Garden of Girls: 1925

Jazz Age / Art Deco Era photos taken by Ziegfeld Follies photographer Edwin Bower Hesser at his Hotel des Artistes studio in New York City.

Edwin Bower Hesser (1893-1962) was a prominent photographer who worked in New York and Los Angeles during the golden age of Hollywood. Hesser belonged to the generation of photographers who saw the marriage of image and performance as the future of the art. He was drawn to the world of movies and worked as a contract photographer for numbers of silent stars based in New York. He began to make regular trips to the west coast for photographic sessions with Hollywood stars, and finally moved his base of operations to the West Coast.

A fire in 1922 destroyed all of his negatives. In starting over, Hesser realized that the real money in photography lay in periodical publication, not in the service of film publicity offices or stage PR men. He saw a particular opportunity in the subject which the 1920s stage explored with great daring, but the screen, even in pre-code days, could not pursue: female nudity.

Throughout the late 1920s, he published EDWIN BOWER HESSER'S ARTS MONTHLY, exploiting the association betweens art and nudity, and sold it to an anonymous readership of 'art students.' The magazine also featured the work of Ziegfeld Follies photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston, along with John De Mirjian, George DeBarron and Strand Studios.

Interestingly, the famous beauties of the day eagerly flocked to his studios to be artistically photographed in various stages of undress, and these included a number of famous actresses: Marion Davies, Anna Wong, Louise Brooks, Corrine Griffith, Bessie Love, and Alice Calhoun, were among the many who willingly posed for ‘artistic’ photos by Hesser.

Hesser also developed his own color photography system known as Hessercolor, that intrigued magazine publishers, but did not prevail in the marketplace . But his experiments with color photographic processes and his experience with mass reproduction of imagery made him attractive in the eyes of the New York Times, who hired him as a technician.



(c) Susann Disbro Gilbert

References:
Dr. David S. Shields, McClintock Professor at the University of South Carolina;
UCLA Special Collections;
Trouble in Paradise: Edwin Bower Hesser precodecinemablogspot.com