Genevieve Naylor (American, 1915-1989)

Genevieve Naylor was born in Bronxville, N.Y. on February 12, 1915. She studied at Miss Hall’s School, the Arts Students’ League, and the New School for Social Research. In 1934 Naylor met Berenice Abbott and began studying photography with her at the New School for Social Research. From 1935 to 1937 Naylor became an apprentice to Abbott, helping her put together the classic Changing New York. She also took a job at the Photo League as a photographic cataloguer.

Naylor’s professional career began in 1937 as one of the first women photojournalists hired by the Associated Press. In addition to the AP, her photographs began to appear in TIME, FORTUNE, and LIFE Magazine. She was also selected by the WPA to chronicle the Harlem Arts Center as part of the Harlem Document Project.

In 1940, the US State Department’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) sent Naylor and her husband, Misha Reznikoff to Brazil as part of the Good Neighborhood Program. Naylor’s assignment under the OCIAA was to promote American goodwill. Recording a virtual “day in the life” photomontage of all aspects of Brazilian society for the American public, Naylor and Reznikoff traveled up and down the eastern coast and interior sections of Brazil. Naylor’s photographs were exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art upon their return to the United States in 1 943. She was only the second woman photographer to have a monographic show at MoMA. From MoMA the exhibition went on tour across the United States in 1944.

Alexey Brodovitch, Harper’s Bazaar’s influential art director, saw Naylor’s exhibition at MoMA and immediately hired her as a fashion and reportage photographer for the magazine. She worked closely with such legendary editors as Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland, and Nicholas De Gunzburg.

Concurrent with her job at Harper’s Bazaar, Naylor began to freelance with all the Conde Nast and Hearst Publications. This association was to last through the late 1970s. During this period, Naylor returned to her photojournalist roots, and began a long succession of human interest stories covering a variety of topics including

suburban life, health, overcoming personal hardships, Royalty, schools, professional people, film stars, authors, musicians, government, automobiles, architecture, Americana, and the Kennedy-Nixon presidential election of 1960.From 1954 to 1958, McCall’s assigned her to be Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal photographer.

In 1979, Naylor retired from magazine work, concentrating on abstract and experimental photographs for her personal collection. She died in 1989.

In 1985, her fashion photography was featured in the exhibition entitled Shots of Style at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, curated by David Bailey. In 1991 the Victoria & Albert Museum featured Naylor’s fashion work in a new exhibition entitled Appearances. Her photographs were part of Harper’s Bazaar’s commemorative book, 125 Great Moments of Harper’s Bazaar.

In the fall of 1994 and 1995, the Museum of Sao Paulo, and the Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro mounted a one-woman exhibition devoted to her 1940s Brazilian work. The exhibition simultaneously opened in March of 1996 at Columbia University and the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C. In 1998, a third exhibition of Naylor’s Brazilian work was seen in the cities of Belo Horzonte and Rio under the title, Late Modernities in Brazil.

This project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

In 1997, the United States Information Service began a three-year tour featuring 50 large modern prints of Naylor’s Brazilian work. The exhibition was seen in twenty major Brazilian cities. Her work was also part of the exhibition Brazil 500 Artes Visuales which toured internationally in 2001.

Naylor’s work was featured in a three-year tour based on Naomi Rosenblum’s book, A History of 20th-Century Woman Photographers. Duke University Press has published a monograph on Naylor’s Brazilian photography, and a 30-minute documentary on her Brazilian sojourn was broadcast on the History Channel in March of 1999.

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