Constance Bannister


Constance Bannister was an American photographer. She was an avid baby photographer and is reported to have taken more than 100,000 shots of babies.
Born Constance Lorraine Gibbs, on February 11, 1913, in Ashland City, Tennessee, to Arthur Thomas Gibbs and Bessie Serena Jackson, Bannister moved to New York to study photography, studying first at the New York School of Applied Design and the School of Modern Photography then enrolling at the New York Institute for Photography. Her first assignment, in 1937, was shooting Palm Beach society photographs for the Associated Press. She opened a studio in New York and worked for the Chicago Tribune, shooting Broadway plays headed to Chicago. She also photographed the New York City Ballet and the Ice Capades. Her work was featured in many popular magazines in the 1940s and 1950s.
Her baby pictures were published in books, calendars, and advertisements during the 1940s and 1950s. A line of "Bannister Baby" dolls were produced in the 1950s. Beginning in 1946, she wrote a comic strip, "Baby Banters," syndicated twice weekly to approximately 50 newspapers.
Bannister was married three times, first in 1936 to Stephen A. Bannister ; later to Air Force Captain Charles G. Fredericks and lastly to Joseph Hatcher. Bannister died on August 17, 2005, in Laurel Hollow in Nassau County, New York, where she lived.

Selected publications