Jessie Tarbox Beals was the first woman press photographer, and her work ranged widely from portraiture to documentaries of New York's slum children (especially in 1910-1912) to architecture, landscapes and gardens.She received a Third Class Certificate of Qualification to teach at age seventeen.
Background
Jessie Tarbox Beals was born on December 23, 1870 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her father, John Nathaniel Tarbox, was an inventor and sewing machine magnate. When Jessie Beals was seven, however, her father lost all of his savings in a bad investment and began drinking heavily. He eventually left home at the insistence of Beals's mother, who then embroidered and sold some of the family's belongings to keep the family income going.
Education
Jessie Beals was a "bright and precocious child" and did well in school. At age fourteen she was admitted to the Collegiate Institute of Ontario, and at seventeen received her teaching certificate.
Career
Jessie Beals began teaching at a one-room schoolhouse in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, where her brother Paul was also living at the time. In 1888, she won a subscription prize camera through the Youth's Companion magazine. The camera was small and somewhat rudimentary, but Jessie Beals began to use it to take photographs of her students and their surroundings. Beals soon bought a higher quality Kodak camera and set up Williamsburg's first photography studio in front of her house, although photography largely remained her side hobby.
In 1893 Jessie Beals took a new teaching position in Greenfield, Massachusetts and visited the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the Exposition, Beals' interest in traveling and photography was sparked having met Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Käsebier.
In 1899, Beals received her first professional assignment when she was asked by The Boston Post to photograph the Massachusetts state prison. She taught Alfred the basics of photography and the couple set out to work as itinerant photographers in 1900, with Alfred as Beals's darkroom assistant. That year, Beals also received her first credit line for her photographs in a publication, the Windham County Reformer.
By 1901, the Beals' funds were depleted and they resettled in Buffalo, New York. Later that year, Beals was hired as a staff photographer by the Buffalo Inquirer and The Buffalo Courier, after impressing the editor with a photograph of ducks waddling in a row entitled "On to Albany." This position made her the first female photojournalist and was well-regarded by the papers and citizens of Buffalo and worked at the publications until 1904 when she left to take photos of the World's Fair.
Photojournalism was physically demanding, often risky work, but Beals could be seen carrying out assignments in her ankle-length dresses and large hats, with her 8-by-10-inch glass plate camera and 50 pounds of equipment in tow. During one assignment for the lurid murder trial of Edwin L. Burdick in Buffalo, Jessie Beals broke a rule that forbade photographs of the trial by climbing a tall bookcase to a window to snap a picture of the courtroom before she was detected.
In 1904, Jessie Beals was sent to the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. There, she persuaded officials to give her a late press permit for the pre-exposition, climbed ladders and jumped into a hot air balloon just to get photographs that interested her. She was greatly interested in the Indigenous peoples which resulted in capturing many spontaneous images that didn't necessarily fit into the predominate narrative of racial and developmental progress. She had a different style than most news photographers of the day, focusing on series of pictures that would later be used to write stories, rather than vice versa. Beals's display of her signature "hustle" earned her the position of official Fair photographer for the New York Herald, Leslie's Weekly and the Tribune, as well as the Fair's publicity department, producing over 3,500 photographs and 45,000 prints of the event.
In addition to photographing the various exhibits at the Fair, Beals also captured a candid photograph of President Theodore Roosevelt. This initial encounter earned her a special pass to photograph Roosevelt and the Rough Riders at their reunion in San Antonio, Texas in 1905. In 1905 Beals opened her own studio on Sixth Avenue in New York City. She continued to take on a variety of photograph assignments, ranging from shots of auto races and portraits of society figures, to her well-known photographs of Bohemian Greenwich Village and the New York slums. Over the years Beals also photographed several presidents and celebrities, including Presidents Coolidge, Hoover and Taft; Mark Twain; Edna St. Vincent Millay; and Emily Post.
By 1928, she and Nanette moved to California, where Beals photographed Hollywood estates. The Great Depression brought Beals and Nanette back to New York in 1933, where Beals lived and worked in Greenwich Village.
Beals gradually fell into poverty, years of lavish living and the effects of the Depression having taken their toll. She died on May 31, 1942 at Bellevue Hospital, at the age of seventy-one.
One-year-old Nellie (Cheyenne) wears a lucky piece on her forehead
Physically Defective Children
1901
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Two Girls
1920
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A Wichita woman at the Fair
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Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Of her moody night images, Alexander Alland, Sr., wrote: "Her pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge under moonlight, Washington Square blanketed with a thick snowfall at dawn, and the towering spires of the city seen through winter mists became classics of the time."
Connections
In 1897, Jessie Beals married Alfred Tennyson Beals, an Amherst graduate and factory machinist. In 1911, Beals gave birth to a daughter, Nanette Tarbox Beals, most likely from another relationship. Beals left her husband in 1917.