Untitled (Woman’s Sewing Group)

In 1943, Esther Bubley was hired as a photographer by Roy Stryker—head of the Farm Security Administration who launched an important documentary photography program. Bubley worked at the Office of War Information (OWI). Two years later, Stryker left the government for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and Bubley and many other OWI photographers followed him there. Under Stryker’s leadership and the influence of her colleagues, Bubley developed her candid style of documentary photography. Her projects chronicled the changes in the lives of American working-class women during and after World War II. She later became a noted documentary photographer whose work appeared in Life magazine, McCall’s, the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and Good Housekeeping, among many other publications. 

In Untitled (Woman’s Sewing Group), Bubley takes a candid shot of a group of women who have come together to knit and sew. In a living room setting and wearing bathrobes, they engage in a collegial social gathering. This glimpse into the shared leisure activities of young women is in keeping with Bubley’s interest in documenting the intimate lives of her female subjects. The photographer’s unrehearsed depictions of self-possessed women redefined conventions in American photojournalism.

Text by Rebecca Shipman and Adrienne L. Childs, as part of the Seeing U.S. Research Project