuffy come across as twin Zeligs. Great events and beautiful people swirl around them. Judging from the dull firsthand quotes featured here, though, the pair had little to say about photography, fashion, history or being twins. They don’t offer great insights about their friends (among them, the photographer Irving Penn and his second wife, the early supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives), their teachers (including G. Gordon Lippincott, the man who modernized the label for Campbell’s soup), the famous art directors of their day (print pioneers like Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman), or themselves. Their main distinction is being identical.
Not until the book’s last chapters do their differences come through. Fuffy married Jimmy, the sexy lensman, in Las Vegas right after his divorce, and gave him a two-seater airplane as a wedding gift. She became Kathryn Abbe and had some kids, moved out of New York and began taking unposed pictures of children. She seems the lighter presence.
Franny married Leslie Gill, an artist turned art director. To Gill’s children (he, like Jimmy, was on his second marriage), Frances McLaughlin-Gill was known as “the Unmentionable.” Serious, tough and tart, she had a longer and more prestigious career than Fuffy’s; even after the birth of her own daughter in 1957 and the sudden death of her husband four months later, she continued to shoot for Vogue, moved successfully into short films and for years taught photography courses at the School of Visual Arts.
Although Kino, a longtime arts journalist, bills Franny and Fuffy as the stars of “Double Click,” her book is really a history of New York’s fashion magazines. It runs from the 1930s, when a number of Bauhaus photographers and Russian artists emigrated to the United States, to the early 1940s, when American women took on the jobs of men who were off fighting World War II, to the postwar period, when fashion magazines prescribed not only clothes but roles for women. One of Franny’s features was titled “See Yourself in a Man’s Appraising Eyes.” And Glamour ran a series (by Jimmy’s psychiatrist, no less) advising mothers how to, in Kino’s words, “ready their psyches to mold the next generation of men who would rebuild the world.”
In this complicated history, with its huge cast — even in the final pages, the author continues to stuff in new thumbnail biographies — Franny and Fuffy are all but lost in the whirl. Why, then, did Kino choose them as her lens? It might be the same reason Jimmy Abbe dragged his feet picking one twin over the other; the reason Franny and Fuffy floated to the top of the highly competitive world of fashion photography; the reason Dick Cavett interviewed them on his show in the early 1980s; and the reason most of the illustrations in “Double Click” are not photographs by Franny and Fuffy but photographs of them. As identical twins, they are captivating and uncanny. It’s hard to look away.
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