Getty Museum
Gypsy Rose Lee and Her Girls
Creator
Ralph SteinerAmerican Photographer · 1899–1986
All works by this person →Ralph Steiner studied photography at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and at the Clarence White School from 1921 to 1922. With White's assistance, Steiner got a job making photogravure plates at the Manhattan Photogravure Company, where Alfred Stieglitz's *Camera Work* was printed. After about a year, he quit to became a freelance advertising and magazine photographer. Steiner began to make film
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1944
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
In addition to recording dances for posterity, photographs extended the celebrity of individual dancers. The famous burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee was especially aware of photography's value as a public relations tool. A friend of Ralph Steiner's, Lee commissioned him to make this photograph as part of a series of publicity shots. On a rural road in the Bronx, Lee posed wearing a shimmering, sequined gown and fur, flanked by a Rolls Royce and Louis Vuitton luggage and surrounded by her spectacularly costumed "girls." Lee's elegant presentation gives no hint that her costume weighed over seventy pounds or that the day was hot and her makeup took two hours to apply.
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