Ziegfeld Revisited

Inspired by the French Folies Bergere, Florenz Ziegfeld created the Ziegfeld Follies in 1907. The Follies were lavish revues featuring glamourous chorus girls in elaborate costumes. I knew very little about the Ziegfeld Follies when makeup artist Alyria Salazar mentioned that it was her dream to do a Ziegfeld themed shoot. A web search led me to the work of Alfred Cheney Johnston and I was all in for creative vision.

Alfred Cheney Johnston was one of the great jazz-age portrait photographers. He is best known for his portraits of Ziegfeld Follies girls and silent film stars during the 1920’s-1930’s. During his 15 years working with Ziegfeld, he photographed hundreds of showgirls including early glamour icons such as Fanny Brice, Billie Burke, Louise Brooks, Ruby Keeler, Hazel Forbes, and Barbara Stanwick.

In creating the Ziegfeld Revisited series, we attempted to honor the style of Johnston’s portraits as faithfully as possible. We took great care to emulate the sets, lighting, props, hair and makeup. Apart from a few color images, the images were processed to simulate the photographic methods of the era.

We chose our models carefully. Prudence is a professional burlesque performer and had long been a fan of the Ziegfeld Follies. Prudence was already very familiar with images that inspired our shoot and absolutely channeled the poses and expressions of Johnston’s subjects (including the dead-on recreation of the iconic Louise Brooks below). Julia is a classic beauty whose penetrating eyes and exquisite body were a perfect fit for the project. We took a little artistic license having Kim as one of our Ziegfeld girls. Given the customs of the day, there were no Asian showgirls in the original Follies. But we loved Kim’s look and graceful poses and decided that the lack of diversity in the original Follies would remain their loss, not ours (I’m fairly certain that if Ziegfeld and Johnston were alive today, they'd agree).

We hope you enjoy viewing our homage to Alfred Cheney Johnston and his beautiful Ziegfeld Girls as much as we enjoyed creating it.