For obvious technical reasons, photography of dramatic, dance, or musical performances was impossible during the medium's early history. But demand for photography of performers, along with those of royalty and other celebrities, fuelled the mid-and late 19th-century carte de visite and cabinet boom, and commercial photography generally into and beyond the postcard era. Theatre specialists included firms like Reutlinger in Paris, Sarony in New York, and London studios such as Elliot & Fry, whose valuable images of Lily Langtry, Henry Irving, and Buffalo Bill were registered, sometimes in large batches, under the 1862 Fine Art Copyright Act. In the inter-war years, Manassé in Vienna and Harcourt in Paris flourished on sales of glamour portraits of stage and screen stars in old and new formats, including cigarette cards.
The performance element of star portraits could be conveyed with relative ease in the studio, though never with more economy and grace than in Nadar's famous series of the mime Jean-Charles Debureau as Pierrot in 1854-5. The cult of the Wagnerian music drama from the 1860s tended to produce less elegant results. Joseph Albert's 1865 photograph of the principals of Tristan und Isolde, Ludwig and Malwine Schnorr von Carolsfeld, captured them in full costume on a creaking modern sofa. Later, Wagnerian scenes were often photographed on stage, with tanklike, helmeted performers posed amid the clutter of late 19th-century historicist decor. The Charlottenburg photographer Emil Schwalb used superimposition and retouching to convey the illusion of actual performance in his pictures, which appeared as postcards, prints, and illustrations in programmes and Wagner handbooks. The spread of half-tone printing by 1900, and the proliferation of theatrical magazines like Le Théâtre, Das Theater, and Bühne und Welt, increased demand for stage pictures generally, but particularly for full-set photographs of the ‘strong climaxes’ of new plays. Specialists in this kind of work included firms like Foulsham & Danfield in London's West End, and White's Studio and Byron in New York. The pictures were usually taken during dress rehearsals from a temporary platform in the stalls, and lit by carefully placed charges of magnesium flash.
In the 1920s the expanding illustrated press developed an appetite for pictures of performers of all kinds, from ballet dancers to clowns. A particularly versatile photojournalist was Felix H. Man, who photographed weightlifters in Munich beer cellars, jazz musicians in Berlin, and modern plays in both Germany and England. But his speciality was orchestral music. Usually permitted to set up a tripod—sometimes mistaken for a new instrument—in the orchestra during rehearsals to photograph conductors and soloists, he also succeeded with more dramatic or surreptitious shots at first nights and other ‘real’ performances.
Influential in the increasingly popular field of expressive modern dance was Arnold Genthe, who aspired, for technical reasons not always successfully, to liberate dance photography from the posed studio shot; his Book of the Dance appeared in 1916. Using more versatile equipment in the 1920s, though still based in the studio, Charlotte Rudolph in Dresden and Lotte Jacobi in Berlin were better at conveying the illusion of dynamic action. Especially memorable were Rudolph's exuberant image of the dancer Gret Palucca in 1923, published in Moholy-Nagy's Malerei, Fotografie, Film, and Jacobi's almost abstract study of Lieselotte Felger performing a spinning-top dance that almost eliminates her waist (1931). Jacobi continued to experiment with dance photography after emigrating to New York, and in 1950 montaged pictures of the dancer Pauline Koner with the cameraless images she called ‘Photogenics’. The former abstract painter Barbara Morgan, perhaps the most important dance photographer of the mid-20th century, also used experimental methods, including double exposure, in her celebrated photographs of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and other performers. Like Jacobi, she preferred the controlled conditions of the studio to the uncertainties of the theatre, and planned her pictures with extreme care. ‘Previsualisation’, she wrote, ‘is the first essential of dance photography. The ecstatic gesture happens swiftly and is gone; unless the photographer previsions in order to fuse action, light and space simultaneously, there can be no significant dance picture.’.
Some of the most famous photographs of the classical ballet had been taken before 1914 by Adolphe de
In the second half of the 20th century, performance photography became an ever larger, more varied, and more competitive field. Photographers already famous in other fields, like Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, did important work in the theatre. Cartier-Bresson, Guy Le Querrec, and others in France, and Dennis Stock (b. 1928) in the USA, were drawn to jazz. Roger Pic, working with the Renaud-Barrault company, and Brecht, broke away from the conventional ‘strong climaxes’ approach to photographing plays and tried to record the ebb and flow of performances in their totality. Longer, faster lenses, more sensitive films, and colour offered new creative possibilities, although fundamental problems remained. Dance photographers like Lois Greenfield, for example, continued to prefer the studio to the stage. Perhaps the most challenging new development since the 1950s was the rise of rock music, offering both performance and documentary opportunities. Its practitioners were soon legion. But a legend of its kind was Annie Leibovitz's 1975 tour with the Rolling Stones, a journey of discovery that not only produced unrivalled concert images but a visual chronicle of life on the road, the fans, and the whole scene.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Morgan, B., Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (1941).
- Beaton, C., and Buckland, G., The Magic Image: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (1975).
- Ewing, W. A., Fugitive Gestures: Masterpieces of Dance Photography (1987).
- Craske, O., Rock Faces (2004)
