Marjorie Content

Marjorie Content (1895–1984) was an American photographer from New York City active in modernist social and artistic circles. Her photographs were rarely published and never exhibited in her lifetime. Since the late 20th century they have become of interest to collectors and art historians. Her work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art; it has been the subject of several solo exhibitions.

She was married several times, including for a short period to Harold Loeb, a writer and the editor of the avant-garde journal, Broom. Her marriage to writer Jean Toomer in 1934 lasted more than 30 years, to his death.

Marjorie Content was born into an ethnic German-Jewish family in New York in 1895, the daughter of wealthy Manhattan stock-broker Harry Content and his wife Ada. She was educated at the private Miss Finch's School, founded on the Upper East Side in 1900. During these years, she met Alfred Stieglitz, the uncle of a school friend, and they became lifelong friends. He was a prominent artist, photographer, and gallery owner.

In 1914, Content left school at age 19 to marry writer Harold Loeb, also of New York. She moved with him to Alberta, Canada, where he had been working on a ranch. Their two children, Jim and Susan Loeb, were born there in quick succession in 1915 and 1916.

After the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in the Great War, the couple could not stay in Canada as foreigners and returned to the United States. Loeb worked in San Francisco for a time with a business of his maternal Guggenheim relatives. He entered the Army when the United States entered the world war. Due to poor eyesight, Loeb was assigned to a desk job in New York City.

In 1919, Content became a manager of The Sunwise Turn bookshop, a female-run bookstore devoted to new writing. Her husband was a part owner and also worked there. In 1921 Loeb founded Broom, a literary magazine, which deepened Content's connections to the literary and art world. One of his partners, Lola Ridge, the magazine's American editor, hosted artists in the office of Broom, which was located in the basement of Content's brownstone townhouse.

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