Life Story: Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942)

Jessie Tarbox was born December 23, 1870 in Hamilton, Ontario in Canada. Her father, John Nathaniel Tarbox, was the inventor of the portable sewing machine. For the first years of her life Jessie and her family lived a luxurious life in a beautiful mansion. But when Jessie was seven years old her father lost their fortune to bad investments. He started to drink heavily, and eventually her mother, Marie Antoinette Bassett, asked him to leave their home. Marie did her best to support her four children by sewing and selling family possessions. 

Jessie was a smart child and did well in school. When she was fourteen, she began attending the Collegiate Institute of Ontario. In 1887 Jessie graduated with her teaching certificate. She took a job in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, where her brother lived. But her real career began in 1888 when she won a camera for selling magazine subscriptions. Jessie started out by taking pictures of her school and students. She soon realized she had some talent. She bought a better camera and set up a portrait studio in her home to make extra income.  

Jessie’s portrait studio brought in steady money, but soon she wanted to do more. After learning about photojournalism in a summer photography class, she attended the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago to learn more about the field. She met other women photographers and had the opportunity to practice her craft. She started to dream about someday becoming a news and travel photographer.

After the World’s Fair Jessie returned to Massachusetts and took a new teaching position in nearby Greenfield. She continued to develop her photography practice, but it remained a side project for many years. In 1897 Jessie married Alfred Tennyson Beals. She continued to teach part-time and practice photography. During this time a few of her photographs were published in newspapers, but she was not credited for her work.

In 1900 Jessie decided to quit her teaching job and focus on photography full-time. She achieved her first credited photo that same year, in Vermont’s Windham County Reformer. This made Jessie one of the first woman photojournalists to be published in a newspaper. But this achievement did not transform her career overnight. Jessie spent most of the year going door to door offering to take portraits to make ends meet.

The Beals ran out of money in 1901 and they relocated to Buffalo, New York for a fresh start. In 1902 the editor of The Buffalo Inquirer and The Courier was impressed by some photographs Jessie shared with him and hired her to be a staff photographer for his papers. This made Jessie the first woman professional photojournalist in the US. In 1903 Jessie managed to get photos of a murder trial that had been declared off-limits to photographers. This exclusive established Jessie’s reputation as a tenacious photographer. That same year one of her portraits was reprinted nationally. Jessie had finally achieved her goal of becoming a successful professional photojournalist.

Jessie faced unique challenges as the country’s first woman photojournalist. For example, she was expected to haul her equipment and climb into position for shots while wearing a full-length skirt. But her tenacity and smarts always saw her through. She scored her breakout photograph of the off-limits murder trial by climbing to the top of a bookcase. She was also known to climb ladders and ride in hot air balloons to get unique angles on her subjects.

One key to Jessie’s success was her innovative approach to photojournalism. At a time when most photojournalists simply took the images reporters needed to illustrate their articles, Jessie would take photos she thought were interesting and then ask a journalist to write a story based on the images she captured. Jessie was also good at gaining the trust of some of the most important figures of the time. During the 1904 World’s Fair she boldly asked President Theodore Roosevelt to pose for a portrait, and then followed him as he toured the grounds. Impressed with the quality of her work and her initiative, the President gave Jessie credentials to travel with him and even invited her to photograph the 1905 reunion of the Rough Riders, the unit he’d served with during the Spanish-American War.  

Jessie and Alfred moved to New York City in 1905. When Jessie could not find work as a newspaper photographer, she and Alfred opened their own studio. American Art News commissioned Jessie and fellow woman photographer Zaida Ben-Yúsuf to make portraits of important artists of the day. When the photographs were published, Jessie’s career in New York started to take off. 

As her career flourished, Jessie’s marriage struggled. She gave birth to a daughter named Nanette in 1911, but there were rumors that Alfred was not the girl’s father. Jessie left her husband in 1917 to open her own studio and tea shop in Greenwich Village. The couple divorced in 1924 and Jessie never remarried.

Jessie’s fame and fortune only grew over the next decade. One of her strengths was that she was never tied to a particular subject or style—she was content to explore where her interests and clients took her. In this period she continued to take portraits of the famous and wealthy, but she also documented life in the city’s slums for reform campaigns. She contributed to the evolution of photography as an artistic medium by displaying images in a number of significant art shows. As more women began to pursue careers in photography, she started giving public lectures. By the late 1920s she had steady work taking photographs of the homes and lifestyles of the wealthy.

In 1928 Jessie and Nanette moved to Los Angeles, where Jessie was in demand to photograph the mansions of Hollywood stars. But this work completely dried up when the Great Depression began in 1929. They returned to New York City in the 1930s, where Jessie continued to photograph gardens and properties, but she never again attained the level of fame she had once enjoyed.

Jessie never worried about saving money at the height of her career, so in her final years she found herself once again struggling to afford her daily needs. Without any secure place to store her negatives and prints, most of her work was lost during this time. When Jessie became severely ill in 1941 she was admitted to the charity ward at Bellevue Hospital. She died there May 30, 1942. 

• photojournalism: Using pictures to tell a news story.
• portrait: An image of a person.
• staff photographer: A person who is employed by a particular organization or company to take photographs for them.