Bringing Up Baby

Happy Birthday, Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903–98), pediatrician and best-selling author.

Spock's Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946; 6th ed., 1992) has sold more than 30 million copies and influenced generations of parents.

Two decades before Dr. Spock's first book, this baby portrait was photographed by John Frank Keith. He worked as a bookkeeper in a fish market but spent weekends making photographs. Keith's subjects were invariably the working-class families of Philadelphia's Kensington area. . . . Keith's informal archive is more than a collection of individuals: it is an intimate portrait of a neighborhood in the 1920s.

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured: John Frank Keith, 1883–1947, Baby on a Stoop, Kensington, Philadelphia, ca. 1925, silver print, 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.