Photographer's Daughter Inherits 100,000 Baby Pictures
โTonight Showโ host Jack Paar called Constance Bannister the โworldโs most famous baby photographer.โ She published calendars, books -- even a syndicated comic strip. Her photography tips were printed on boxes of flashbulbs.
And when she died in 2005 at the age of 92, she left her daughter Lynda more than 100,000 images of โBannister Babiesโ โ an archive that could be worth a fortune.
The familyโs story is featured in the latest episode of Strange Inheritance with Jamie Colby. It airs Monday, March 20 at 9 pm ET on the FOX Business Network.
Constance Bannister was born on a Tennessee farm in 1913, the second oldest of 17 children. In the mid-1930s she packed up moved to New York City.
โShe wanted to be somebody, and somebody big,โ Lynda Bannister tells Colby in the program.
Constance enrolled in the New York Institute of Photography. After a stint as an Associated Press society photographer, she had an inspiration.
โShe went into Central Park and just started photographing babies,โ says Lynda. โShe ended up going back the next day with prints, sold some to a mom, and the career was born.โ
She opened a studio on Central Park South and quickly gained a reputation as the best baby photographer in the city.
โShe had a way of communicating with the baby and would get them to do the craziest things,โ says Lynda. โShe just knew exactly when to snap that shot and get that perfect picture.โ
She was stunning on camera herself. During World War II, Look Magazine commissioned a series of kiddie beach photos for a feature called โPin-up Babies.โ Next to her photographerโs credit the magazine published a shot of Constance in her bathing suit.
โService men wrote from all over the world asking for a signed 8x10 for their foxhole or bunker,โ Lynda says.
The post-war baby boom presented a new opportunity for Bannister. She offered parents free pictures of their children if they signed a release allowing her to sell the images.
Soon โBannister Babiesโ were everywhere. So was Constance.
โI have all her appointment books from 1940s and 1950s,โ says Lynda. โEvery single page is filled with meetings, radio shows and television shows. People knew her by name. They knew her on sight.โ
Bannister retired in the mid-1970โs, and remained out of the public eye.
Before she died, she assured Lynda that the file cabinets full of prints and negatives that she would inherit were still valuable.
โShe actually told me, โDonโt mess it up, Lynda.โโ
Lynda indeed learned that those Bannister Babies are as bankable as ever. Sheโs signed licensing deals with Getty, Microsoft, Yahoo and greeting card publishers, and says sheโs received as much as $25,000 for the rights to a single image.
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