Alfred Cheney Johnston (April 8, 1885– April 17, 1971) was a photographer born in New York City, known for his portraits of Ziegfeld Follies showgirls.
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 unaccredited work as a retoucher at the Sarony Studio.
In approximately 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 upscale retail commercial products — mostly men’s and women’s fashions — for magazine ads). He photographed possibly more than a thousand 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 J
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.)
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 huge 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 near Oxford, 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.
The only book known to have been published by Alfred Cheney Johnston during his lifetime devoted to his nudes/glamour photography is the 1937 spiral-bound softcover "Enchanting Beauty", which contains 94 black-and-white photos (mostly about 7×9 inches, centered on a 9×12-inch page, although a number are cropped circular or in other designs). Unusually (compared to virtually all other examples of his work seen today on the Web or other sources), 37 of these photos were taken outdoors along a stream or in flower-dappled fields, etc. Unfortunately–but not surprisingly–all the shots in the book are "airbrushed" in the pubic area, to keep them legal with respect to the publishing standards of the day. Text from Wikipedia
In 1960, Johnston donated a set of 250 large prints of his work (largely nude and semi-nude Follies showgirls and some well-known actresses of the 1920s/1930s) to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Apparently five of them have "gone missing" over the years, but the Library still has 245 images in its Prints and Photographs divison (Lot 8782).
Alfred Cheney Johnston died in a car crash in Connecticut on April 17, 1971, a few years after the death of his longtime wife, Doris.
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