Prejudices about knitting being a granny's hobby were dispelled in more recent years by young designers using innovative yarns and experimental techniques to make avant-garde knitwear, and by enthusiasts who have proved knitting is a great relaxing hobby in our frantic digital world.
People Knitting – A Century of Photographs (Princeton Architectural Press) helps dispelling any further stigma about knitting. The volume is a collection of vintage images compiled by collector, artist and curator Barbara Levine.
Most images come from the author’s personal collection that she started twenty-five years ago: Levine explains in her poetical introduction that she instantly thinks about her mother knitting every time she sees somebody engaged in this art. Levine claims she used to be fascinated, almost mesmerized, by the serene image of her mother knitting and by the sound produced by the needles.
The pictures collected in this book go from the 1860s to the 1960s and invite readers to enter into the private worlds of the people portrayed, allowing the knitting enthusiasts who will get the book to do a sort of historical and anthropological journey through this art.
The images collected here provide indeed not just a glimpse into the personal lives of knitters, but they also explain the symbolic meanings of knitting.
Women portrayed in Victorian times while they were knitting or with the needles in their hands pointed at their domestic skills and abilities; during World War I and World War II doing your little bit of knitting meant contributing to the war effort, but throughout the decades different people took up the hobby.
All sorts of knitters are portrayed in these images: there are adorable children, busy mothers and wives, nurses, soldiers and war prisoners (and there's even a taxi driver…) from all over the world, from the Shetland Islands to Jerusalem, from Albania and China to Australia, Canada and the USA. Notable figures aren't missing: from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth, to actresses Betty Grable, Mary Pickford, Doris Day, Joan Crawford, Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman (a few of them knitting on a film set to relax a bit).
In many ways this is also a visually engaging anthropological book since it shows the roles, clothes and attires of many different people, hinting in this way at their social status. By leafing through the pages we enter a Gibson girls' knitting circle from 1910 and get behind the scene of a vaudeville show to see a performer knitting; there are Scottish girls working with their needles while men are away fishing and unruly English high school boys beatifically calmed by the practice of knitting for soldiers in 1918.
Knitters are pictures everywhere: some practice their art outside maybe sitting on a bench, others during breaks at work, while walking or fishing. At times the pictures are interspersed with images of magazine covers, posters and adverts or quotes.
Yet the volume is not just for practicing disciples of this art: in her introduction Levine reminds us that, while some of us may be knitters, others are "knitter observers", people in awe of the magic produced by quick fingers moving and turning a ball of yarn into a wearable garment or accessory. Hopefully we will see the book developing into something else such as a photographic exhibition at a yarn fair.
People Knitting: A Century of Photographs by Barbara Levine, published by Princeton Architectural Press (£9.99), is out now
Image credits for this post
1. Book cover
2. Snapshot, ca. 1950, taken from Barbara Levine's collection
3. 120: Snapshot, ca. 1950, taken from Barbara Levine's collection
4. Woman knitting socks while drying her hair, 1960, taken from Barbara Levine's collection
5. Snapshot, ca. 1950, taken from Barbara Levine's collection
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