All my ladies

A few years ago women’s monthly magazines made a big thing of offering a smaller version for the reader on the go. One with a busy busy life I suppose. Well, in August 1939 they had them too.

Eve’s Journal is a rare magazine. I first came across it in the stacks at the National Art Library, when I was supposed to be researching something else. Always been easily distracted, me. A small and hefty little magazine, best described as Lilliput meets a mini-Vogue. It had fictional stories, poems, fashion, world stories. The handful of copies I have seen have been big on fashion illustration and photography, too. Basically trying to be all things to some few women.

Each issue had a few artfully naked shots of healthy women (oh so very Health & Efficiency). And a few surreal photographs of various surreal subjects. And the occasional photograph of a famous woman. Eve’s photographs were mostly robust black and white images, heavily influenced by modernist photography of the time. As practised by those stylish people at the Bauhaus, and other places.

And, funnily enough, most of the photos seem to have been taken by émigré photographers, on the flee themselves from political developments in other parts of Europe. They ended up working for Life, Daily Herald and, it seems, Eve’s Journal. The name under this image is ‘Popper’. Most probably Paul Popper, a Czechoslovakian photo-journalist who founded a slightly famous photo agency called Popperfoto in 1934, which is now part of the Getty stable.

I love this picture of smiling girls and women. So very of the time. But so very of our time, too.