The oral biography of Billie Jean King, who created opportunities for women on the tennis court and in the workplace, and who continues today to champion social change and equality around the world.
Lynn Gilbert is a documentary photographer who has used her camera for the past 50 years to bring attention to areas of society that no one has recorded before.
Gilbert honed her craft by taking pictures of preschool kids at play in New York City private schools for almost a decade. In the 1970s, she took formal portraits of New York children at home in their environments. Her series 70’s Kids NYC represents children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds from more than a hundred families.
Her next body of work was portraits of key women from the second wave of the feminist movement. Her book ‘Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped our Times’, published in 1981, contains these 47 portraits, along with each woman’s story in her own words. Her book was the first to identify these pioneering women in multiple disciplines, at a time when women were not given credit for their achievements. The book is reissued digitally as Women of Wisdom, and individual chapters are available.
For almost a decade, Gilbert photographed the interiors of authentic traditional homes throughout Turkey that had never been documented before. Her intimate, unstaged “portraits” of interiors capture a culture that is rapidly disappearing. This project led to the publication of ‘The Silk Road: Then and Now’ in 2015.
Currently, she is documenting one of the great private gardens of the world located in Westchester County, NY. For the past two years, from dawn until moonrise, Gilbert captured the soul of the garden.
For decades Gilbert has had exhibitions including the National Portrait Gallery, New-York Historical Society, Pace Gallery, Roosevelt Library, State Museum of Painting and Sculpture, Turkey, Throckmorton Fine Art, and AIPAD.
Gilbert has been widely published; MOMA’s website, The Smithsonian, The British Museum Blog, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Photo District News (PDN), New York Magazine, Antiques, The Advocate, Chicago Tribune, The Eye of Photography, Museé Magazine, and numerous Turkish publications.
Gilbert’s work is included in collections at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, New-York Historical Society, and private collections.
A wonderful oral biography of Billie Jean King from her days on the court. My favorite anecdote from the story is about the Bobby Riggs match. “To beat a fifty-nine-year-old guy was no thrill for me. The thrill was exposing a lot of new people to tennis. But the most important thing about the match was that women liked themselves better that day.
In Philadelphia a few weeks later, I walked into the offices of the Bulletin to meet the editor, and all the secretaries stood up and clapped. They just went berserk. The editor said, “You have no idea what you did. The day after you played Bobby Riggs, all of these women asked for a raise.” Billie Jean King
This was a great short-read about Billie Jean King and her life and career. An oral history, coming first-hand from King herself, this is definitely a must read for anyone interested in her story!