Wallace W. Kirkland

Wallace "Kirk" Kirkland (1891–1979) was an American social worker and photojournalist who worked for Life Magazine.

Early life and education Kirkland was born and raised on a coconut plantation in Jamaica, the second child of Scot William Dixon and Brit Emma Elworthy.

His parents separated in 1905 and he moved to New York with his mother and sister in August 1905. Kirkland worked at a variety of jobs in New York and New Jersey. He was a pipe washer, a grocery store clerk and ran a Boy's Club at a YMCA. He was a graduate of George Williams College, studying social work. During World War I, Kirkland left school to travel to Texas where he assisted troops through the YMCA. He married Ethel Freeland on May 27, 1918. He took many local photos with the boys from Hull House, eventually choosing to leave social work and become a professional photographer in 1935.

In 1935 Kirkland opened a small photography studio in a carriage house in Oak Park Illinois, calling the area "Chicago's Bohemia." He was hired as a staff photographer by Life magazine in the founding year of its relaunch in 1936. Kirkland worked for the magazine for decades, photographing many significant historical figures and events. He met and photographed Mahatma Gandhi and Douglas MacArthur and worked for several months as the White House photographer with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

After World War II he was an instructor in Life's School of Photography for its New York correspondents. He was frequently traveling and corresponded often with his wife and children. He was said to have "carried a slate on which he wrote his name, the town he was in, the hotel and... the date" to keep track of where he was when he woke up in the morning. Of the camera he also said "I always knew when I had a good picture... It gave a sort of satisfied grunt." Other papers including correspondence with his family and images of Robert Rauschenberg at work are held by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The Rauschenberg images went undiscovered outside of the archives until 2016.