“It was a lark.” That is how Ninalee Allen Craig describes the day in 1951 when she and photographer Ruth Orkin embarked on a photographic excursion through Florence that took them from the banks of the Arno to the Piazza della Repubblica. There, Orkin shot a picture that would become an enduring emblem of post-World War II femininity—and male chauvinism. Craig was 23 years old and, she said in an interview with me in 2011, a “rather commanding” six feet tall when she caught Orkin’s eye in a corridor of the Hotel Berchielli in Florence on August 21, 1951. A...
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