Beauty, Aspiration, and Commerce

Abstract

Alfred Cheney Johnston (1885–1971) was among the most renowned photographers of the Jazz Age yet has received little sustained attention in academic scholarship. Best known for portraits of Ziegfeld Follies performers, Johnston worked within the pictorialist tradition while adapting it to commercial advertising and celebrity publicity. As Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s designated photographer, he worked with women widely praised as the epitome of American beauty—a condition that freed both sitter and photographer from trying too hard to “prove” glamour; instead, an atmosphere of unforced confidence permeates the images. This article argues that Johnston’s studio practice was particularly effective at sustaining slow viewing through display of glamour and confidence. His photographs also document how women’s expanding public visibility in the 1920s took shape within established systems of commercial promotion, offering an aspirational visibility that his images both reflected and helped construct. Through close analysis of several portraits, the article shows how Johnston’s images render women simultaneously as public icons and as modern individuals asserting presence. It further examines how more directive, message-driven styles that emerged during the late 1920s and early 1930s in glamour and advertising photography rendered Johnston obsolete and ultimately marginalized him within the art-historical canon. Considered as well are the digital afterlives of his photographs, which circulate widely online as retro icons of feminine—and often feminist—appeal. In this context, Johnston’s work offers insight into how commercial portraiture has shaped, and continues to inform, an aspirational vision of femininity.