Profile · Superior, Wisconsin
Esther Fern Bubley
Documentary photographer; born Phillips, raised Superior (not born in Superior)
$750,000
Esther Fern Bubley was a documentary photographer whose wartime bus series, Standard Oil assignments, Life magazine stories, and Museum of Modern Art prints made her one of the defining camera voices of mid-century America. Phillips, Wisconsin, is the birthplace; Superior is where she found the camera. Fourth of five children of Louis and Ida Bubley, Russian Jewish immigrants, she was born in Phillips on February 16, 1921, then settled with the family in Superior. At Central High she was yearbook editor and tried to make the book look like Life, which had hit the stands in 1936. She spent two years at Superior State Teachers College (now UW–Superior), then took the Minneapolis School of Art’s one-year photography course. In Washington in 1941 she found no job, disliked a Christmas season at Vogue, worked as a National Archives microfilmer, and was hired by Roy Stryker as a darkroom assistant at the Office of War Information before he let her shoot. The hard assignment was buses—Midwest and South, wartime, people sleeping sitting up. When Stryker went to Standard Oil she followed: Tomball, Texas, and another bus story that won Pictures of the Year in 1948. She shot for Ladies’ Home Journal’s “How America Lives,” about forty stories for Life, and thirteen Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital prints in MoMA’s Diogenes with a Camera; Edward Steichen hung her contact sheets to show she used every frame. She was the first woman to win Photography magazine’s international contest in 1954 and appeared in The Family of Man. She died in New York of cancer on March 16, 1998.