Book Review: Jazz Age Beauties - the lost collection of Ziegfeld photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston, by Robert Hudovernik

I'm a freelance photographer as well as an aficionado of all things 1920s, and when I came across this book on Amazon I fell in love with it just from the stunning cover photo.

It's a hardcover book of the work of celebrated 1920s New York portrait photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston, made famous from being the official photographer of the (often notorious) Ziegfeld Follies girls. I ordered it right away, and it's taken pride of place on my 'vintage-related' bookshelf.

At first glance, the book is utterly beautiful. Hardcover and 271 pages, it's a decent coffee-table size volume.

Twenty-one pages of text appear in the front of the book, including a foreward by Julie Newmar - that's right, of Batman 1966 'Catwoman' fame. (Her mother Helen Jesmer was a dancer in the Follies in 1919 and had been photographed by Johnston. Three decades later she took Julie to be photographed by Johnston as well.)

The text is well-researched and gives a good overview of Johnston's life and work, concentrating on his heyday in the 1920s working with Florenz Ziegfield to be the official 'beauty' photographer of the Ziegfeld Follies girls. Additional information in the back of the book give more details about Johnston's advertising work, his studio set up and methods, as well ad a timeline of magazine covers he photographed.

But the main content of the book is Johnston's photography. The photographs are divided into three chapters or 'Galleries':

1. The Stars
2. The Secret Nudes
3. Advertising images

The Stars contains portraits of Follies showgirls as well as actresses and other celebs of the day, including Gloria Swanson, Norma Shearer and Louise Brooks. His images have a wonderful ethereal quality to them, a mystery and beauty that is so often absent from portraiture these days.

Follies girl Jean Ackerman

Actress Marjorie King

The Secret Nudes alludes to a collection of nude photographs in boxes marked "Private" discovered in his estate after his death. Far from being lewd or tawdry, however, the nude photographs encapsulate just as much grace and beauty as Johnston's other work.

Unknown nude

Originally trained as a painter, Johnston studied artistic principles such as the "Line of Beauty" and had a stunning eye for composition, which is clearly evident in his pictures - they do, in fact, look like ethereal paintings, composed and lit to perfection.

Johnston's artistic training and eye for composition is clearly evident

The (few) advertising images show his commercial work, for products such as soaps, beauty powders and cigarettes. Again, Johnston's timeless style is present, wrapping the products in a timeless, classic and poised sense of beauty.

The only let-down of the book is that some of the images reproduced are at too low a resolution, and contain unacceptable levels image noise and compression artifacts (jpg 'jaggies'). I think this is a real shame in an otherwise gorgeous volume. I can't understand why better scans weren't obtained or, if that was impossible, why the lower resolution pictures weren't printed at smaller sizes - a smaller image is preferable to a full-bleed picture that has lost too much image quality.

Thankfully it's only a minority of images that suffer from these reproduction issues, and overall the book is gorgeous. If you're a fan of the 1920s or just extremely well-executed portrait photography, I highly recommend this book for your coffee table.