(Canscene) — Some years ago, my brother John, visiting us here, noticed two nearby art stores selling posters. He claimed he’d tried all over England to find An American Girl in Italy and I suggested he try here.  He got lucky and within days, was carrying his trophy back to England.

I was reminded of this by  Paul French’s article in Partners, the bi-monthly magazine of the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Toronto. He recounts how in 1953,  Ninalee Allen , a 23-year-old art student in Florence and her friend photogapher Ruyh Orkin took advantage of an improvisational situation on a Florentine Street. The spotaneity of the moment was preserved by Ruth asking Ninalee to make the walk into history only one more time.

As a poster, it became, according to French, the second most famous in the world. (One presumes the first is the flag raising at Iwo Jima).

Back in New York, Ninalee was surprised to find herself the subject of a Kodak poster, a fact that haunted her first marriage  a few years later to a Venetian nobleman whose suffocatingly proper family drew her into a sequestered life.

Her second  and happier marriage, to Hamilton business man Robert Craig, brought Ninalee to Canada’s  steel city.  After Craig’s  death, she moved to Toronto, where at the age of 80, she resides today.
–30–

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 10:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.