WRITTEN IN THE STARS

Glamour, Text, Collecting and Rotary postcards
“The Press is perhaps a good deal to blame for the prominence of the “star” actor, and, even more damaging, the prominence of the “picture-postcard” actress who is the mainstay of the pernicious twaddle that passes for musical comedy.”

Dublin Daily Express, August 31 1910

If dates are your thing then the history of the Rotary Photographic Company is obscure, or even murky. Some very credible sources say the firm was established in 1899 while others, equally respectable, put it at 1901. Likewise some say its end came in 1921 but newspaper reports have it on record applying for bankruptcy in April 1916. Of course, everybody could be right, depending on the definition of ‘established’ (a company can change its name and its identity while the owners remain constant) and ‘folded’ (as in either ‘matters were in the hands of lawyers’ or ‘it actually died’). As for the owner, J. Menger, not only are his birth and death details unknown but his first name is often followed by a question mark. That said, the only interesting thing about the facts is that we don’t have them. All we really need to know about the Rotary Photographic Company is that between 1901 and World War 1 it led the pack among British postcard publishers when it came to design, and this at a time when nearly 200 million postcards were bought each year. Bankruptcy must have seemed like a distant and unlikely threat.

  Rotary was known for several themes (landscape not among them) but it based its reputation on real photographic postcards of actresses. An article in the Leeds Mercury in August 1903 has a spokesperson from the company talk about the demand for postcards of musclemen and “masculine musicians” though the “matinee girls” are what the customers really want. Millions were produced, and millions still gather dust in English flea markets. It’s understandable that people quickly weary of sorting through piles of images of the Dare sisters but scattered among the ordinary are postcards that display a vivid sense of graphic design, all the better for being photographs. Here in a play on a postcard of postcards, Phyllis Dare shows off some of the cards she appears on. Some decades later, post-modernists would take the idea of self-referentializing tres seriously but for Rotary’s designers it was just the standard grist.

  The lettering is faintly macabre, but worse than that it is inelegant. Anyone familiar with the work of French studios like Reutlinger would know something of the same idea was being worked across the Channel though with a more sophisticated sense of style. In Paris the stars of the theatre were sold as beautiful creatures too chic to share space with ordinary proles, but in England they were always of the people. The women in Reutlinger postcards rarely smiled while the English actresses always did, and not just smile but look positively delighted to be with the customer. Airs were things they put on in private.

These postcards were constructed exactly the way the Reutlinger cards were. The three portraits would have been taken at different sessions; in fact Rotary wouldn’t have cared who was in the image just so long as there was an existing photo of her. They might have used the lettering and background on dozens of cards differing only in the actresses appearing on them. The difference was that Reutlinger was a studio while Rotary was a publisher. Mr Menger may never have set foot in a darkroom. 

 “”Do introduce your little friends,” smiling upon the rather awkward group, as Camel said afterwards, “just like a postcard actress”.”

This rather awkward line is from an inexplicably forgotten story called Bride from Bloomsbury by Anthony Upperton, published in the Dundee Courier on July 29 1925. It turned up after the age of the postcard actress; it, and she, had more or less passed into history by the end of WW1 but we get the idea. The postcard actress was a sweet and pretty creature though she was expected to have less personality than some six-legged inhabitants of the space behind the furniture. 

 In 1906 actress Florence Smithson took Rotary to court to prevent the company from publishing photos of her taken by A. E. Chandler of Exeter. The reasons why she didn’t want the photos used might have something to do with her not being paid any rights. We don’t know how the case turned out – the press quickly lost interest in following it – but if it was a rights issue then effectively she had none. Chandler may have paid her for the privilege of taking her portrait; that was common practice among the minor studios but once he had secured the images – prints and negatives – were his. When the Rapid Photo Company came up with the design for this card, it could have asked photographers like Chandler for any portraits. Only if Ms Smithson was appearing in a popular play would the company have snapped up her portrait. Even a major star like Sarah Bernhardt, at the bottom right, wasn’t likely to get a cent from this postcard even if it sold in the thousands. Behind these cheerful scenes lay some ruthless negotiating. 

Here’s a card from the rival Philco Company, interesting because it tells us as much about collecting as it does about how postcards were made. Like Rotary, Philco didn’t take any portraits but paid for existing ones. By setting the faces in a puzzle it was encouraging people to collect a whole set, here of the missing word series. Another card in the collection is identical to this save the message in the middle. 

 And here is a card copyrighted by Ralph Dunn, a photographer working out of 63 Barbican. Notice how the same portrait of Gertie Millar is used in the Philco card. It’s possible that Dunn took the original then sold rights to Philco but it is just as likely both bought rights from a third party. If that was the case, Dunn was making a claim on the idea of having Ms Millar jump out of a Christmas cracker. 

 

 Here’s another of Dunn’s postcards. He liked the surreal effects of photo-montage. Despite his claims to copyright, Dunn has liberally borrowed from Reutlinger, especially in this image. We ought not feel too much outrage given Reutlinger took a liberal attitude to borrowing himself. Mr Dunn was also taken by the idea of actresses popping out of things; as no doubt were many like-minded elderly gents.

 

 If the messages on the backs of these cards are any guide, the most serious collectors of postcards were young women. In the Flossie card below one young lady asks another specifically how her collection is coming along. But back to Lucy. The moon, the stars, the beautiful actresses making up the name: we are in the land of dreamy dreams, a pre-Freudian world where all things and all thoughts need only be beautiful. 

 

The idea of cramming the typography with portraits of actresses may not have originated with Rotary but it became something of a signature. Two things are happening here. The first is that the viewer is quietly impressed with the trickery; it’s like watching a magic show knowing all along you’re being played with. The second is that the collectors inevitably try to identify the actresses, which is another way of saying they intellectually engage with the images. 

No one is called Flossie anymore; even cats won’t answer to the name. 

Our final card is a tribute to an unaccredited designer’s eye and an example of why this era was destined to be brief. While the idea is not original there are dozens of individual photographic images sure to make some assistant’s week a nightmare while a recipient was bound to spend hours gazing at every detail. Excellent, on both counts, but at the same time we can see an aesthetic straddling the last dull edge of the Victorian age and the cleaner, sharper post-war modernism with some discomfort.

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WRITTEN IN THE STARS

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

Real photo postcards from the Edwardian stage

“Romance at short notice was her specialty.” 

Saki; The Open Window

 Real photo postcards of actresses are one of the enduring legacies of the Edwardian era; ‘enduring’ to mean lasting although the general impression from a recent visit to the Spitalfields Market was that interminable would be more apt. Not surprising when you read how many thousands of millions of postcards were published then sent each year of the 1900s and how photos of stage actresses were far and above the most popular category in Britain. But amidst the glut of portraits of women in ubiquitous broad-brimmed, feathery hats and puffy blouses, with their stiff composures and curiously sexless expressions, there are occasional images that catch the eye. Just about every one of Hettie King will do that. She was one of several actresses who made an art of male impersonation. It seems that while transvestitism among the citizenry could always create an absolute scandal in the late Victorian and Edwardian era, gender impersonation in the theatre was a specialized skill and in demand, with none of the connotations of sexual or political transgression apparent today.  Of course, Ms King was a comic actress: she played the man for laughs, and laughs in the Edwardian theatre were often of the double entendre type.

It was already a convention in pantomime that the crotchety widow or the scheming stepmother was played by a man; this was comedy after all. When J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan debuted in 1904 it was standard for the lead character to be played by a young actress. The play’s subtitle was the boy who wouldn’t grow up and gender ambiguity was a useful metaphor for somebody trapped in a physical and emotional cocoon. Zena Dare was one of the first actresses to play Peter Pan. Here she is as Napoleon, another comedic role for which the English typically cast women. Well that must have stung Gallic pride, or perhaps not since the Paris music halls had long taken cross-dressing to places the English theatre nervously avoided. 

 Zena Dare is one of those people, like Gabrielle Ray. Lily Elsie and Marie Studholme, who were prolifically photographed for postcards in the 1900s yet whose name barely stirs a hint of recognition today. This is inevitable when we think of the thousands of actresses and advances in technology since the 1900s, yet it might be also reflect a particularly British attitude. Where the French loved scandal and their theatre stars made the most of that, over the Channel the female artistes were presented as having much more sensible private lives. If the reputations of Cléo de Mérode and Caroline Otero live on it is for their behaviour off-stage whereas someone who enjoyed a few years in the West End limelight then married well and retired from the stage to cross breed apples on the Sussex Downs would at best be damned with faint praise by being heralded as a national treasure. 

                       

 Not everyone was so apparently blessed. During the first decade of the last century, Gabrielle Ray was reckoned to be the most photographed woman in the world. Though she was acclaimed as an actress and dancer, a look at her résumé suggests she wasn’t being called to play Lady Macbeth or Juliet or any of the other roles that defined a special talent. It may have been her looks alone that attracted so much attention, in which case her tragedy was as typical as it was awful. Agents, directors, producers – especially fat, white and ugly ones – can love a face without caring what lies behind. Even a casual reading of Ray’s biographical details suggests her alcoholism had something to do with her being marketed for her face not her acting. In 1936 she suffered yet another breakdown and spent the rest of her life – all thirty seven years of it – in psychiatric institutions.

Here’s a good quote from Ray found on the Footlight Notes page. As she makes clear, kissing was fun in 1906, but not as much as tearing about the countryside in a motor car: I have done a lot of motoring, but very little kissing. At the same time, I think it would be a pity to discourage those who like kissing because it seems to please them very much. If I have by accident kissed anyone I have never heard any complaint about my mouths; but there, you see, I put cream on my face when going out in a motor-car, because before I used to do so the wind made my face very dry.”

 We’ll get back to the subjects but we can’t ignore the photographers: William Downey and his son Daniel, Alexander Bassano, the sisters Rita Martin and Lallie Charles (previously discussed HERE) and Francis Foulsham and Arthur Banfield, whose work Cecil Beaton dismissed as “rather quaint in (its) woodenness”. To be fair, that same criticism could have been levelled at most of the photographers, and to be fair again, it wasn’t always their fault. You get the impression with some people that they couldn’t make the intellectual jump between appearing on stage and before a still camera. Maud Jeffries was an international star, pulling in full houses from London to New York to Sydney, especially for the faux biblical epic The Sign of the Cross. You wouldn’t know it from this image. She looks like someone shoved a papier-mâché crucifix in her hands and told her to look fearful of the Lord. This inability to perform for the camera is a common complaint from the period, and comes from photographers, producers and actors. Numerous Edwardian performers will spurn the cinema while others will take it on and fail. The typical explanation is that the actor needs the human presence, the applause and even the heckling, in order to perform. 

 

 Being a photographer to the stars carried responsibilities. The studios above also photographed royalty and anyone else who required an official portrait. What mattered most to their non-theatrical subjects – royals, politicians, etc – was that there be no surprises. Politicians showed gravitas, the prince dignity. They were expected to be a lot more creative with stage performers, which could be hard when the process was a treadmill. Faced with a client list of several dozen performers, each demanding the special touch, even the best photographers could exhaust their repertoire. In the same way, some tricks could startle at first but quickly became clichéd. Phyllis Dare was Zena Dare’s sister. Born in 1890, she began acting when she was nine and by the time she was fifteen was a star in light comedies. When she was seventeen (around the time this photo was taken) she published her autobiography and became one of the first in a long line of juvenile performers to author a necessarily thin and vacuous account of a life so far unlived. The title was From School to Stage, which sounds like it covered everything.

 

 For some of us, the very definition of a perfect Friday afternoon involves sitting down with a pile of century old directories and tracking down long forgotten photographic studios. No matter what joys the exercise holds, there are times when running into brick walls becomes tiring. Who was Kilpatrick? It was usual though not compulsory to attribute the photographer or studio on the postcard but Rotary, which published the card, only licensed the image. There was a studio belonging to a Kilpatrick in Dublin and if Ms Studholme travelled to that city for a performance and the studio paid to photograph her, it could have sold the image on to Rotary. Given that Ms Studholme performed in America and what the English quaintly refer to as ‘the colonies’, the studio could have been anywhere in the English speaking world. Her costume here looks Wagnerian, but operetta rather than opera. 

 

 Here’s another minor mystery. This portrait of Lily Brayton is credited to Johnston and Hoffman, recognized as one of the leading studios at the time – in Calcutta. The National Portrait Gallery in London have 52 portraits by the company in their archives, mostly of theatrical stars. Either we are talking about two companies having the same name or Johnston and Hoffmann opened a branch in London. The latter seems more likely, but if so you’d think that would warrant a mention in the entries found in various encyclopaedias. Once again we have a case of the gender role reversals and while there is a passably interesting history of women dressing as eighteenth century highwaymen, what’s really interesting about this is that we see a really professional use of electric lighting. This was uncommon in the early 1900s. Electric lighting was still too expensive for a lot of studios and even those who could afford it needed to relearn photography to understand how to use it properly. 

 

 Dover Street Studios are another commonly encountered name. Interesting that among a dozen or so sighted, variations on the Gibson girl look are prominent. It looks like the studio had an agenda. The GG’s identifying features were her hairstyle and the long, tight dress or gown, both seen here in Ms Gertie Sinclair. It was actually a North American fashion. The graphic artist who designed the look, Charles Dana Gibson, wanted to capture the essence of the ideal American women, whose very modernness he attributed to a composite of cultural ethnicities and attitudes. I don’t know how successfully the Gibson Girl caught on in Britain.

 

 The cabbage is a nice touch. Here Ms Millar wears the costermonger’s outfit that inspired the original pearly kings and queens, Like Peter Pan, Aladdin was an obviously male figure commonly played by women and the musical, The New Aladdin transplanted the oriental story to London. 

 

 Here’s a well-known study of the Moores, theatrical family of course, of whom Decima and Eva became the best known. As discussed in the post on Rita Martin, the relationship between the theatrical world and the suffragettes was more convoluted than you might think, and thanks in no small part to the suffragettes habit of throwing gas bombs into theatres and ruining performances. The Moores however were firmly behind the movement to give women the vote and were among the founders of the Actresses’ Franchise League, which among other activities produced the plays, How the Vote was Won and Votes for Women. I want to say more but do the research yourself. It’s worth the effort.

 

 And here is Eva Moore with her son in an image that is strange on several levels though in Edwardian England it would have met with widespread approval. These portraits of actresses with their children are more than commonplace. They are a reminder of the sharp distinction between London and Paris, where it was advisable for an actress not to indicate she had a family. They were also a protest against the popular image of the stage as the home of outcasts and other ne’er do wells. How better to show the world that the theatre was not only glamorous but also respectable than by showing actress mums with their kids. Except of course that young Master Moore looks miserable, as you might if Mum had made you put on a clown costume then dragged you before a camera.

 

 There are of course many postcards of male actors and there is a world waiting to be read in the differences between the two, but let’s end with an image of one of the best known female impersonators of the age, Malcolm Scott. Like Hettie King, his choice of role was no indication of his orientation and it seems he lived an otherwise ordinary life with wife and family in the suburbs. What’s to like about this photo of course is its various assumptions. We are told that is Mr Scott but we don’t know for sure. For all we know it could be Hettie King playing Malcolm Scott playing Hettie King; a conundrum we think made perfect sense to the Edwardians. We are lucky that so many of these photographs lie scattered throughout flea markets in abundance. In an age when some people think they can charge small fortunes for snapshots they didn’t take but bought for 25 cents, it’s great to have so many images from the Edwardian theatre, a world that is both familiar and disruptive.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

MY FAIR LADY

Rita Martin; a forgotten photographer

“These pictures are the acme of artificiality and as far removed from nature … as a hat trimmed with artificial summer fruits.”

Cecil Beaton

 All the photographs in this post are of Lily Brayton, the beautiful and celebrated star of Shakespearean drama in the Edwardian era, but she is not the focus. That belongs to Rita Martin, the London portrait photographer who was one of the best known in Britain at the time but is strangely neglected today. It is not unusual to encounter photographers who were household names in their time yet don’t crack a mention in any of the encyclopaedias, but what makes Ms Martin’s case special is that where she does get attention it is for the high standard of her work and her innovative techniques: two qualities you’d think historians would have picked up on.

 

 The facts are these: she was born Margareta Weir Martin in Ireland in 1875 and died in 1958. According to the photoLondon Database her studio was at 74 Baker Street, Marylebone, a mile or so away from the studio of her better-known sister Lallie Charles in Curzon Street, Mayfair. The addresses were in exclusive neighbourhoods. A photo by Lallie Charles in the National Portrait Gallery database shows the two women and their sister Bea in what was probably Lallie’s studio C1899. The furnishings and décor are what we would expect of a high-end studio of the age: a distinct oriental element in the screens, rugs and vases, potted ferns (or are they lilies?) and dark, elaborately tooled tables and chairs. The women have that dreamy gaze we associate with the late-Victorian era; as though life in this room is too achingly elegant to risk leaving it. In 1975 Cecil Beaton co-authored with Gail Buckland a personal history of photography, The Magic Mirror, to which he added an appendix; Commercial Photographers of the Victorian and Edwardian Era. Like the other appendices it accounted for photographers who hadn’t fitted with the general theme of the book. Rita Martin and Lallie Charles were given more attention than anyone else in this section. There’s a sense reading it that Beaton knew Martin - not Charles: she died in 1919 - particularly when he intimates that the sisters fell out. It reads like gossip he received first hand.  

 

 The quote from Beaton at the top however comes from his book British Photographers, part of the Britain in Pictures series published by William Collins during World War II. Each thin volume contained a short essay by a noted authority and thirty or so reproductions of artworks in colour and black and white. The topics ranged from butterflies to canals to a history of fashion: all of them intended to remind people of what was too precious to let fall into the hands of the Germans. Beaton’s contribution included one of his famous scenes of Saint Paul’s Cathedral during the blitz. Given the brief amount of space Beaton was allowed, that he would give more attention to Rita Martin than he would to Lewis Carroll or Roger Fenton may seem surprising, but when you look at his early work especially it is clear that Martin and Charles had defined for him what studio portraiture could achieve. For Beaton, artificiality is a compliment. In The Magic Mirror he says of both sisters that “they transcended the stereotyped (and) showed a tyranny over their subjects, who were willing to do their bidding, for they knew they were being beautified”. Beaton could be describing his own working methods. During the first decade of the twentieth century, photographic postcards of stage actresses were popular around the world. Most studios placed the subject before an elaborate stage backdrop, emphasizing the theatricality above the performer. Rita Martin preferred to place her women in a stark setting that obliged the viewer to consider their stage presence.

 

 Lallie Charles was a photographer of the royal family and made her name more as a society photographer. To understand how she and her sister developed their styles and reputations, we need to consider Alice Hughes, one of the most formidable presences on London’s late-Victorian photographic scene. She would not photograph men. You might think taking this stand at the beginning of the suffragette era would marginalize her, but around the turn of the century her studio was so popular with society women and stage stars that she employed up to sixty assistants; again, none of them men. Lallie Charles was probably one (this is unclear) but the more important point is that Hughes rejected the standard sepia, Pictorialist view for the very expensive, beautifully rendered platinum prints in sharp focus. One of the criticisms of Pictorialism, then and now, was that the photographers frequently confused artistic excellence with vapid sentimentality. A soft focus view of a society lady admiring a tulip might sound like a good idea in theory but the result could make her look as fascinating as a blade of grass in a paddock. Charles and Martin took Hughes’ ideas and when it came to publishing postcards saw the virtue in refining them, reducing background interference, or removing it altogether. Their success however owed as much to their ability to impart or inspire a performance for the camera, something few actors were seriously expected to do.

 

 According to Beaton, Martin had a contract with the theatre manager George Edwardes that gave her exclusive rights to photograph Lily Elsie and other performers once a month. This may not be entirely accurate, or may have only existed for a short time, because other studios photographed Ms Elsie. One was Foulsham and Banfield, whose work Beaton waspishly described as “rather quaint in their woodenness”. The general impression is that all power resided with management. Edwardes could agree to such a contract, as long as Ms Martin kept her fees to a figure he thought was reasonable. More likely, a successful performer like Lily Brayton had enough influence to ask for Rita Martin, and if sales of postcards justified her demands Edwardes would agree. 

 

 Although Ms Martin photographed several leading men of the stage, of the 322 prints held by the National Portrait Gallery, only three are of men alone, though a couple more are of men with their families. The number of prints is enough to be representative and suggests that like Alice Hughes, Ms Martin had principles she couldn’t be persuaded from. The first instinct is to say these were political, but on second thoughts it may have been that she was essentially interested in glamour. That wasn’t a word many male actors would have wanted to be associated with in the 1910s or actually applied to them. It implied an interest in haute couture and other womanly pursuits. When you look through lists of images of male Edwardian actors, they tend to go for either comedy or dashing but respectable, and were typecast as one or the other. Lily Brayton on the other hand could wear costumes from across the centuries and cultures and still transmit an aura of chic allure. For a photographer of the stage, male actors were boring.

 

 According to the NPG website, Lallie Charles photographed some of the suffragettes. Rita Martin photographed Rosamund Massy from the National Women’s Social and Political Union. What does this mean? Were they sympathisers? Were they asked to because they were well-known women photographers? Was it because, like Lily Brayton, the suffragettes were part of the cultural milieu? None of these questions cancels another so the answer may be all three but it’s worth remembering that while London’s theatre world might have been thought progressive, there wasn’t a huge amount of sympathy for the suffragettes. The actress and singer Anna Held complained that they went about slapping men and when they started setting fire to theatres and letting off smoke bombs inside that predictably turned people off them. Rita Martin may have believed that women had the right to vote and agreed to photograph some of the suffragettes but that didn’t mean she was obliged to like any of them.    

 

 Which brings us to the important issue of why she has been forgotten. It isn’t as though her work is hard to find, and she was well enough known in the 1940s for Beaton to assume his readers needed no formal introduction to her. It’s one thing to discover a previously unknown photographer, vis-a-vis Vivian Maier, but when a photographer has a substantial body of work in an archive the neglect is not random. Perhaps, like her sister, she’s seen as too establishment, too Edwardian, and her portraits of theatre stars don’t cast a challenging light on the social history. But the photo-historian’s first job should be to write the history, not re-write it and clearly there are spaces that need filling in. A common myth about early theatre portraits is that they were perfunctory commercial jobs and the genre didn’t take off until a handful of photographers in the 1930s (Beaton in particular) introduced an individual style. If that is the case, these portraits of Lily Brayton reveal a relationship between photographer and subject that was decades ahead of its time.

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MY FAIR LADY

FANCY DRESS

Images of fancy dress

“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.” 

Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited

At a recent conference in Nottingham Verity Wilson from Oxford gave an engaging presentation on fancy dress in photography. A historian of fashion and textiles rather than photography, she admitted the topic was broader than she had first anticipated. Well, yes. Once anyone started talking about fancy dress in photography they would quickly have to set out parameters and enforce definitions before they were swamped. Here are just a few of the types, genres if you like, of photographs where people not only dressed up for the camera but assumed roles for it: theatrical, tableaux de vivant, family snapshots, glamour, fashion, folk costumes for the tourist market, tourists in folk costumes, fancy dress balls and costume parties, national identity, the erasure of identity and with all that we haven’t left the 19^th century yet. Someone asked how we could tell the difference between a fancy dress photo and one of an acting troupe. Often we can’t though the distinction matters. We think actors in costume are less interesting than ordinary citizens in fancy dress because they are only doing their job. The photo above was taken in Winnipeg, C1910. I think it is a group of actors because most of them look like actors but I say that not knowing what exactly an actor looks like. And if it is a group of actors, does it matter if they are amateur rather than professional? Fancy dress in photographs is a form of amateur theatre.

For the purposes of the presentation Ms Wilson excluded actors. She was more interested in that basic desire we have to slip into another character and how the camera was the perfect machine to help us achieve that. It gives us a record that verifies the memory but more than that, from the very beginning there was the idea that the camera was a truth machine and the photograph a fact, so what better use was to be made of it than to manufacture evidence? You could assume any identity you wanted; the camera would vouch for it. 

From the Edwardian era into the 1920s, costume parties were incredibly popular at Oxbridge colleges, particularly among the arts students. A whole mythology has been built around the parties Stephen Tennant and his circle of bright young things threw and cameras were essential. The various images we have of their parties don’t suggest the behaviour was particularly wild but then, people tended to stop what they were doing as soon as the camera came out and hold that pose (Cecil Beaton was often the photographer). Evelyn Waugh’s descriptions of them usually amount to scenes of giggling groups in retarded adolescence recklessly driving around dressed as playing cards, or something to that effect. Fancy dress was part of being liberated. Some social historians relate it to the passing of the Victorian era, others to the end of the First World War, though both seem to be missing something. Just as important was a conscious effort among younger generations to engage in adult games like masked balls that had once been reserved for the very wealthy. The people in this photograph look too rough around the edges part of the Bright Young Thing set; notice how the two men are wearing carpets for togas. 

Tableaux vivant were also a popular Victorian then Edwardian pastime, but unlike costume parties the photograph was the whole point. A scene like this could take hours to put together, given that first it had to be imagined, people had to dress for it and then it had to be arranged. I can’t explain the thinking behind this though it may have had its origins in some fairly trashy artwork. It is possible the children were in a school play but we know Charles Dodgson took a lot of these staged scenes with children and there’s no reason to think he wasn’t following a fashion. During the era when tableaux vivant were popular, people didn’t shy from the morbid or grotesque. For a series of tableaux vivant look at Luminous Lint here.   

This image appears to combine elements of the costume party and the tableau vivant. If it is a costume party I doubt it was very decadent since there appear to be young children in this scene – and no sign of alcohol. They are dressed as Japanese. No idea why they are all pretending to be asleep unless the photographer wanted the impression this was a dream. Despite the costumes, something about this photo tells you immediately it was taken in England.

When it came to fancy dress, other cultures were high on the list, and the more exotic the better. The gut reaction to call it colonialist, or worse, needs to be tempered with the huge number of images we have of Chinese dressing as westerners, Turks as Arabs, Arabs as Chinese and so on. If the motive for dressing as another culture is a joke in bad taste it is also universal. This was obvuiously taken in a photo studio. Was dressing up as Arabs one of the services the studio offered? It isn’t so strange when you think how popular studio cowboys were (see here) or even sitting in a papier maché boat. It is possible too that they are soldiers on the North African front in the Second World War. When he was in Constantinople after the Crimean War, Roger Fenton wanted to photograph some of the locals in their native dress but was too shy to ask. When he returned to England he got his friends to dress up instead.

This is by Theodore Servanis, a Greek photographer working in Constantinople from the 1900s to the 1920s, and it is obviously from a school play. If the play is a French classic by Moliére, Hugo or one of their cohorts, the school was most likely Armenian as French was often the language of instruction and these were the schools that taught European classics. French wasn’t just the language of commerce; it distinguished high from low culture. If the intention was to present the façade of sophistication you could argue that was another form of fancy dress. The wristwatch the girl on the far right wears is a nice touch.

Compare the Servanis photo to this one. The man’s costume indicates he is Meskhetian Turkish, from Georgia, which when this was taken was part of the USSR. Technically this is traditional rather than fancy dress but he wouldn’t have worn this costume in his daily life. The date this was taken is important. In 1944 Stalin began a purge of Georgia and the Meskhetians who weren’t killed fled to the Black Sea region of Turkey, Trabzon in particular. If this was taken at that time he is probably a refugee making an obvious political point.

Speaking of national identity, this woman was photographed at an Elizabethan fair in England on July 30, 1924. Some quick research suggests that the Elizabethan theme was popular for fetes and fairs at the time; several examples of advertisements pop up on the internet. Historians who like symmetry might find it revealing that at one end we have the beginning of the British Empire, at the other its end, but it isn’t really clear that in 1924 most English people accepted the Empire was over. More likely; Elizabethan suggested not only elaborate costumes but also Merrie England, that hard to locate halcyon era that apparently existed sometime after the Black Death and before industrialization. These days we associate Elizabethan with ruthless machinations at the court, religious persecution and the prelude to revolution. History can take the fun out of the past.

What is it with the Far East? As often as not, fancy dress has meant the Orient, for women especially. Around 1880 Japanese style started to become fashionable. One reason was that the country had only recently opened its ports to the West and designers discovered the concept of style with minimum appearance. Teapots, bureaus and vases turned Japanese and kimonos and bamboo umbrellas became fashion items. Ancient Egypt had been popular at the same time but interest waned until Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered in the 1920s. Japan however never went away. If its allure remained mysterious it might be because the country was never colonized by Europeans. Its stuff never belonged to the West so it never lost its glamour. And if you think about it, there are a lot of things we Europeans can’t do these days; it is crude to wear black face or dress as Native Americans, Arabs, Sikhs, Turks, Zulu or Inuit but even now, when a group get together for fancy dress you can be guaranteed that at least one male will be a cowboy, one female will come Japanese.

Anyone who collects vernacular photographs will have a sizeable proportion devoted to fancy dress, whether they set out with that in mind or not. Some collectors specialize in it. As subjects go these photos are hard to pass over. They are about people having fun for the camera and more than one scholar has pointed out that’s what we think the Kodak was invented for. But there is more, because if all vernacular photos are inherently mysterious, fancy dress adds another layer to the riddle. Philosophically speaking, it is about identity, the construction of truth and reality and so on, with the implicit understanding we are not going to get a single categorical answer. It’s that paradox that the more a photo tells us the less interesting it becomes.

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FANCY DRESS

RENO

Reno in postcards

“Some people are malicious enough to think that if the devil were set at liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada Territory, he would come here and look sadly around then get homesick and go back to hell again.”

Mark Twain

The city of Reno began its life as a bridge over the Truckee River. Charles Fuller built it in 1859 and charged wagon trains a fee to use it. Soon enough someone decided to set up a store and then there was another, followed by a hotel, and by the time the Central Pacific Railroad was being built in the 1860s, Lake’s Crossing, as the settlement was now called, was large enough to justify a train station. It was officially named Reno after Major General Jesse Lee of the same surname, who fought and died on the Union side in the Civil War. It seems he never got close to the place but he couldn’t have complained if he did. To the west it faces the Sierra Nevada and on all other sides it is surrounded by desert; scenically speaking one of the best sited cities in North America.

When I was in Reno recently I was describing a building to a woman who had lived in the city for ten years but had trouble placing it. “We really don’t go into the downtown area that much,” she explained and that made sense. Even if residents were interested in gambling they’d have no reason to go there. Poker machines are everywhere but for day to day living needs downtown has nothing in the way of services anyone would need. That might explain the curious atmosphere of the place. It is crossed by a grid of wide avenues devoid of real traffic. If you are conditioned to wait for the light to go green before you cross, you can stand for five minutes at an intersection with no moving vehicles in sight in four directions. It is a strangely silent place too. 

The impression from historical documents and photos is that downtown Reno was much livelier when it was smaller, and there’s a reason for that. The huge skyscraper hotel casinos that dominate the skyline now only arrived in the 1980s. The way they work, if you book into one like the Eldorado or the Circus Circus for a weekend of relaxation at the tables, you have absolutely no reason to go anywhere else. Food, drinks and entertainment are laid out for you along with coupons that make it seem you are saving money. In the old days, when the businesses were smaller, patrons moved between establishments more often either because they had to – if you wanted a slab of prime Nevada beef you might go to Harold’s rather than the Nevada Club – or because people inevitably tire more quickly of smaller places. They get crowded and smoky and like a television channel it isn’t long before you start wondering if the passing parade isn’t more interesting somewhere else. It is worth remembering incidentally that everything you see here has gone. Where the Frontier, Nevada and Harold’s Club were there is now a blank space given over to one of the super casino’s entertainment venues. The famous sign in the distance has been moved to Lake St, about five blocks away, which is a lot better than demolishing it altogether but in its new position over the Truckee River, and not in a place you’d call the entrance to Reno, it has lost its magic. Then again, you could look at a scene like this and think the whole city has. Incidentally; compare it to the one immediately above, taken perhaps ten years earlier, and notice how casinos have altered the streetscape.

Here is the famous sign, and a photograph that, if not quite famous, is instantly recognized by Nevadan historians. Most of the photographs here were taken by the Nevada Photo Service but this is one of the very few where the company gave itself credit. It’s an image that has become emblematic of old Reno, a city of the night, a neon city. Engel’s studio was just around the corner and he made several versions, including some he took in daylight. All of them contain those elements we’ve come to associate with Reno’s façade; the signage and the cars. The cars especially; this was a city for visitors.

Another landmark was the mural outside Harold’s Club. Painted by Sargent Claude Johnson from a design by Theodore McFall. According to his Wikipedia entry, ‘Johnson was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation’. Race may not have meant a lot to Harold Smith but Johnson was also a member of the Communist Party, which might have. In any case, the mural showed a group of pioneers with their wagon trains in a circle around a campfire while up in the rocks behind the waterfall a group of Native Americans watched passively. Backlighting gave the impression the campfires were crackling and the waterfall flowing. In 1995, when Harold’s was being demolished, a group of concerned citizens moved to save the mural. It sits out at the Reno Livestock Events Center behind the University. We are grateful it was saved but have to accept that in its present location something is missing.

After the gold rushes of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries faded, Nevada was stuck with the problem of how to attract people. An early answer was to legalize boxing, or prize fighting as it was officially known, but the trouble was that 100 000 spectators could descend on Reno for the Johnson Jeffries fight of 1910 yet as soon as it was over they left. Still, rewriting that law gave the city fathers other ideas. Over the next few years they would legalize gambling then divorce. Both of them proved incredibly successful, until towns like Atlantic City took the idea and sucked the northern visitors away. Nevada would always promote the notion that it had the most liberal laws of any state in the U.S though pragmatic is a more accurate description. The Doghouse used to advertise itself as “the divorcees’ haven”, which gives you some idea of what it was like behind closed doors.

I thought for a while this was one of the Nevada Photo Service postcards but now I think the handwriting is close but not enough. To say it has the NPS look would be misleading because there were particular scenes that lent themselves to photographers and we know that other studios such as Frasher Fotos and J. H Eastman took near identical photos as Engel of some Reno landmarks. More interesting than who took it is the way that signage and Neon became identified with Reno. People would come to speak of ‘Nevada style’, which wasn’t entirely accurate since it was never indigenous, but what looked normal in a Chicago street could be transformed in a desert town.

There was a curious side effect to Reno’s divorce laws. When we say divorce was legalized, what that really means is that the state got rid of the paperwork. Divorce was of course legal across the U.S but as a state law with federal effects it could entail a year of expensive legal wrangling plus, and this was the worst, publication of the spouses’ intentions in the local papers. Nevada’s only stipulation was that one of the couple spend six weeks in Reno while the paperwork was sorted. Because men were more likely to have full time jobs than women, it was usually the women who went to Reno. This was of course red rags to the bullish young cowpokes working the nearby ranches and there are stories of women who arrived in Reno to get a divorce and never left, and others of women who got their divorce, moved in with the cowboy and a month or two later were back at the registry office filing another request. In the meantime they had another six weeks to kill. 

Reno’s history could be distilled into the story of one city’s constant struggle to bring people in, against the constant fear that with an economic downturn it could vanish back into the desert. When the transnational Lincoln Highway was being planned in the 1910s, the choice was to go through Nevada and end in San Francisco or avoid the salt pans and go through Arizona, which meant the road would end in Los Angeles. Apparently it was Mormon filled Utah that pushed for the Nevada route on account that so many of its citizens wanted access to Reno’s nightlife. Whatever else the city had on offer, casinos were what drew people to Reno. Without them it is likely the divorce laws would not have had such appeal. Six weeks in a sleepy desert town with nothing to do can make a bad marriage seem tolerable. 

 For most of Nevada’s history Reno was its largest and pre-eminent city. Las Vegas to the south was just a small service town, until the gangsters worked out that being much closer to LA and Hollywood gave it cachet. In a short time Vegas would be hosting Sinatra and Martin while Reno was left with a few sad also-rans. As Vegas boomed, once again Reno found itself battling for economic relevancy. What kept it going were those elements that had drawn people in the first place: mining and location. It still has some of the biggest gold deposits in the world and it is only a short drive from Lake Tahoe and Silicon Valley. In the 1980s however the decision was taken to redevelop the downtown district. In a few years the monstrous Silver Legacy and only slightly less ostentatious Eldorado and Circus Circus resort hotels would snuff the life out of smaller places. The only way to compete was to build big, offer more inducements like special packages and fill the lobbies with more machines. An older Reno still survives. There are plenty of small motels that look like the final scene in an independent film about someone whose luck ran out a long time ago. And there are also those parts just outside the downtown district that belong to another world; Manzanita Lake at the University of Nevada could be the grounds of a prestigious eastern college and across the river are streets lined with 19^th century wooden houses. You can’t however escape the impression  that it is defined by that area bounded by Arlington, Fourth, Centre St and the River. What lies outside might belong to Nevada but not Reno.

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RENO