Grocery Shopping, ca. 1960s

“Being a woman influenced my ideas about what I wanted to photograph. My interest in women’s issues, in family issues, in social relationships came out of my experience of growing up as a female.” — Abigail Heyman

This photo is probably from the late 1960s and maybe even early 1970s. The Keebler brand name was adopted by United Biscuits in 1966 a few years before the Keebler Elves appeared. Also the photo is from Abigail Heyman’s 1974 book Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal, and she didn’t start her photography career until around 1967.

(Photo by Abigail Heyman)

Abigail Heyman was an American photographer and feminist. Her 1974 book Growing Up Female became an important text for the feminist movement. After becoming one of the first women to join Magnum Photos, she went on to produce two more books: Butcher, Baker, Cabinetmaker, a book for girls about women at work, and Dreams & Schemes, which took a journalistic approach to wedding photography. Throughout her career she published photo essays about subjects, especially those related to women’s lives, that had been considered too personal or trivial for photojournalism. Her work was published in outlets such as Time, Life, Ms., Harpers and The New York Times Magazine.

In 1981, Heyman co-founded Archive Pictures Inc., an international documentary photographers' cooperative agency in New York City, along with Mark Godfrey, Charles Harbutt, Joan Liftin, and Mary Ellen Mark.

In the 1990s, Heyman joined the International Center of Photography in Manhattan as director of the documentary and photojournalism department. Though her work is most identified with the feminist movement, as Liftin told the New York Times, “as a feminist, she was not so much about marching. She took pictures that showed what the marching was about.”