Toni Frissell began her career in photography in the 1930s, at first working as a fashion photographer for Vogue magazine. During World War II, she was, for a time, the official photographer for the American Red Cross, and later, the Women’s Army Corps.
Her work took her to Europe, where she photographed soldiers and civilians affected by the war, including a famous series featuring the Tuskegee Airmen at an air base in Italy. In later years, she continued a career of photographing both famous and ordinary people for decades, amassing a collection of some 340,000 images. In 1971, Frissell donated her photographs to the Library of Congress, preserving the images and making them available to everyone. Below, a small collection of Frissell’s work. These images from this pioneer in her field are windows into our recent past.
