| Community Zoe : Articles : Alfred Cheney Johnston |
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Alfred Cheney Johnston (c) Collectors Photography, 1988 All rights reserved. Used with permission by Jeff Dunas www.dunas.com |
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As the official photographer of the Ziegfeld Follies, Alfred Cheney Johnston produced some of the most luxuriously beautiful photographs of the 1920s. Like other great commercial photographers of his era, such as Baron de Meyer and Edward Steichen, Johnston was perfectly matched to his task. Florenz Ziegfeld's "glorification of the American girl" gave free reign to Johnston's appreciation of women: their physical beauty, their intelligence and their personal style. Working with a large portrait camera, using soft focus and crafting exhibition-quality prints, he convincingly transformed "cheesecake" into an art form. Johnston was extremely successful in his day, and his photographs are easily appreciated today. Yet he has been over-looked in almost all modern writing on photography because he violated two taboos of the standard photo-histories: he was a "late" pictorialist, and he was a commercial photographer. In the last ten years, studio photographers, especially those working in Hollywood in the 1930s, have found their fans. With the publication of these photographs from his estate, Johnston can at last take his place among the pioneers of modern, commercial photography. Not only is it enjoyable to see the young and scantily clad Gloria Swanson, Ruby Keeler and Marion Davies, but Johnston's photographs also make 1920s chic come alive. We are privy to New York's demimonde, ambitious showgirls in Spanish shawls and silk slippers giving us everything they've got. Once we shed the avantgarde austerity of the "straight" aesthetic, we can unabashedly enjoy the theatricality of the Ziegfeld girls, as well as Johnston's brilliant technique. Because Johnston was something of a myth maker, accounts of his life must be read with a measure of skepticism. The oft-repeated story is that in 1918, when Johnston was still an art student and amateur photographer, a family friend showed his photographs to Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld's great eye for talent and his entrepreneurial daring led him to hire Johnston on the spot as official photographer of the Follies. Johnston had the courage, despite his inexperience, to demand a credit line, and Ziegfeld complied. Within six months, according to the tale, Johnston went from fledgling art student, to famed photographer with a fully established style. The seductive yet dignified image of the Ziegfeld girl tempted high society women and Hollywood starlets to commission portraits from him. By the end of the Twenties, Johnston chared up to $1,200 for a sitting. |
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The few independently culled facts on Johnston's early life suggest a slightly different account. Johnston was born in Manhattan on April 8, 1885. From age 19-23 (1904 -1908), he studied at the National Academy of Design, taking the usual roster of classes. Throughout his years as a student, he lived in Mount Vernon, probably at the home of his father, who was a banker. He married in 1909, but the next 10 years of his life are a mystery. Johnston's version omits these years entirely, for he claims to have begun working for Ziegfeld as a young student rather than as a 34-year old man with art school a decade behind him. One wonders what motivated Johnston to wish away the years of 1908-1918. Perhaps his artistic vision at the time was foundering, or he was a commercial artist, which would have lessened his prestige. Or, since his account of his career comes from late in life, it may have been intended simply to mask his actual age. Although the passing of ten years weakens the drama of Johnston's story, there is little question that his art training served him well in creating an artistic photographic style. Banishing the painted backdrops and Victorian furniture of conventional celebrity portraiture, he employed an overtly "aesthetic" imagery common to the more sophisticated painted and photographic portraiture of his day. By using "Renaissance" furniture and tapestries, Oriental rugs and brasses, and attributes of the arts (such as a brush and palette or musical instruments), he created a refined and erotically charged environment for his models. The oversized "bubble," a symbol of transient beauty ubiquitous in pictorialsm, connects Johnston's work more closely to turn-of-the-century art photography. So does his printing on tissue and making of autochromes -- techniques loved by pictorialists for their delicate effects. With Johnston, we have clearly left the stagey world of Sarony for that of the photographic salon. |
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What distinguishes Johnston's work from pictorialism, however, is the overt, sensual display of the female body. This is in part due to Johnston's own sensibility. He often rejected the clothing worn by his sitters, draping them instead with the silks, laces and velvets that became his signature props. Known as "Mr. Drape," he was something of an ad-hoc couturier. But the driving force behind Johnston's style was Ziegfeld's glorification of the American Beauty. Ziegfeld began producing his Follies in 1907 and by the 1920s had established a revue that set a standard for American musical theater. Under Ziegfeld's flamboyant direction, a collaborative team of composers, lyricists, choreographers, set designer and costume designer invented a spectacular show that featured what were billed as the most beautiful girls in America. Ziegfeld's girls were famous for being taller, slimmer and leggier than earlier performers, and thanks to short, clinging or transparent garments, his audiences saw more female flesh than ever before. Ziegfeld very skillfully expanded the limits of good taste, insisting that he was portraying the beauty of the nude - not the naked-body. It is no exaggeration to say that Ziegfeld had a strong hand in supplanting the Victorian ideal of the buxom, tightly bound female form with the slim, physically active and loosely dressed beauty of the 1920s. Indeed, Ziegfeld was known as an "authority" on the American Beauty, specifying her physical attributes (5 feet, 5 1/2 inches, 117 pounds, shoe size 5, etc.), as well as her less quantifiable qualities (poise, natural refinement, spirit and "the quality of glory"). Although Ziegfeld's theory of beauty was in part a publicity stunt, there was something else to it: his girls did convince the audience that they had a magic presence greater than sexual display. All of Ziegfeld's proteges saw performing in the Follies as perparation either for marriage to a millionaire or for Hollywood stardom, and more than a few of them achieved those goals. In his creation of the American Beauty, Ziegfeld's primary collaborator was Johnston. Johnston was the photographer of the Ziegfeld girls rather than of the Follies itself, for Ziegfeld maintained the services of the George White Studios for routine production of photography. The interpretive strength of Johnston's work is especially apparent when compared to White's lackluster output. Johnston's photographs made permanent Ziegfeld's ideals. He worked with several formulae - the gypsy, the harem girl, the goddess - which were the same erotic fantasies that inspired Ziegfeld's productions. The performers who transformed these formulae into vehicles of stardom could effect the same transformation before Johnston's camera. What was special about Johnston's photographs was not only that they were soft-focus, large exhibition prints - a far cry from the cabinet cards of the turn of the century - but that they made the theatrical experience immediately felt. The models reveal not only their beauty, but also the full force of their dramatic magnetism. Johnston continually stressed that it was "brains" and "personality," not physical attractions alone, that made his subjects beautiful. This was his way of expressing his agreement with Ziegfeld's ideal of dignified sensuality. |
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Johnston's photographs of showgirls with bared breasts go beyond the period's accepted standard of suggestive nudity. Photographs of thinly veiled breasts or exposed thighs could be hung in the theater lobby or published in magazines. Those depicting total nudity were found in Johnston's estate in boxes marked "private." He, and no doubt Ziegfeld, still felt constrained by the puritanical norms that prevailed in their day. With the Depression and the 1933 death of Ziegfeld, Johnston's great work was over. During the 1930s, he continued to photograph showgirls and society ladies. He also ventured into advertising, where he attracted prestigious accounts and won many awards. Among his advertising photographs are some interesting experiments with Paul Outerbridge's carbro process. His most acclaimed work was a cigarette advertisement showing a beautiful model in an evening gown holding two elegant dogs on a leash, an image that suggested style and elegance but had nothing to do with the product. Although this concept was to become a standard in advertising in years to come, Johnston's use of pictorialist imagery was soon displaced by the modernist, high-contrast style of product display, which was foreign to his talents. |
In 1940, at the age of 55, Johnston gave up his lavish studio in the Hotel des Artistes and retired to a fifteen-acre farm in Oxford, Connecticut. He set up a replica of his New York studio in his barn and continued to photograph "as a hobby," although a 1949 newspaper showing Johnston photographing a Copa showgirl makes one wonder just how voluntary his "retirement" was. Clearly, the fashions in female beauty and in photography had passed him by. On April 17, 1971, he died at the age of 87. In 1934, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., gave Johnston a one-man show, after which he fell from public view. In the several interviews he gave to the photographic and local Connecticut press in the 1950s, Johnston reminisced about the stars of the silent screen and asserted his old-fashioned views on photographic aesthetics. He still used his old 11x14-inch camera, and he objected to the use of multiple artificial lights for studio portraiture. He lived long enough to see the beginnings of a new phase of the appreciation of photography as an art, but it was an appreciation of rigorous form and descriptive detail, rather that the voluptuous fantasy of his work. Now Johnston's fantasy can be appreciated on its own terms. Beyond the appeal of subject and handling, however, is a more fundamental contribution to cultural history. In recording the lavish performances of the Zeigfeld girls, Johnston was one of the first photographic art directors in the modern sense. It was not until the 1930s that photographers such as Steichen, Horst and Hurrell used photography to make stars, to magnify rather than record the lives of the stage and screen. What is now an influential and central focus of our culture - the cult of media personality - had its beginnings with Alfred Cheney Johnston's glorification of the Ziegfeld girls. © 1988 Collector's Photography / Jeff Dunas |
