A coworker sent me this image in an email, something that captured his eye that he thought I would enjoy. I had it open in a tab at the office for over a week as a reminder to look it up and learn more about this photo.

I finally looked it up based on all the information I had – just the file name, something like “Ladyinwater1947.jpg”  the idea that this seemingly underwater photo was taken in 1947 fascinated me.  It didn’t take me long to become even more enchanted with this image when I found it was shot at Weeki Watchee Springs – one of my favorite places on earth.

I have had a fixation? relationship? with Weeki Watchee Springs since I was a toddler and made my parents sit through the mermaid show twice in a row. If you know me and my parents, this is kind of remarkable. I don’t think of my mom as someone who let her children push her around, even when we were little and cute.  The show we saw that day haunted my dreams, literally, and it wasn’t until I was in my late teens or early twenties that I found myself back at Weeki Watchee and figured out that the mermaids doing underwater magic tricks in my dreams were an early memory and not some weird subconscious invention.

How do you tell your parents – “Ever since I can remember, I’ve been having this dream where a mermaid goes through a roller style drier and comes out flat and even in my dream, it freaks me the hell out”. You don’t.

I say “seemingly underwater” because I suspect this photo was taken from the Weeki Watchee theater – this is an underground theater in the park. In place of a stage or movie screen is a giant window into one of the springs. It’s proving tricky to find an article about this shoot or a collection of photos from it because of the popularity of this one image, but I got good money that says this photo was taken from that theater.

I’ve found a few articles on Toni Frissell, and the links are below. I don’t intend for these posts to be like book reports – so reading them all and boiling them down for you is not really on the agenda. That said, apparently Toni got her start in fashion photography after she was fired as a caption writer from Vogue. Or so sayeth the interwebs. She’s known for shooting fashion outside the studio, but her career spanned much more than the fashion work. She did a lot of work during the second world war shooting the Tuskegee Airmen, the Women’s Army Corps and the 8th Army Air Force among others and traveled to the European Front on a couple occaisions to capture images of not only the war fighters on the front, but the nurses, WACs and orphans.  After the war she shot portraits of some of the most powerful names in the US and Europe including Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Kennedy’s wedding.  She eventually became the first woman on the Sports Illustrated staff.

And there you have it. Book report done.