One pair of filmmakers, one documentary about a pair of photographers

The title of the documentary “Twin Lenses” has nothing to do with the two people from very different backgrounds who made the movie.

The 25-minute film—which will be screened during the Hamptons International Film Festival next week—is about the iconic female photographers who helped pioneer the advancement of women in the world of fashion and magazine photography.

The producer and director of “Twin Lenses” is Nina Rosenblum and the writer is Dennis Watlington. The collaboration on this and previous projects has brought together two people who have had very different life and career experiences.

First, more about the documentary: It tells the remarkable story of the twins Kathryn Abbe and Frances McLaughlin-Gill, pioneer fashion and editorial photographers whose images graced the pages of magazines including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and are recognized as masterpieces of their genre.

The twins embraced a wide range of subjects: celebrities, intimate family moments, high fashion, lifestyle, and beauty. In 1943, Frances joined Vogue Studio, photographing exclusively for the magazine and other Conde Nast publications for two decades. Kathryn, a freelance photographer, had clients including McCalls, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and Paris Match.

Both twins married into photographic families. Kathryn’s husband, James Abbe Jr., the son of James Abbe Sr., a famed Hollywood photographer, was a noted photographer, as was Leslie Gill, the husband of Frances. The twins set a standard for balancing their pioneering work and devoting time to family, raising children. Now 88, Kathryn lives in Montauk and her sister lives in New York City.

“Twin Lenses” tells of their accomplishments in photography in their own words and in the words of their families. The film pays tribute to the richness and allure of their life’s work, their bond, and their commitment to each other and to excellence in photography.

As for the people behind the lens, Ms. Rosenblum worked for more than a dozen years for PBS, then became an independent filmmaker by establishing Daedelus Productions, her own company. She is a two-time International Documentary Association award-winning producer, director, and writer of documentaries.

Her previous films include the Oscar-nominated PBS documentary “Liberators: Fighting On Two Fronts in World War II,” narrated by Denzel Washington and Louis Gossett Jr. and nominated for an Academy Award; the Emmy Award-winning TBS show “The Untold West: The Black West,” narrated by Danny Glover; PBS/POV feature documentary “Through the Wire,” narrated by Susan Sarandon; and “The Skin I’m In,” about Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone that was broadcast on Showtime.

Mr. Watlington followed a different path to teaming up with Ms. Rosenblum. An Emmy Award winner for “The Untold West: The Black West,” he has written numerous television movies, features, soaps, sitcoms, and articles for Vanity Fair, New York Times, and other publications. His book, “Chasing America: Notes of a Rock ’N Soul Integrationist,” was published in 2006 by St. Martin’s Press and this month is being published in France. He is an African-American from the South who started out in the writing business as a sports reporter and then moved on to writing for TV.

“Somehow the combination really works—she is an excellent documentarian, and I’m a former writer of soap operas,” Mr. Watlington said, laughing, referring to his stints writing scripts for “One Life To Live” and “General Hospital.” He was also a field producer on TV documentaries, such as “The Mike Tyson Story” for NBC and “The Lenny Dykstra Story” for HBO.

Ms. Rosenblum has long had a fascination with the subjects of “Twin Lenses” and with photography itself. Her mother wrote “A History of Women Photographers,” which included Kathryn and Frances and was published by the Abbeville Press. Her father was a well-known photographer and highly decorated World War II cameraman who landed at Normandy on D-Day and also documented the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. One of Rosenblum’s previous films is about her father, “Walter Rosenblum: In Search of Pitt Street,” which was also written by Mr. Watlington.

“Documentaries are in my heart,” Ms. Rosenblum said. “My whole world was documentaries. I never really thought about fiction or features because the real world was more incredible. To take somebody’s life like the twins’ is like a miner looking for that vein of gold. You go through hours and days and weeks of material, and when you find those special moments it’s ‘Eureka!’ And it’s real, you didn’t make it up.”

Her initial research into the twins made her more intrigued because they were truly pioneers in the male-dominated world of fashion photography in the mid-20th century. Born in 1919 in New York City, they grew up in Wallingford, Connecticut, and they received a BFA in art and design from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1941. They studied photography with Walter Civardi there and painting with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the New School for Social Research.

After winning Vogue magazine’s “Prix de Paris” contest, they worked as assistants to Vogue fashion photographer Toni Frissell. Kathryn married photographer James Abbe Jr. in 1946 and they had three children. She was especially known for photographs of children, including the famous Kienast quintuplets, for whom she was exclusive photographer on assignment from Good Housekeeping beginning in the 1970s. She also photographed television personalities, actors, actresses, and musicians. She rescued and printed negatives of early Hollywood actors and actresses taken by her father-in-law in the 1960s.

Frances carried out assignments for the covers and editorial pages of Vogue, Glamour, and House and Garden. She produced photographs of theater and film personalities along with fashion and beauty shots, still lifes, portraits, and travel reportage in the U.S. and overseas. She and the artist Leslie Gill had a daughter, Leslie, in 1957. After her husband died when her daughter was only a year old, Frances worked as an independent film producer and director, making television commercials for Johnson and Johnson, Procter and Gamble, Lever Brothers, Revlon, Breck, and other companies.

The pioneer aspect is that fashion photography assignments were rarely doled out to women a half-century ago. The top editors and executives at Conde Nast and other magazine companies were men. While that has changed completely now, back then it took women who were strong-willed as well as talented to break into the pages of fashion publications.

“Vogue was completely a male bastion,” Ms. Rosenblum said. “When Cecil Beaton took the photo of the famous fashion photographers at Vogue, he refused to put Frances in there because she was a woman. Both of them really broke down walls there.”

Ms. Rosenblum and Mr. Watlington have established a working process that is as smooth as a good double-play combination on the baseball diamond. “She as director would go out to get the richest amount of material available and bring it into the studio to piece it together,” Mr. Watlington explained. “Then the writing begins. The process is the opposite from writing a book or making a feature film. With a book you write it, then it is edited. With a feature film, you write the screenplay, then the director takes over. The script for a documentary is written in the editing room after much of the film has been put together. A big reason for that is the words have to be appropriate for the images.”

He continued: “Essentially, the core of our creative relationship is she brings in the best groceries and I try to make a good meal out of them. Not only have we done very well over the last 10 years or so, but we feel this new one is the best of the lot. Like Tony Dorsett once said about the quarterback: She calls it, I haul it.”

“It’s very hard to make a film using still photographs,” Ms. Rosenblum said. “There is no motion. People are looking at a still screen. That makes it even more crucial that the writing grab the audience. Meanwhile, the director has to be constantly judging how long an image is on screen: long enough that the point is made to the audience and the narrative can be spoken, but not too long that the audience begins to wander.”

“Whether it’s a feature or a documentary, you have to have a dramatic arc to the story,” said Mr. Watlington, who lives in Massachusetts. “There are tons of documentaries made but very few make it to that level of achievement that make them into a film that lasts.”

“Twin Lenses” has other connections to the East End beyond Kathryn living in Montauk. Ms. Rosenblum’s sister lives in East Hampton, and her husband’s family lives in Springs.

Mr. Watlington and Ms. Rosenblum are constantly looking for new projects, but sometimes the projects find them. In 2004, Ms. Rosenblum was a juror at a film festival in the Canary Islands when trains were bombed in Madrid. One of the wounded was her best friend’s daughter. When she walked into the hospital room in Madrid, she fainted.

“When she told me she fainted—this is a woman who spent years traveling around Rikers Island—I knew there was a movie,” said Mr. Watlington, who hopped a jet to Spain. “We went to work.”

The result was “Zahira,” about the young woman and the relationship between the bombings and the war in Iraq. The project was broadcast on the Canal + network in Europe.

Next up for the duo are two documentaries. One is “This Is the Photo League,” about the organization of social documentarians who established the genre of street photography in New York City, and “In the Name of Democracy,” the story of Lt. Ehren Watada, the first officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. Separately, Mr. Watlington is writing his second book, about being biracial in America.

“Whether or not you support Barack Obama, you had to marvel at the first debate that featured a black man and a white man going at it at the University of Mississippi,” Mr. Watlington said. “In my lifetime I saw that taking place at the university where George Wallace stood at the front door in defiance of the police and vowed that no black man would attend that school. We have come a long way in America.”

“Twin Lenses” will have two showings, with the filmmakers present. One will be on October 18 at 3 p.m. at the Southampton Cinema, and the other is on October 19 at 8 p.m. at the East Hampton movie theater.