Dolores Allen Littles has always known her own mind. She met her husband, artist Jim Littles, when they were in high school, and began a life-long relationship with Martha’s Vineyard on her first visit here at age 18.
“When I stepped off the boat, I knew this was a place I wanted to be,” said Ms. Littles, now 95. She had booked a room at Shearer Cottage after spotting an Ebony magazine advertisement for the Black-owned Oak Bluffs guest house.
Her traveling companion was unimpressed with the Vineyard, Ms. Littles recalled with some wonder.
“She couldn’t care less, but I started coming every summer,” she told the Gazette. “That’s how it hits you, or it doesn’t.”
Ms. Littles was just as certain where she wanted to work: LIFE magazine, the picture-driven weekly that brought the world to American homes. She achieved that goal and then surpassed it, rising from an entry-level desk job to become the photography editor of Time-Life Books.
A current exhibition at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, titled Inside the Edit: Dolores Allen Littles, Time-Life and the Island, traces her nearly 30-year career with the print-media giant at a time when it was rare for a Black woman to reach such heights in the publishing world.
Founded in 1936 by Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, LIFE quickly set the standard for 20th-century photojournalism with its large format and high-quality printing.
“I was always a fan,” said Ms. Littles, who applied for work there several times before landing a desk job in 1954.
In the meantime, the Long Island native attended college at night and worked as a secretary for the New York City arm of government-funded Voice of America, which produced radio programs for international audiences. Broadcasters specialized in different parts of the world, Ms. Littles said, and every week one of them would bring in an international food to share.
“It was great fun and I learned a lot,” Ms. Littles said.
At LIFE, she started out as one of two young women who read newspapers from around the country and beyond, looking for interesting stories the magazine could pursue. Ms. Littles was working as a typist when she first crossed paths with photographer Gordon Parks, who had become Time-Life’s first Black editorial staffer in the late 1940s.
“Gordon was walking down the hall, and he asked me if I would do him a favor, and I said ‘What?’ Because I didn’t know him,” she recalled.
“But he was the only other Black person around, and he said Eastman Kodak was having an art show, and they asked him to participate,” Ms. Littles said.
The favor he wanted was for Ms. Littles to write the label captions for Mr. Parks’s photographs in the Eastman Kodak show, she said.
She didn’t jump at the chance, Ms. Littles recalled.
“I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ve never done that before,’ [and] he said, ‘Well, there’s a first time you do anything.’
“So I did it, and we became friends,” she said.
In return, Mr. Parks invited her to choose a print for herself. She picked his American Gothic photograph, and the acclaimed image hangs today in her Oak Bluffs home, and is reproduced in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum show.
Taken in 1942, the black-and-white portrait of federal janitor Ella Watson centers a single Black woman — mop in one hand, broom in the other, American flag in the background — where painter Grant Wood had placed his farm couple in the original American Gothic painting, 12 years earlier.
“It says everything,” said Ms. Littles, who went on to deepen her involvement with photography at LIFE and Time-Life books.
One of her early champions at Time-Life books was editor-in-chief Maitland A. Edey, a longtime summer resident of the Vineyard.
“He was a man who I adored, who was very much involved in my progress,” Ms. Littles said.
Another summer Islander, Alfred Eisenstaedt, became one of Ms. Littles’s favorite collaborators on the job and gifted her a print of his famous V-Jay Day in Times Square. While they didn’t work together on Vineyard-related stories, she said, the museum has reproduced a number of LIFE articles about the Island and Islanders with photographs by Mr. Eisenstaedt.
The job also gave Ms. Littles the chance to meet some of the world’s biggest newsmakers.
“I met the first astronauts,” she said. “Everybody came to the office, even Kennedy. Everybody.”
Nonetheless, Ms. Littles isn’t one to drop a lot of names.
“I don’t want to be famous because of who I know,” she said.
As photo editor, Ms. Littles shaped what readers saw when they looked at the covers and leafed through the pages of countless Time-Life books published during her tenure. The museum show includes an interactive display of illustrated books on an almost dizzying array of subjects: LIFE World Library of Italy, The Encyclopedia of Collectibles, The World of Cézanne and more.
There also are photographs of Ms. Littles at work and with her husband Jim, an artist, musician and photographic retoucher — a craft much in demand at magazines before the digital era — who died in 2010.
The Littles bought their first Oak Bluffs summer home in partnership with three other couples, sharing it in rotation.
“It was that something that other families were doing at the time as well,” she said. “People were amazed, but it was easy. Never had a problem,” Ms. Littles said.
They later moved to their own place in Tower Ridge, where Ms. Littles still lives in a bright home filled with books, photographs and artwork, including her husband’s baskets and other creations, and longtime neighbors nearby.
“My neighbors, I love them so much,” she said.
Inside the Edit: Dolores Allen Littles, Time-LIFE and the Island is open during regular museum hours through Oct. 4. For more information: mvmuseum.org
Comments
Comment policy »