LongHouse Talks: Carol Kino Double Click (August 28)

Carol Kino joins us in conversation on Wednesday, August 28 at 12:00pm as part of our LongHouse Talks series in collaboration with Maryam Eisler. Come for a special talk and stay for a seasonal lunch! Copies of Double Click will be available for purchase and signature, provided by our friends at BookHampton.

The McLaughlin twins were trailblazing female photographers, celebrated in their time as stars in their respective fields, but largely forgotten since. In Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines, Carol Kino brings these two fascinating women and their remarkable accomplishments to vivid life. 

The twins, known professionally today as Frances McLaughlin Gill and Kathryn Abbe, began their careers just before Pearl Harbor.  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. She was also the first woman to cover the Paris collections for Vogue. Kathryn’s surrealistic portraits filled the era’s new “career girl” magazines, including Charm and Mademoiselle. In the book, Kino has used their early careers to examine the lives of young women during the proto-femnist moment of the war years, and also to illuminate the emerging world of magazine photography. 

The twins also began visiting Montauk and Second House during the war, and Kathryn and her husband, James Abbe Jr., built one of the first summer cottages on the Old Montauk Highway.  Their creative lives were fed by these sojourns.  Both twins carried out many magazine shoots here and they and their husbands were early collectors of American art and antiques.  Jimmy Abbe later left photography to open a gallery in Sag Harbor.

Carol Kino’s writing about art, photography, design, and culture has appeared in many different publications, including The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, The New York Times, Town & Country, The Atlantic, Slate, and many leading art magazines, including Art & Auction, where she was a longtime contributing editor. Double Click, her first book, was supported by a fellowship from the New York Public Library Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.  Previously, she was awarded two fellowships from the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism program.