The Inspiring Story of the First Female Newspaper Photographer
At the International Balloon Race held in St. Louis in 1907, photographer Jessie Tarbox Beals was told she couldn’t ride in a hot air balloon because it was too dangerous for a woman. But just as one was lifting off — according to the Philadelphia Public Ledger — “the huge crowd was thunderstruck to see [Beals], a camera slung over her shoulder, grip the top of a basket and pull herself aboard.”
The story exemplifies how Beals — the first woman to work as a staff newspaper photographer — broke into photojournalism itself. At the turn of the 20th century, news photography was a man’s world. Through sheer guts and indomitable grit, Beals forced her way in. And seemingly, just as she remarked about her ballooning, she wasn’t “in the least unnerved.”
“Her career was remarkable by any standard,” the critic Alexander Alland Sr. writes in his 1978 biography Jessie Tarbox Beals: First Woman News Photographer. “But for a woman at the turn of the century, it was practically unheard of.”
Born in Canada on December 23, 1870, Beals moved to Williamsburg, Massachusetts, when she was 17 to teach in a one-room schoolhouse — a “ladylike” occupation she dismissed as “genteel, sheltered, [and] moneyless.” Her deliverance came in the form of a crude box camera she won by selling a magazine subscription to her neighbor. A year later, Beals had opened a portrait studio on her front lawn and discovered she could earn more by photographing her students than actually teaching them.
Still, she only moonlit as a photographer until 1899, when a Boston Post reporter showed up in Greenfield (where Beals had moved) hunting a collaborator to shoot a story at a nearby prison. Beals’s images ran uncredited, but she soon quit town to chase pictures — and earn actual bylines — up and down the east coast. By 1902, her work so impressed E. V. B. von Brandenburg, the editor of the Buffalo Enquirer and Courier newspapers in Buffalo, New York, that he hired her.
This of course ruffled feathers in Buffalo, where some folks frowned at the idea of a woman on the job. News photography was strenuous, dangerous, and still relatively new: The first halftone print of a photograph ran in The Daily Graphic in 1880. It wasn’t exactly respectable, either. According to Alland, many early news photographers were hacks, “expected only to illustrate the reporter’s story,” and the photographs themselves “were generally regarded as mere records of fleeting interest.” But during her two years on staff, Beals proved — as the Enquirer later stated — “that women frequently succeed where men fail.”
Her secret? Hustling. “The most necessary qualification” for a photographer, she said. In her early career, Beals was known to work Sundays and holidays, including Christmas, and grew a reputation for being able to shoot and deliver a print within a couple hours (thanks in part to her dutiful husband Alfred, who ran her darkroom). Wearing the billowing skirts and elaborate hats of her era, Beals braved all manner of weather and conditions, including fires, floods, and winds so strong she had to sit on her 50-pound camera to keep it from flying away. “Mere feminine, delicate, Dresden China type of women, get nowhere in business or professional life,” she liked to say.
In fact, Beals would do seemingly anything for a photograph — straddle a speeding cab, scale a telegraph pole, break the law. At a 1903 murder trial in Buffalo from which press were barred, she climbed a dusty bookshelf to reach a transom window and fired off several shots — her first exclusives — before she was caught. After being refused a press pass at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, she roamed the exhibits with her camera anyway, hawking thousands of prints to the fair’s own publicity department. “Good Lord, Loeb” — President Theodore Roosevelt remarked to his secretary, after Beals stalked him around the fairgrounds one day — “where in the world does that woman get all her [photographic] plates?”
She was fearless, sometimes to the point of recklessness — like the time she ignited two pounds of explosive flash powder in Manhattan, triggering a window-busting blast that boomed through three blocks. And by today’s standards, her tactics could be predatory. At a human zoo in St. Louis, Beals shoved her camera in the face of a defenseless Patagonian woman who reportedly “expressed her contempt for everyone within earshot and the camera in particular,” then “turned tenderly to her sick child, lying on the ground, and carried it into the tent …”
But if Beals sometimes reflected the bigotry of her day, she also transcended it, overcoming sexism and discrimination to build a career she loved — and one that paid. After her stint in Buffalo and subsequent trip to Missouri, Beals opened a studio in New York and became a highly sought-after photographer. By 1910, the schoolmarm who had earned just $7 a week was claiming $150 (roughly $4,000 in 2020 money) to be a “fair day’s” wage. She documented socialites, business moguls, cultural icons, and four American presidents — along with anything else that might earn a buck, from cigar store statues to the pampered cats of the wealthy. Her photographs appeared everywhere from Vogue to the New York Times, often eschewing artiness for a more direct documentary style. “I have to gratify the public, not my art soul,” she told the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1912. “It is a great luxury to go hungry and be unpolluted by commerce.”
Today, it’s Beals’s courageous legacy as the country’s first female newspaper photographer that makes her so remarkable. And until Alland published her biography, it was in danger of being forgotten. In later life, Beals’s health broke down, and her career and finances with it. She died in 1942 in the charity ward of Bellevue Hospital. The obituary published by most newspapers ran just a few lines — conspicuously short for a woman whose photographs once commanded five columns.
