Alfred Cheney Johnston: Beauty as Artifice, Nudity as Art
Biography
Cheneyjohnson1921 by Alfred Cheney Johnston, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Alfred Cheney Johnston was born on April 8, 1885, in Westchester County, New York, the son of a bank clerk — though Johnston himself, ever the self-mythologizer, preferred to claim descent from a wealthy banking family, a useful fiction for a man determined to court the New York elite. His earliest ambitions were pictorial rather than photographic: he enrolled at the Art Students League and then spent four years at the National Academy of Design, where he studied painting and illustration alongside a young Norman Rockwell. Upon graduating in 1908, and having married fellow student Doris Gernon the following year, Johnston attempted to establish himself as a portrait painter. The endeavor failed. It was reportedly Charles Dana Gibson — the celebrated illustrator and a longtime family friend, creator of the iconic "Gibson Girl" — who encouraged Johnston to look more seriously at the camera he had been using merely as a reference tool for his canvases. The advice proved transformative.
Johnston spent his early professional years at Sarony Studios, at the time the dominant name in theatrical portraiture in New York, working as a glass-plate retouch artist. The experience was formative in two ways: it gave him an intimate understanding of photographic materials at their most granular level, and it introduced him to the clientele — socialites, stage actresses, aspiring starlets — that would define his career. Sometime between 1915 and 1917 he left Sarony to work independently, and around 1917 he was hired by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. as the official photographer of the Ziegfeld Follies, an association that would last until Ziegfeld's death in 1932.
The Follies were by then the most glamorous theatrical enterprise in America, a Broadway institution modeled loosely on the Parisian Follies Bergère, built on an aesthetic of spectacular excess: elaborate costumes, ornate stagecraft, and showgirls who were taller, slimmer, and more exposed than anything Broadway had previously seen. Johnston's role was ostensibly promotional — individual and small-group portraits of the performers in their stage costumes, destined for newspapers, magazines, and publicity materials. But within those commercial constraints, he found ample room to operate as an artist. By the peak of his fame in the 1920s, he was charging between $500 and $1,400 for a set of twelve prints, equivalent in today's terms to tens of thousands of dollars, and his work appeared regularly in Vanity Fair, Motion Picture Classic, and The Theatre. Stars sought him out of their own accord: Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, John Barrymore, Barbara Stanwyck, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. He is credited, with reasonable justification, as one of the inventors of the celebrity glamour shot as a genre.
The Depression, and with it the collapse of Ziegfeld's finances and the revue's eventual closure, ended Johnston's golden period. In 1940, financial difficulties forced him out of his luxurious suite at the Hotel des Artistes and into retirement on a fifteen-acre farm in Oxford, Connecticut, where he reconstructed a version of his studio in a converted barn, stubbornly continuing to use his large-format camera until the end. He died in an automobile accident on April 17, 1971, outliving his wife by three years, with no children and, reportedly, only two people at his funeral. The Museum of Modern Art had already declined his donation offer a decade earlier — Edward Steichen, then head of the photography department, turned him away — and he died in near-total obscurity. Two years after his death, the Library of Congress, which had accepted 245 of his prints in 1960, mounted a memorial exhibition of his work.
Technique and Approach
Alfred Cheney Johnston 1921 by Alfred Cheney Johnston, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Johnston's technical signature was inseparable from his artistic formation as a painter and draftsman. His primary instrument was a Century Universal view camera producing 11×14-inch glass-plate negatives — an exceptionally large format that yielded contact prints of extraordinary tonal depth and fine detail, with none of the sharpness losses that enlargement introduces. The plates were his canvas in a quite literal sense: working in his bathroom-turned-darkroom, Johnston would set up an easel and apply developer chemical directly to the surface of the photograph with an artist's brush, softening hard edges and producing the glazed, slightly hazy backgrounds that became his visual trademark. He also frequently painted backdrops directly onto the glass negatives themselves, an approach that resolved his frustrated desire to be a painter and gave his images a peculiarly hybrid quality — photographic in their capture of light and flesh, pictorial in their construction of space and atmosphere.
His studio practice was equally deliberate. He maintained multiple backdrop stations simultaneously — a tapestry, a Japanese bird screen, a moveable white wall — so that a model could rotate through different setups in a single session. Props were plentiful and carefully chosen: Greek pedestals, peacock feathers, silk screens, fans, mirrors, Oriental rugs. Before any sitting, Johnston would meet his subjects over coffee at the restaurant below his building and make preliminary sketches, believing it essential to understand a woman's personality before attempting to render her on glass. He applied makeup himself when needed and draped his models in silks, laces, and velvets with such distinctive care that he earned the nickname "Mr. Drape."
The nude work — both the semi-nude Follies portraits published in his lifetime and the fully explicit images discovered posthumously at his farm — sits firmly within the Pictorialist tradition, a movement that had effectively been displaced by modernism decades before Johnston's peak years. This is precisely why critics and institutions largely ignored him: he was committed to soft focus, warm tonalities, Old Master lighting, and the decorative surface at a moment when photography's avant-garde was moving toward sharp edges and formal austerity. Yet within those conservative formal choices, Johnston pushed constantly at the edge of what was permissible. His only book published during his lifetime, the 1937 Enchanting Beauty, contains ninety-four photographs that are airbrushed in the pubic area — the legal minimum concession to publishing standards of the day. The posthumously discovered nudes make no such concessions. They are full-frontal, unretouched, and in the quality of their light and composition entirely consistent with the rest of his work — suggesting that the erotic and the aesthetic were never, for Johnston, meaningfully distinct categories.
Personal Considerations
Alfred Cheney Johnston Bergman ZiegfeldFollies by Alfred Cheney Johnston, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The case of Johnston is, like the previous about Mortensen, another example of the Pictorialist Photographer, who build his career in the famous Ziegfeld Follies during the 20s of XX century, ostracized by Edward Steichen so fascinated by sharp edges, detailed, defined and contrasty images that bear a great responsibility, given that nowadays we remember all too well imagery like the ones of Ansel Adams for landscapes and Helmut Newton for portraits and nudes, but very little has trickled from the glorious past of the pictorialism ages.
I mean, again, for commercial world – that surely demanded that kind of look – this preference was understandable, but for artistic photography? Well, let me say the following: if tripping today into the art nude photography section of any art gallery on line, or even on Etsy dot com, seems stale enough, mostly too similar to one another, well, we have guilty parties to put our fingers on.
That is why, I believe, study the styles and techniques of photographers like Johnston, Sturges, but even Mortensen, but in more recent times we can add also Joyce Tenneson and David Hamilton, remembering always a simple concept: technique must serve the meaning and the feeling to evoke in the frame, it is not the ultimate goal of an image – that is the fault and the failure that detailed, sharp, crispy, technically correct photography brings with it.
The best thing you can do, if you are a photographer in formation, is to abandon dogmas about Photography, start studying the authors I have written about in this series, go look for their images – above all in exhibitions if they happen to be near you, that is the best way to taste their craftmanship – interviews if existing, ideas, and then start thinking, how a shooting approach can serve what you want to say, depicting the subjects you prefer to portray, in confront of another.
Only this way you can have hope to beat generative AI, there is not other way around, less than ever the sharp, perfect, detailed image one.
Shine on!