Esther Bubley: on assignment.

In a 1953 spread for Ladies' Home Journal, photojournalist Esther Bubley illustrated first-time homeowners' trepidations and desires. "How could I describe our little family?" observed one young mother. "We look very much like one bottle of milk standing alongside ten thousand other bottles of milk." But Bubley had an eye for so many bottles of milk, translating midcentury American homogenization into a revealing panorama of everyday life. Rounding the world twice during her four-decade career, the Wisconsin native snapped photos in such far-flung locales as Iran, Brazil, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Vietnam, and New Zealand, for corporate clients that included Standard Oil, Pan Am, and Pepsi-Cola. Bubley began her career at age twenty-one, in 1942, when she went to work for Roy Stryker at the Office of War Information (OWI) in Washington, DC. For the OWI, over a period of four weeks in 1943, she traveled as far afield as Chicago and Chattanooga to create the first installment of what was perhaps her most emblematic photo-essay, "Bus Story." These studies of wartime travelers capture remarkably unguarded moments and typify Bubley's instinctive talent for inconspicuousness. Portraitist of Marianne Moore, Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, and Albert Einstein, she was admired by no less than Edward Steichen, who included Bubley's work in a number of exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art, including his legendary 1955 photography show, "The Family of Man."--ED.

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