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December 1972 | Volume 24, Issue 1
A Twenties Constellation
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
The personage at left is neither Cossack nor commissar, but an American photographer who pursued—and overtook—an extraordinarily lively career in photojournalism and who today, at eighty-nine, lives in San Francisco. Although James Abbe’s photographic adventures unfolded in many exotic places, including Russia, some of his most successful pictures were of American stage and film performers, and especially of those glamorous figures of the 1920’s who became the first truly world-famous stars. When two AMERICAN HERITAGE picture editors visited an exhibition of Abbe’s star portraits in New York a few months ago, they were so impressed with the quality of his work that it was decided to present a sample in our pages. The only problem was one of selection, and the group that follows is indeed a very small sample of an enormously rich collection of photographs.
We discovered, in the course of preparing this feature, that Mr. Abbe is a fascinating individual as well as a fine photographer. In response to our request for personal information he sent us a bundle of typescripts and letters, from which we have patched together a kind of biographical sketch in his own words. —The Editors
Looking back over the past eighty-nine years, I’d probably react approximately the same way were I to live them over again. On the whole, I would say that I have made the most of most opportunities.
Glaring exceptions would include failing to accept an invitation, in 1903, to take my camera to a place called Kitty Hawk and record the efforts of a pair of visionary men to fly. I explain that failure by the fact that I had then reached the ripe old age of twenty and believed with most of my contemporaries that if God had intended men to fly, he’d have equipped them with wings.
At that age I had been educated for the most part by the facilities afforded in my father’s bookstore in Newport News, Virginia. As a student at the local high school I had failed to graduate. My peers couldn’t bear to have a perfect class image spoiled by one delinquent, and apparently the school authorities agreed; at any rate, as I learned decades later, my name was expunged from the record.
One of my first professional assignments was taking photos of college girls for the annuals published by the highly respectable J. P. Bell Company of Lynchburg, Virginia. The knees and thighs so freely exhibited by the present generation of girls were only dreamed of in 1913, when I completed the work for my first college annual; but the girls themselves were no different. As the years passed, I annually took pride in never having seduced a college girl when the opportunity presented itself (I was already married and had three children). But this joyful ordeal could not last forever, and in 1917, after some nudging by the J. P. Bell Company and Randolph-Macon