Sally Cherniavsky Fox

Salomea Cherniavsky "Sally" Fox (born 1929 in Hollywood ; died February 26, 2006 in Boston ) was an American photographer and editor . Her illustrated books of historical image documents of women at work and leisure are considered an important contribution to women's history and visual history .

Family, education and professional life

Sally Cherniavsky came from a Jewish family of musicians from Russia who immigrated to California . As a teenager, she moved with her family to New York , where she attended the High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts . She then attended Queen's College , where she earned her bachelor's degree in painting and art history. She found work in the Public Relations Department of the Museum of Modern Art , then briefly in the Archives of American Art .

During this time she married Maurice S. Fox. They had three sons together: Jonathan, Michael and Gregory. The family later moved to Brookline , Massachusetts . It was there that Sally Fox began working as a photographer. The non-fiction and textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin , for whom she had worked as a freelancer for a while, finally hired her as the person responsible for image research. She stayed there for the rest of her professional life.

Editing

Sally Fox also privately collected historical photos, paintings, drawings, and graphics. She was particularly interested in pictures that document the everyday life of women. In the 1980s she published several illustrated books: in 1985 her first book, The Medieval Woman, was published . In it, she presented medieval illuminated manuscripts and woodcuts showing women at work and in leisure activities. The book became a bestseller with over 300,000 copies sold and has been translated into eight languages. Her next work, The Victorian Woman , appeared in 1987 and was a collection of visuals about women in the Victorian era . In 1988 she published another collection of medieval images and the following year the book The Sporting Woman , which was devoted to women in sport, again with an emphasis on the Victorian period. These included posters, postcards, press photos and caricatures showing women doing sports that were considered unusual for women at the time, such as boxing or mountaineering . Sally Fox believed that male historiography suppressed the diversity of women's lives. The images served her as evidence of an otherwise undocumented range of interests and activities by women throughout history. From her last book, Fox developed an exhibition that was shown in various museums and universities in the 1990s under the title The Sporting Woman: InSights from the Past .

In 2005, Sally Fox donated large parts of her private picture collection, which includes several thousand pictures, to the Schlesinger Library , which she has kept until today.

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  Boxing

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  Wrestling

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  Track bike (1897)

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  Football (1895)

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  basketball

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  Baseball (1912)

Works

• The Medieval Woman. An Illuminated Book of Days (1985; ISBN 978-0-8212-1587-6 )
• The Victorian Woman. A Book of Days (1987; ISBN 978-0-8212-1646-0 )
• Medieval Women. An Illuminated Address Book (1988; ISBN 978-0-8212-1700-9 )
• The Sporting Woman. A Book of Days (1989; ISBN 978-0-8212-1739-9 )

Awards

In 1987 the American Society of Picture Professionals presented Sally Fox with the Ann Novotny Award for Original Picture Research .

Web links

Commons : Sally Fox Collection  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Sally Cherniavsky Fox in the Jewish Women's Archive (English)
• Sally Fox Collection on the Harvard University website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Obituary in the Jewish Women's Archive , accessed on February 11, 2019.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Short biography in the Jewish Women's Archive , accessed on February 11, 2019.
3. ^ Obituary in the Boston Globe on Legacy.com, accessed February 11, 2019.