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Ninalee Allen Craig died on May 1st
The star of one of the 20th century’s most famous and
controversial images was 90
May 17th 2018
THE photograph, by Ruth Orkin, was called “American Girl in
Italy, Florence, 1951”. Whenever it surfaced, in restaurants, in students’
rooms, on T-shirts, on tote bags, so did the questions for Ninalee Allen Craig,
who walked at its heart through a phalanx of Italian men. They stared and
leered; one grabbed his crotch; their calls were almost audible. Wasn’t she
afraid? Surely she was upset? Her downcast eyes, that clutch of her shawl,
strongly suggested both those things.
Then she would laugh her boisterous full laugh and say, not
at all. On the contrary, she was imagining she was Dante’s Beatrice. She had
studied the “Divine Comedy” with Robert Fitzgerald at Sarah Lawrence in New
York, and had fallen in love with that notion of unattainable beauty. Her
dollar-a-night hotel was on the Arno, and she had a corny postcard of a
Victorian painting by Henry Holiday that showed Beatrice walking by the river,
in shining white, ignoring the stricken Dante, who pressed his pounding heart
at the sight of her. Who knew whether her very own Dante might not be standing
on some corner, while she swept luminously by?
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In 1951, Ninalee Craig, then using the name "Jinx
Allen", went on a six-month tour of Europe. While in Florence, Italy, she
met photographer Ruth Orkin and the two became friends. Orkin photographed
Craig as she walked around Florence capturing images of her shopping at
markets, flirting in cafés, viewing landmarks, and other travel experiences.
The most iconic of the photos is known as American Girl in Italy and shows
Craig walking down a street being ogled by a group of men.
Many interpret the photograph as one of harassment and
chauvinism.[6] In 2014, Craig said: "At no time was I unhappy or harassed
in Europe". "[The photograph is] not a symbol of harassment. It's a
symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!" She has also noted
that "Italian men are very appreciative, and it's nice to be appreciated.
I wasn't the least bit offended."
Later life
After her trip, Craig returned to New York City and worked
as a teacher and an ad writer. She was married to an Italian and lived with him
in Milan, but later divorced. After returning to New York, she met a Canadian
man, married him, and moved to Toronto. She had a large extended family,
including 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Ninalee Craig: The woman made famous by the ‘American Girl
in Italy’ photos
‘American Girl in Italy’ has adorned the walls of homes for
generations. For its subject, Ninalee Craig, it was a symbol of a woman having
a wonderful time
Ellie Silverman
Wednesday 9 May 2018 10:15
The Independent
In August 1951, at a dollar-a-night hotel in Florence, two
American women came face-to-face in the hallway one morning.
One was Ruth Orkin, a promising 29-year-old photojournalist
who was seeking a subject for a magazine photo spread about the experiences of
women travelling abroad alone – a rare thing to do at the time.
The other was Ninalee Allen, a 23-year-old adventure-seeking
graduate of Sarah Lawrence College who had been travelling solo for months
through France, Spain and Italy. She called herself “Jinx” because she thought
it sounded exciting.
“She was beautiful, luminescent and, unlike me, very tall,”
Orkin later told The New York Times. Allen agreed to the photo shoot as a lark,
and off they went through the streets of Florence.
Imagining she was Beatrice from Dante’s Divine Comedy, one
of her favourite books, Allen held her shawl, stood straight and strode past
more than a dozen men leering at her from all directions at the corner of
Piazza della Repubblica.
Orkin ran ahead, Allen recalled, and “took one picture,
asked me to back up, and took a second. That’s all that was done at that
location, two pictures.” It took about 35 seconds.
“I spoke only to the two men on the motor scooter,” she said
1995. “I yelled to them to tell the others not to look at the camera.”
In less than one minute, Orkin had captured what would
become one of the more indelible photographs of the era: “American Girl in
Italy”.
The photo appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine as part of a
1952 photo essay entitled “When You Travel Alone...” and included advice on
“money, men and morals to see you through a gay trip and a safe one”.
The caption with the photo of Allen read: “Public admiration
… shouldn’t fluster you. Ogling the ladies is a popular, harmless and
flattering pastime you’ll run into in many foreign countries. The gentlemen are
usually louder and more demonstrative than American men, but they mean no
harm.”
Over the decades, the photo was reprinted and hung in dorm
rooms, became artwork for homes, appeared in calendars and on postcards and, to
some, captured the reality of street harassment or cat-calling long before it
was part of the public consciousness. One man, with his hand over his crotch,
was airbrushed out in some reproductions.
“Oh, and that poor soul touching himself? I was used to it,”
Allen wrote in The Guardian in 2015 under her married name, Ninalee Craig. “It
was almost like a good luck sign for the Italian man, making sure the family
jewels were intact. When it was first published, that was occasionally
airbrushed out but I would never consider it to be a vulgar gesture.”
The photograph invited many interpretations, each adding to
its meaning and power. It accompanied stories about harassment, victimhood and
the female psyche. In November 2017, a restaurant in Philadelphia removed the
photograph after complaints from customers.
It all began to grate on Craig, who said the image
represented nothing more than admiration and curiosity and was “a symbol of a
woman having an absolutely wonderful time”. That she stood six feet tall, she
added, may also have explained the gawking.
“Women look at that picture and feel indignant, angry,” she
said. “They say, ‘That poor woman. We should be able to walk wherever we want
to and not be threatened.’ As gently as I can, I explain I was not feeling
fear. There was no danger because it was a far different time.”
Craig, who has died in Toronto aged 90, went on to marry a
Venetian count and a Canadian steel industry executive.
Born Ninalee Allen in Indianapolis in the late Twenties, her
father was the personnel director for LS Ayres, a department store, and her
mother was a home-maker. She studied art history at Sarah Lawrence in
Bronxville, New York, and graduated in 1950.
After her months-long travels in Europe, she settled in New
York City and became a copywriter at the J Walter Thompson advertising company.
One day, she wrote in The Guardian, she saw the Orkin photo
“blown up in Grand Central Station, used as part of a promotion by Kodak, which
horrified my father. He had no idea I was walking around Italy in that way.”
She married Achille Passi, a widowed Venetian count, in
1959, and raised her stepson. She lived in the Passi family villa in Treviso,
near Venice, and once described his family as a “very old family where you’re
only in the newspaper twice in your life – once when you’re born and once when
you die. Period.”
Nine years after the photo of her appeared in Cosmopolitan,
it ran in a Time-Life picture book about Italy. The caption identified her, and
her mother-in-law was “apoplectic”, Craig said in 1995. The man on the scooter
who appears to be gazing at her backside was a cousin of her husband. Her name
was not included in future publications, at the Passi family’s request.
After divorcing Passi in the 1970s, she returned to New York
and met Robert Ross Craig. In a freakish coincidence, he also had a connection
to the Orkin photo: he knew one of the two men sitting on the scooter parked
near her. “My God,” he told her, “that’s my business partner in Italy. That’s
Carlo Marchi!”
They were married from 1978 until his death in 1996. In
addition to her stepson, of Venice, survivors include three stepsons from her
second marriage; 11 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Craig remained close friends with Orkin, who died in 1985
after a noted career in photography and filmmaking.
“I wouldn’t say the picture has changed my life but I’ve had
so much amusement from it over the years,” Craig wrote in 2015. “And more free
meals at Italian restaurants than you’ll ever know.”
Ninalee Craig (Jinx), American icon, born 6 November 1927,
died 2 May 2018
© Washington Post
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