Bonnie Parker

This gelatin silver print of Bonnie Parker, the American bankrobber and popular culture heroine, dates from April 1933, a year before she and her lover, Clyde Barrow were killed in a vicious shootout with the police. Parker and Barrow were glamourized in American pulp detective magazines during the Great Depression long before they were ambushed in Louisiana. "Bonnie and Clyde" reentered the American public's imagination thirty years later via Hollywood in the 1967 film "Bonnie and Clyde" starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Directed by Arthur Penn (Irving Penn's brother), the film instantly became a cult classic for its violence, innovative storytelling, and the physical chemistry between its lead actors.

This vintage print, complete with original airbrushing and other retouching, is among the most famous of all American press photographs from the early twentieth century. It features Bonnie Parker as a gun toting, cigar-chomping, style conscious, gender-bending young woman posed with her foot on the front fender of the stolen Ford V8 in which she would later die. The portrait is likely by Clyde Barrow and was one of six of the couple playacting discovered in a Joplin, Missouri hideout on an unprocessed roll of film found inside one of the outlaws' many cameras. Quickly developed by the local newspaper on April 13, 1933, it fanned the flames across the country for the sexy gun moll and her dramatic lifestory; it also forced the police to increase their efforts to capture the desperadoes who had already killed nine police officers.

The photograph was first published on April 16 in the Joplin Globe newspaper, then distributed nationally by ACME Newspictures, a successful news agency that operated from 1923 to 1952 (when it was acquired by United Press).