Veteran Feminists of America
DIANA MARA HENRY -
MOVEMENT
PHOTOGRAPHER MY WALK THROUGH
HISTORY
Copyright © Stuart
Bratesman Her
father was a tailor, one of her brothers was a gangster and her mother
scrubbed floors to buy chicken for a diabetic sister, but she nabbed a
Harvard man, Carl Henry. He was a wealthy dreamer, a Communist, and, after
their marriage, a combatant in the European Theater, World War 2. He wrote
letters home every day. The
*letters which relate his World War II experience are also a remarkable love story. Carl
Henry was a philosophy major at Harvard, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate and a
lover of freedom. In 1934, before graduation, he protested the warship at Boston
Harbor that Hitler had sent on a “friendship mission” to the United
States. The Communists were watching and enlisted him, and he was a
card-carrying member until he met Edith, who said, “You don’t believe that stuff, do
you?”
After
the War, Carl and Edith Henry started Lucky Stride Shoes, manufacturing
their own national brand of ladies' flats, in Maysville, Kentucky. Although
my mother was the designer, whose image was the company logo, and who my
father boasted was the highest paid woman executive in the US
($50,000/year I seem to remember him saying) , she never had a checking
account and when she wanted money would hold out her hand to him. With
these mixed messages I grew up, cared for until almost age 12 by other
women so my mother could work .
I only bonded with the governess who taught me French, when I was 2
and ½. Because of my bond with her,
I speak French at native level required for teaching, which I did
1n 1996, as Associate Professor of French at the Defense Language
Institute.
Life
was emotionally tough for this child of a career woman in the 1940’s. Also
funny, as when “Mademoiselle” left, my parents enlisted others who never
stayed long… then they
hired a German
governess to teach me another language. After my first day with Fraülein I ran to them, shouting “Mommy, Daddy, see what
Fraülein taught me today!” and showed them the goosestep...The next
morning, Fraülein was gone. My
father was an amateur
filmmaker who made films of
his European trip when he was 13, films that were shown for months on end
back home in Cincinnati...and he indulged my early enthusiasm for the
first film I ever saw, North by Northwest, by taking me to see it over and
over when I was eleven, in 1959, the year it came out. He’d taken me to see animation festivals at the
Cincinnati Museums which also sparked a wonder and a sense of fun that
have never left me in my creative contact with photography and now with
the computer and website design. He analyzed advertisements with me,
pointing out how the images and the words conveyed a message and
manipulated the consumer...Heady stuff, and surely an influence on my
fascination with - and belief in - the power of images to mold
opinion. Finally
seeing her child slip away toward adolescence, and lonely to get her
groove back with her buddies in NYC, (and after a three-week stint of
living in Rome), my mother got
my father to sell the business and relocate us to NYC. It was too
late for her to be the mother she hadn’t been, though. NYC opened doors of freedom to me
that no amount of retroactive attempts at mother-daughter bonding could
close. I
attended the Lycée Français de NY
from the 6th to 12th grade, went to Radcliffe at age 17 after 6 years of Latin
and 4 years of Greek, winning all the top prizes for scholarship (well,
except for Math and Sciences), being President of my class several years
running, playing in little
Ionesco productions, and getting a taste of foreign policy and
history-in-the-making with the election of Kennedy, Castro coming to
Harlem, Kruschev to the UN, and the assassination of JFK.
So
after a first brilliant year at Radcliffe, the Harvard lack of rapport
with its undergrads shut me down academically - well, I did win the (2nd)
Ferguson History Prize for (2nd) best Sophomore essay in History – “The
Concept of Time and the Concept of History” – but I was checking out.
Luckily, I found the college newspaper, and, “comping” for the Crimson,
won both a place on its Photography board and a superannuated grad who
hung around to snap up the virgins and teach them photography in
exchange...
Well,
where’s the feminism in all this? It’s coming, it’s coming . Anyway, so I am sitting in an
“American Intellectual History” lecture with hundreds of students because
it is taught by a renowned wit and wonder of the faculty, when he starts
ripping into Ruth Benedict for being no more insightful about her
anthropology than her menstrual problems would have caused her to be. What
Letty Cottin Pogrebin later called a “click” sounded more like a death
knell to me, and to my roommate who, thank G-d, was there to confirm to me
that we were both as humiliated and unnerved as ever two budding young
women could be. Then there’s the
put-down by the grad student who turned me down for an independent study
in color my last year, after two years of work for the newspaper - “If you
don’t know color at this point there is nothing we can teach you...” And for the first of many
times I wondered: “Would he have said that
to me if I had been a man?” Well,
then of course there’s the fact that in four years of college I never had
ONE, not one, female faculty member!
My experience was not
the exception, but the rule. (There was however a great female dean who
fought tooth and nail to keep me from failing out, even if it meant
scheduling exams just for me that I had forgotten to take, or pleading
with a prof of “French Culture” to change an E to a D, even though I had
eschewed attending his class ...) Okay,
now the feminist insights come fast and furious. Because after graduation
in 1969, working for NBC News, the prospects are dim for women who want to
go beyond researcher in broadcast journalism after 40 years at the
company: either sleep with a man or go to Vietnam, and you might do
something interesting...The women who first made it as anchors were class
of ’72, we were three years too early. Friend Barbara, a Radcliffe grad and also working
for NBC used to meet me in the ladies room and we’d cry
during our breaks. (Barbara
later became head of a major independent school and then Mayor of an
important western city, so society benefited from her talents
eventually.) After
the NBC assignment ended, I
became a general assignment reporter at the Staten Island Advance, and was
assigned to cover the Alice Austen House, which led me back to photography
through the work of this genius, an independent woman with a passion for
all that was new, exciting, and humane. As I came to know her work, I
realized that when I was learning about photography by looking at the work
of the greats in the photo sanctum at the Crimson, we had never turned the
pages of a book on the work of a woman photographer- and I guessed , there
must be others than Margaret Bourke White, who was sometimes mentioned in
an aside. I would like to do the book I thought
of doing then - for young people on the work of the greats:
Margarethe Mather, Alice Austen, Carlotta Corpron, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Tina
Modotti, Laura Gilpin ....Eventually I did the photography for the
historic structures report, lobbied for a Staten Island ferry to be named
in Alice Austen’s honor, helped put a gravestone on her unmarked grave,
and helped organize the campaign that got the city of NY to invest more
than a million dollars in creating the Museum in her name at the
foot of the Verazzano Narrows as part of the NYC Park system.
I
believe it is our noblest enterprise to pay homage and continue the work
and name of the great human beings who went before us. The Schlesinger Library on the History
of
Copyright © 1977 Diana Mara
Henry
I‘d photographed one-room
schools and school teachers, for which I received my first Museum exhibit
- at the Brattleboro Museum - and my first grant - from the NY State
Council on the Arts. I began to teach - at the International Center of
Photography, for which I designed and directed the community Workshop
Program in the late 1970’s, and at Federal Penitentiary, among many varied
locations.
Being
the official photographer for the National Commission on the Observance of
International Women's Year... that flowed from hearing Bella, on the
radio, in 1972, the year I also photographed McGovern, the Democratic
National convention in Miami Beach, the Mini-convention in Washington DC,
and did the photography for Liz Holtzman’s successful first bid for
Congress. Bella became my
mentor, and as she did for all the young people who flocked around her,
made me realize that I could - and should - do great things. I
did her campaign photography- eventually getting paid for the work during
her bids for Senate and Mayor- and then she hired me to do the official
photographs for the National Commission on the Observance of International
Women’s Year, at the First National Women’s Conference in Houston and the
NY State Women’s Meeting that preceded it, in Albany, in 1977.
Though
I had more fun assignments- like being flown over in the Concorde to his
castle in Normandy to photograph Malcolm Forbes' balloon meets – and
(again with Bella leading the way) assignments that were as visually and
morally interesting as the Women’s Pentagon Action, Vietnam Veteran
actions and personalities for a decade or more, animal rights
demonstrations, picketing the NY Times for the use of the term MS (12
years before the grey lady decided to use it!) , celebrities like Jane
Fonda speaking to the Women Office Workers, Judy Chicago's opening at the
Sarah Institute with Stewart Mott kissing Alice Neel, Patti Smith
entertaining Jeannette Watson, no other assignment was as historic and as
vastly challenging and rewarding as those three days in Houston.
Bella Abzug and Diana
Mara Henry In 1985 I became an independent
scholar of the resistance and the Nazi concentration camp of
Natzweiler-Struthof and its 70 kommandos that, like most of the
concentration camps, enslaved mostly non-Jews and some secret Jews. I now
lecture and publish on the brave warriors who, for their actions
suffered the Nacht und Nebel
decree, and André Joseph Scheinmann, the German Jewish spy who became
my my guide to facing the ugly realities of life in order to
survive. I’ve
had the incredible honor of
bringing into the world a daughter. I fought a not-very successful battle
against abuse, and abuse by the judge, and the psychologists. In
California in 1996, there was a fad to have the child spend one year with
father, one year with mother. How terrible that would have been!
My
opinions, informed by my government major as an undergrad at Harvard, as a
person who has lived with those with a mental illness, and as a scholar of
fascism, do not conform with those who say all cultures are the same and
ignore the torture and "Honor killings" of millions of women, gays, and
people and heritage sites of all other faiths in the Moslem
world. My work now resides in the archives of the Du Bois Library of U Mass Amherst as the “Diana Mara Henry; 20th Century Photographer” collection, yet I retain the copyright and rights to publish and license the work for 25 years. I speak to groups and associations and have just published a first book of my work. It includes my official photographs as first published in "The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference: An official report to the President, the Congress and the People of the United States" DON'T MISS Women on the Movie: An
Exhibit of The Official
Photographs COMMENTS ABOUT DIANA’S
PHOTOGRAPHY: "Your photos are beautiful and represent such a powerful and passionate time in American history. I believe these photos will last and many years from now they will be looked at and studied just as Mathew Brady's classic and haunting Civil war photos are today." Please use this as a blurb in your important new book! Best Wishes! Ron Kovic." (Vietnam Veteran, author of "Born on the Fourth of July.") Diana's websit: http://www.dianamarahenry.com/MyWalkThroughHistory.htm All
photographs Copyright © Diana Mara Henry * See this beautiful story told in letters and photos - http://www.frontseattowar.com. Contact Diana: dmh@dianamarahenry.com Comments: Jacqui Ceballos jcvfa@aol.comBack to VFA Table of Contents |