NEW YORK, NY.- Women: Portraits 1960-2000, a lavish new book of photographs by Susan Wood, features fresh looks at some of the most prominent and influential women in the latter part of the 20th century. Long-unseen photographs of icons including Helen Gurley Brown, Julia Child, Nora Ephron, Diane von Furstenberg, Jane Fonda, Betsey Johnson, Jayne Mansfield, Yoko Ono, Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem, Martha Stewart, Cheryl Tiegs, Alice Waters, Gloria Vanderbilt, and many others are featured. A lively essay by Wood, entitled “Women Was My Beat” introduces the book.

Wood’s photographs were made during years of great social change, and her own career followed a similar trajectory. A born and bred New Yorker, she was involved with the original “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue and later won a Clio, the most sought-after award in advertising. In 1954 her photographs appeared in the premier issue of Sports Illustrated. Mademoiselle chose her as one of their “Ten Young Women of the Year” in 1961. Throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, her photographs could be seen in Vogue, Life, People and New York magazines. She was a regular contributor to Look magazine, most notably for a 1969 cover story on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Wood is also noted for her movie stills. Under contract to Paramount Pictures, United Artists and 20th Century Fox, she was on set during the filming of movies that defined the 1960s such as Easy Rider and Hatari.

Involved in the fight for women’s rights and equality in the 1960s and 1970, Wood was a founding member of the Women’s Forum, and counted as friends many of the vanguard of the feminist movement including Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Writes Wood, now 84, in the book’s introduction, “I’m a working woman from an age when women still wondered if we could and/or should work. I remember a woman scientist’s graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College in 1953 recommending we graduates keep some part of our brain actively engaged in an intellectual project even if we visited it only occasionally. ‘Picking up knitting’ was her analogy. Can you imagine the cat calls and boos someone today would get in response?”

Susan Wood has been represented by Getty Images since 2004.