Two arts came to fullness together during the First World War and the decade afterwards: the theater and photography. In the United States they flourished in conjunction. The theater cleared the mists of pictorialism and the aura of amateurism from art photography. Photography dressed the stars of the stage with glamour and assisted in the extraordinary development of the visual dimension of dramaturgy. Histories of the theater have long recognized the importance of the period 1914-1934 for the development of the American stage. Every genre of theatrical performance burgeoned:
The Musical During these two decades the American musical shed its miscellaneous structure, bound song to story telling, nourished a generation of musical masters in Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and finally cleansed the perfume of European operetta from its form.
Drama found a new psychological depth and modernity of presentation, turning away from the historicism and drawing room naturalism of David Belasco, to symbolism, irrationalism, and expressionism at the hands of Alla Nazimova, The Theater Guild, the Group Theater, Eugene O'Neil, and Elmer Rice.
The revue at the hands of Florenz Ziegfeld, George White, and Earl Carroll brought stage spectacle to a new visual brilliance, pioneering a new cosmopolitanism of topical wit, and making the female body the focus of a spectacular imaginative revisualization.
The Dance came to an expressive maturity with the Castles and the Astaires inspiring a national craze for social dancing, Gertrude Hoffman, Isadora Duncan, the Ballet Russe, Ruth St. Denis & Ted Shawn, Mischio Itow revolutionizing the forms and ends of stage dancing.
Vaudeville enjoyed its final burst of glory, bring jazz to the stage, and vernacular virtuosity to towns across America, before its extinction during the Depression.
Photography remains the most evocative medium preserving these landmark innovations. Yet the photographers who enable us to see the stage bloom into creative maturity have rarely been recognized for their contributions to the making of the American theater, particularly for their role in the fashioning of the visual languages of glamour, psychological dread, and 'the new.' Conversely, the theater's influence upon the visual language of 20th century photography, has not received its due. How did stage lighting and the disposition of persons and things on the stage influence the play of light and shadow, space and substance in the pictorial field of a photograph? Of the 40 important studios doing theatrical photography in the United States from 1900 to 1935, six have received attention in print-those of Arnold Genthe, Edward Steichen, James Abbe, Francis Bruguiere, Nickolas Muray, and Adolph DeMeyer. There exists no published account of the development of the crafts of entertainment portraiture or stage photography during this period.
