In 1951, Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret was fired from her job as a photojournalist at the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The reason: she was pregnant.
She responded by photographing the birth to her son — an audacious proposition at the time. The photos — mostly shots of the doctors, nurses and newborn Artie from her POV on the delivery bed — were deemed “unfit to print” by many of the magazines she submitted them to, but were ultimately printed by the Des Moines Sunday Register, Minneapolis Tribune and Look magazine.
This fierce rebuke of sex-based discrimination helped launch, and set the tone for, Liffring-Zug Bourret’s trailblazing career. Through her own freelance photography business in Cedar Rapids, she captured images of the city’s prominent families, women’s clubs, underrepresented and misrepresented Iowans, and famous people who visited the area, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama. She was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.
Liffring-Zug Bourret passed away in 2022 at the age of 93.
“You do not need to leave your own home state to lead a useful, interesting life as a photographer,” she once said, per the Press-Citizen. “Through the images of my camera, I have been privileged to share in the lives of many Iowans.”
This writer was fortunate enough to have befriended Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret in life. She was gracious, smart as a whip and a champion for many worthy causes. Part of her legacy continues through her publishing company, Penfield Books, in Iowa City. Established in 1979, Penfield grew into a unique boutique-publishing dynamo.
Its founder rightfully claimed that hers was the most ethnically diverse Iowa publisher, offering books of interest to those of Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Norwegian, Polish, Scandinavian, Scottish, Slovak, Swedish and Ukrainian descent. Food and recipes are dominant threads in these titles, reinforcing the idea of food as an international language.
Of course, Liffring-Zug Bourret published books of her own, each an evocative collection of images that reflect the timelessness of the issues she so strongly championed — especially her 2011 autobiography Pictures and People: A Search for Visual Truth and Social Justice.
In 2023, Liffring-Zug Bourret was posthumously awarded the Governor’s Art Award, and the following year she was honored with the Women of Achievement Award from Women Lead Change, which included a plaque bearing her name installed on the Women of Achievement Bridge in downtown Des Moines.
An archive in peril
By Paul Brennan
Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret left important collections of her work to the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art and the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI). The SHSI collection, over half-a-million prints and negatives, as well as letters and other written material, was archived at the society’s Iowa City research center. It’s where Liffring-Zug Bourret wanted the collection to go.
But neither her nor any other SHSI donor’s wishes were considered when the Iowa Department of Administrative Services announced in June it was closing the Iowa City research center as a cost-saving move. The fate of its collections was unclear, because the SHSI was not adhering to any recognized professional standards for handling archival material in its haste to shutter the center.
Forrest Heusinkveld is one of 17 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in September to stop the dismantling of the Iowa City center and have all materials removed from it returned. Heusinkveld is Liffring-Zug Bourret’s grandson, and he wants to make sure the material she donated is protected and the promises made to her about where it would be archived are honored. On Oct. 24, a district court judge issued a temporary injunction stopping the state from removing material from the Iowa City center while the lawsuit works its way through the courts.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
