20 Alfred Cheney Johnston Nude Photographs: An Art Gallery

This gallery presents 20 nude and semi-nude studies by or attributed to portrait photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston, best known as the photographer of the Ziegfeld Follies revue. Made largely during the 1920s and 1930s, the photographs show Johnston using classical poses, drapery, soft focus, and theatrical settings to transform the nude into a form of Jazz Age glamour. Most of the sitters are unidentified.

Alfred Cheney Johnston Nude Photographs as Classical Art

Alfred Cheney Johnston composed photographs in the oldest tradition of representing the human figure. Johnston posed his sitters the way a painter or a sculptor would: full-length, the weight on one hip in an easy contrapposto, an arm lifted, a length of drapery falling from the hand to pool on the floor.

Soft focus gives the prints the surface of a mezzotint or a chalk drawing. The effect is deliberately statuary: a living model asked to hold the stillness of marble.

Art Nude Photography in the 1920s

In Johnston’s time, a handful of photographers were elevating the nude to serious art. In New York, Alfred Stieglitz made his extended, reverent studies of Georgia O’Keeffe, begun around 1918 and shown to acclaim in 1921; these were perhaps the most celebrated nude series in the medium.

In Paris, Man Ray’s pictures of Kiki de Montparnasse are among the most famous photographs ever made. In Prague, František Drtikol collected salon medals across Europe for nudes dissolved into Art Deco geometry and dramatic shadow.

Johnston was not part of the high art world. He was a commercial portraitist—”Ziegfeld’s photographer.” We are not sure why he photographed so many nudes. But his pictures are unmistakably art: carefully lit, classically posed, built on painted sets and antique props with real compositional ambition.

Set beside Stieglitz’s intimacy, Man Ray’s wit, and Drtikol’s geometry, Johnston’s work is a fourth thing: the glamour of the American stage rendered in the language of the classical nude. He belongs in the conversation, even if he never set out to join it.

20 Alfred Cheney Johnston Nude Studies, 1920s–1930s

This is a collection of Johnston nude studies from the 1920s and 1930s. The images contain artistic nudity. Click any photograph to view it larger.

The story behind these images: why Alfred Cheney Johnston made his nude photographs.

See the Library of Congress and Los Angeles County Museum of Art for additional Johnston nude photograph studies.