Alfred Cheney Johnston
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Alfred Cheney Johnston (April 8, 1885– April 1971) was a photographer born in New York City, known for his portraits of Ziegfeld Follies showgirls.
Biography
Johnston was born into a New York banking family. Initially he studied painting and illustration at the National Academy of Design in New York but after graduating in 1908 he failed in his attempt to become a portrait painter. Instead, he started to use the camera previously used to record his subjects as his creative medium. Early in his career he did uncredited work a retoucher at the Sarony Studio. In 1917 Johnston was hired by famed New York City live-theater showman Florenz Ziegfeld as his staff photographer, and was affiliated with the Ziegfeld Follies for the next fifteen years or so (he also maintained his own 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 retail commercial products for magazine ads). He photographed literally thousands of showgirls (mainly in New York City, and whether they were part of the Follies or not) during that time period. Johnston typically employed a large view camera that produced 11x14-inch glass-plate negatives, so a standard Johnston 11x14 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. Johnston's "standard" work, of course, was used by Flo Ziegfeld for the normal advertising and promotional purposes for the Follies. However, after Johnston's death in 1971, a treasure trove of extremely artistic full-nude and semi-nude full-figure studio photos (and their accompanying glass-plate negatives) was found stored at the farm in Connecticut where he'd lived since 1940. Most of these untold hundreds of models were, in fact, showgirls from the Ziegfeld Follies, but such daring, unretouched full-frontal images would certainly have had no public-publication possibilities in the 1920s-1930s, so it is speculated that these were either simply his own personal work, and/or done at the behest of Flo Ziegfeld for that showman's personal enjoyment.
See also
