HOMER PAGE (1918-1985)

Coney Island, août 1949 Tirée à NY par l'artiste Épreuve argentique d'époque, 148x203 mm, tamponnée Coney Island, Brooklyn, August 1949 Printed in NY by the artist Vintage gelatin silver print, 148x203 mm, wetstamp Steichen exhibited Page's work at MoMA. I kept this print as a souvenir of my time at the Ladies' Home Journal. LADIES' HOME JOURNAL In 1946, I was in the "doghouse," at Life for turning down the No. 2 job in Washington due to my lack of respect for the man chosen to be No. 1. I quit Life and accepted a job as the Picture Editor at Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ). I didn't realize how lucky I was. The Journal was edited by Bruce Gould and his wife Beatrice. They were brilliant editors. They believed in paying well and promptly: checks went out every Wednesday to Journal contributors whose work had been accepted for eventual publication. They gave me a large office in their Rockefeller Center "Workshop." Every Thursday I took the 8:00 A.M. train to Philadelphia with them and Executive Editor Mary Bass. There, on Independence Square, was the headquarters of the Curtis Publishing Company, with the presses that produced millions of copies of the Saturday Evening Post each week and Ladies' Home Journal each month. The Goulds gave me amazingly free rein. For years they had been running a monthly series on the real lives of families, called "How America Lives". They let me assign the photographers I chose depending on the location and circumstances of the family. They even let me assign photographers to do families in a dozen other countries, for a series called People Are People the World Over (PAP). Most of those photographers belonged to the new agency called Magnum Photos. Robert Capa and I went to Iowa to do the American prototype for the series. PAP ran for a year. Edward Steichen took note. He had been thinking of a similar theme for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He called it The Family of Man.