Jazz Age Beauties

“Jazz Age Beauties: The Lost Collection of Ziegfeld Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston” is a book I stumbled across on Amazon a while back. Its shows the private collection of New York photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston (known as “Cheney” to his friends and associates). Born April 1885 Cheney was best  known for his portraits of Ziegfeld Follies showgirls and actors and actresses of the 1920s and 1930s

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Universe (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789313812
• ISBN-13: 978-0789313812

Warning the following post contains mild female nudity

This Beautiful collection of classic portraits of a time long gone belongs on the bookshelves and coffee tables of any any one who truly enjoys any form of the arts. Despite Prohibition, the ’20s was the decade of jazz, flappers and hip flasks. While some took their vote and joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement, others, well, took liberties. Compiled here for the first time are more than 200 publicity stills and photos of some of America’s first “It” girls—the silent film-era starlets who paved the way for the cacophony of Monroes and Madonnas to follow. Accompanying these iconic images are the stories behind them, including accounts from surviving Ziegfeld Girls, as well as ads featuring them that helped perpetuate the allure of It girl glamour. When rare and striking portraits of these women surfaced on the internet in 1995, author Robert Hudovernik began researching their source. What he discovered was the work of one of the first “star makers” identified most with the Ziegfeld Follies, Alfred Cheney Johnston. Johnston, a member of New York’s famous Algonquin Round Table who photographed such celebrities as Mary Pickford, Fanny Brice, the Gish Sisters, and Louise Brooks, fell out of the spotlight with the demise of the revue. A sumptuous snapshot of an era, this book is also a look at the work of this “lost” photographer.

In 1903, at the age of 18, Alfred enrolled at The Art Students League of New York. In 1904 he transferred to the National Academy of Design in New York City then located on 109th Street. There he studied to be an illustrator. The required drawing and painting classes from the nude model which were a part of the Academy’s rigorous training program would prove to have a significant influence on his later photography. In approximately 1917, Johnston was hired by famed New York City live-theater showman and producer Florenz Ziegfeld as a contracted photographer, and was affiliated with the Ziegfeld Follies for the next fifteen years or so (he also maintained his own highly successful personal commercial photo studio at various locations around New York City as well, photographing everything from aspiring actresses and society matrons to a wide range of upscale retail commercial products—mostly men’s and women’s fashions—for magazine ads). He photographed several hundred actresses and showgirls (mainly in New York City, and whether they were part of the Follies or not) during that time period. For his indoor studio work, Johnston often employed a large “Century”-brand view camera that produced 11×14-inch glass-plate negatives, so a standard Johnston 11×14 photographic print was actually just a “contact print” from the negative and not enlarged at all. This size of negative afforded extremely fine image detail. (However, Johnston also is confirmed to have shot with a Graflex camera in 3-1/4 x 4-1/4-inch roll-film format; an unknown brand of 8×10 view camera; and a Zeiss Ikon camera in 120 [2-1/4 x 2-1/4-inch] film format.)

This book was my inspiration for a “Friday Night shoot” not so long ago in the lightGIANTS studio. Alfred Cheney Johnston died in a car crash near his home in Connecticut on April 1971. Thank you “Cheney” for the inspiration