page_title: Marion Carpenter
section_title: Photography career
hierarchical_section_title: Marion Carpenter / Photography career
caption_attribution_description: English: Christmas card (Photograph 58-649) sent to President Truman in 1949 from Marion Carpenter.
context_page_description: Marion A. Carpenter, was the first woman national press photographer to cover Washington, D.C. and the White House, and to travel with a US President. She broke the gender role stereotype
  in 1951, Carpenter returned to St. Paul, Minnesota, where she worked as a nurse to support her mother and son. While she did some photography, by her death at age 82, she was little known in the national memory. Since her death, there has been recognition of Carpenter as a pioneer.
context_section_description: In 1944, Carpenter moved to Washington D.C., where she started working for the Washington Times-Herald.  She next joined the International News Photo (INP) syndicate as a special assignment photographer.  In addition to her INP work, she did freelance portraits of senators and representatives. Described as "an athletic brunette", she was herself sometimes the subject of photos.
  Her work with the INP syndicate was a factor in winning a highly coveted White House job in 1945, through which she soon developed a professional and cordial relationship with U.S. President Harry S. Truman. She made her mark in Washington "as a photographer of talent and temperament."  She became the first woman member of the White House News Photographers Association. She was the only woman press photographer to travel with President Truman on a daily basis. 
  Carpenter was informally called "the Camera Girl" and "the Photographer Girl" in Washington circles. She resisted being "condescended to by the old men's club" and kept her spirit. In 1946, she told a reporter, "You have to be able to take the guff," after she won an award for a photo of Truman's playing the piano for Lauren Bacall.  At the time, despite Carpenter's membership in the White House Photographers Association, women were not allowed at the annual dinners with the president.  This policy did not change until 1962.
  Carpenter also had pictures published in Life, the photo-journalism magazine which was very popular from the 1940s into the 1960s. For instance, in the May 23, 1949 issue of Life, Carpenter had nine of the twelve pictures in the article on E. George Luckey, who had been a member of the 39th District in the California State Legislature
caption: 1949 Christmas Card created by Marion Carpenter for President Truman.
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