Lifestyle Mirror

“I never thought I was talented enough to be a photographer,” admits Claiborne Swanson Frank, who regularly shoots for vogue.com, among other titles. The budding photographer, who got her start working as Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour’s assistant, took a photography workshop. This led her to shoot a 29-person portfolio of inspiring women in her world called “Indigo Light,” which she exhibited in New York, Boston and San Francisco. And that eventually became the blueprint for her first book, American Beauty published by Assouline. “For me, these portraits are a marriage of location,” says Swanson Frank, who selected women across various disciplines—including entrepreneur Aerin Lauder-Zinterhofer, J. Crew creative director Jenna Lyons, and designer Erin Fetherston—and worked with each one to come up with a location that best represented her natural habitat. “Each woman in the book represents what it means to be an American today,” she continues, explaining each subject wore her own clothes. When Swanson Frank, who makes her home in Manhattan, is not taking pictures, she makes her way to a bungalow in California’s Napa Valley, where her family runs the successful Swanson Vineyards. “It’s my little bohemian escape in the middle of a picturesque vineyard,” she says. “It’s perfect.” —Nandita Khanna