Double Click - Book Review
by Ricardo Santiago Soto, MBA


THE JOURNAL FOR INNOVATION CORPORATION

Double Click, by Carol Kino (Scribner, 2024)



Writer, Carol Kino, BA., brings her art criticism and contributing writing experience to highlight the evolving world of photography magazines. The author covers the life of a set of female twins, Frances and Kathryn McLaughlin, who became photographers. Kino begins at Pratt Institute where the twins attended art college to study photography. Throughout the book Kino includes detailed stories of how the twins met Jack Kennedy or had their photos appear in Glamour, Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Conde Nast magazines. Carol reveals how Vogue began, among other magazine start-ups that eventually grew. The author uses research, history, and stories for entries. The twins were good with the guys, due to their high society communication skills. The McLaughlin twins eventually married Harper Bazaar photographers. You will want to add this book to your Vintage Miami Beach Glamour: Celebrities and Socialites in the Heyday of Chic (2019), Women in Art: 50 Fearless Creatives Who Inspired the World (2019), Forever Paris: 25 Walks in the Footsteps of Chanel, Hemingway, Picasso, and More (2012).


5 out of 5 stars

This was an interesting book about two twins who were also photographers. I thought the premise of the book sounded good. It’s a bit too wordy for me .
Thanks to the publisher and Net galley for the early copy

• Double Click is a riveting dual biography that delves into the lives of the McLaughlin twins—identical sisters who blazed a trail as groundbreaking photographers in New York during the glamorous magazine golden age of the 1930s and 40s.

• Frances McLaughlin was the only female photographer on staff at Condé Nast’s photo studio, working alongside luminaries like Irving Penn. Her streetwise, cinema verité-style work graced the pages of Glamour and Vogue.

• Kathryn McLaughlin's surrealistic portraits filled the era’s new “career girl” magazines, including Charm and Mademoiselle.

• As conventionality took over in the late 1940s and early 1950s, women were pushed back into the home, and the window of opportunity for trailblazing photographers like the McLaughlin twins began to close.

• This story transports you to a dynamic and creative time in New York’s history, celebrating the McLaughlin twins’ contributions to photography and women’s empowerment.

Double Click is a fascinating, well-written look into the lives of Frances and Kathryn McLaughlin, identical twin sisters who embarked on life-changing career journeys as photographers in NYC during the 30s and 40s. I was largely unfamiliar with the McLaughlins before reading the book, and really enjoyed learning about them and their work! Kino does a fantastic job of telling the sisters' stories, but beyond that, I also appreciated the depth with which she covered the magazine world and the creative landscape of New York City at the time, as well as what was considered trendy in terms of fashion and culture in general. I loved finding out more about the creation of magazines for young women specifically, and how the McLaughlin twins became such an integral part of this "golden age" of magazines. Overall, I found Double Click to be such an enjoyable and engaging read! Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for the ARC.

Thank you for providing an advanced copy of this book.

Our institution has been looking for more focused biographies of women artists. Photography, especially, is one area that is difficult to fill because so few works have been focused on women photographers. I did expect this to read more academically and less as a narrative, but I think the tone will work for our undergraduate institution. However, I do not see this as a resource professors would recommend to graduate students to cite and utilize in their academic research. The book does a good job in integrating the McLaughlin sisters amid twentieth-century culture and the rise of photography as a discipline.

Thank you to Net Galley and Scribner for the chance to read and review this book. All opinions expressed are my own.
I really enjoyed this book! The focus of this book is the forgotten twin sisters, Frances and Kathryn McLaughlin. They were famous photographers during the 1930's and 1940's. Even though the focus is on the sisters, there is so much more to this book. My mother read a lot of the magazines mentioned, and it was fun to revisit some of the fashions. It was also interesting to learn about so many other photographers and especially how hard the women had to fight to prove themselves at this time. I also enjoyed all the notes the author added at the end. The notes talked more about what happened to the sisters, as well as identify a lot of the people. I found this to be a very-well written books with lots of fascinating facts.