Doll leads to 1940s female photographers

I could barely read the maker’s name on the neck of the doll. That’s the first place to look to find out who made a doll, vintage or modern. The dim overhead lights at the auction house weren’t giving up much brightness to aid me in deciphering the tiny inscription.

The last name appeared to be a little clearer: Bannister. I turned the doll toward the light, then away from it and the name was finally revealed: Constance Bannister. It was not a maker I was familiar with, like the Madame Alexander dolls that show up pretty often at auction.

It was a cute little pink baby doll with red flushed cheeks, sleep eyes that opened and closed, molded brown hair in curls, and wearing a cotton robe that needed cleaning. The doll was among several others in the lot, a couple with their heads ripped off. The Constance Bannister doll was a little dirty, but had all of ts fingers and toes.

I wasn’t sure if I would buy the doll, but I certainly was curious about who Constance Bannister was. So I went in search of her, and what I found was very enlightening.

Bannister was a photographer, well-known in the 1940s and 1950s for her photographs of babies. She had come years before the famed Anne Geddes captured a diverse group of babies as flowers, animals and other amazing things, along with fixing them in unusual surroundings.

The baby doll at auction was made by the Sun Rubber Co., which apparently took advantage of the photographer’s fame in the 1950s by making a doll in the image of her babies. In addition to the little ones, Bannister photographed food, animals (especially cats and dogs), New York City scenes and people.

Bannister was one of more than 10,000 female photographers of this era, with the numbers increasing after World War II, according to the book “A History of Women Photographers,” published in 2010 and written by Naomi Rosenblum.

The war had opened up the U.S. military to women photographers. With men fighting in the trenches, the military had to train non-soldiers as photographers, and women – especially African American women, most already in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) – benefited. The black women included Elizabeth “Tex” Williams, the first black woman accepted into the Signal Corps photography school in New Jersey in 1949 and graduating at the top of her class; Emma Alice Downs and Grendel A. Howard.

Born in Tennessee, Bannister moved to New York as a teenager in the 1930s to attend photography school, after which she got her first job with the Associated Press in Palm Beach, FL, according to a website maintained by her daughter Lynda. She returned to New York and began working for the Chicago Tribune, shooting shows headed from Broadway to the Windy City on road tours. She also opened a studio near Central Park and was a photographer for the Ice Capades and the ballet.

Later, she started photographing babies in diapers, taking more than 100,000 photos and becoming famous worldwide. They became known as “Bannister Babies,” and she wrote cute and humorous captions to go with the pictures. They could be seen in books, magazines, calendars, and on posters, billboards and TV shows, according to the website. They even sold war bonds during World War II, and Bannister herself became a pinup girl.

Some of the photos were also used for propaganda. Bannister used them in two anti-Russia books in the 1950s. The U.S. Information Agency in 1953 used them as props, showing the babies reacting to Communism in both their expressions and in humorous captions.

Given the times, I wondered if Bannister had photographed any African American babies. I found one photo from the 1940s of a black mother and baby but this was more a portrait, not a Bannister Baby. In a catalog that accompanied a 2008 exhibit of Bannister’s works, her daughter noted that Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women worked with Bannister in the 1960s to put the face of a black child on the cover of one of her calendars. I’m not sure if it was ever done; I could not find such a calendar via Google. I found one black baby photo by Bannister said to be from the 1960s.

An ad for Num-Zit teething lotion in Ebony magazine in March 1960 included a contest asking parents to send in photos of their teething baby’s smile to win a $1,000 savings bond. In the ad was a photo of a black baby snapped by Bannister, one of the judges.

I saw Bannister Babies published in the St. Petersburg, FL, Evening Independent newspaper in 1960 under the title “More Baby Talk” with captions. Life magazine published this sweet upside down baby photo in its January 1950 issue. Her photos kept turning up in the magazine, but the women photographers’ book noted that it wasn’t easy for women to get this works published in Life. They were mostly commissioned to shoot domestic topics.

Male photographers apparently didn’t make it easy for them, either. The book told of women who were nudged from great shooting spots by abusive male photographers. Bannister recalled printing her photos in a hotel bathroom after finding out that male photographers had deliberately scratched her negatives, among other things.

At auction, I bought the doll and the ragtag group that accompanied it. In my search to learn more about Bannister, I came across a black doll said to be a Bannister that was sold at auction in Ohio in 2011. There was no indication of when it was made.