Moira Shearer

(All credit for this post goes to Scott Bilotta, an American who researches the history of photography and collects materials related to this. In his collection he has an envelope containing three glass plate negatives that resulted from a photo shoot of Moira Shearer in New York in October 1949.)

   On October 4^th, 1949, Moira Shearer joined the rest of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company and flew from London to La Guardia airport in New York where the company opened its first tour of North America.

   As a result of her appearance in the film, The Red Shoes, released in 1948, Shearer was well-known in the US and probably even better known than the company’s prima ballerina, Margot Fonteyn. Thus, Shearer drew a great deal of the attention of the New York press. The paparazzi were out in force at La Guardia on October 5^th and, unsuccessfully, solicited some “cheesecake” shots of the female dancers.

   On Sunday, October 31^st, well into the company’s schedule at the Metropolitan Opera House, Shearer attended a photo shoot at the studios of the photographers, Harry Warnecke, and his assistant, Gus Schoenbaechler, who had been commissioned by the New York Daily Post to create a colour portrait of Shearer. It was to be used on the cover of an upcoming issue of the colour supplement that the newspaper put out each Sunday. Colour photographs were time-consuming and costly and, thus, still relatively rare in the press in 1949 and were usually confined to special issues.

   Warnecke, using a widely available “tri-color” camera, shot a single image of Shearer that was exposed on a glass negative. From this image Warnecke then derived three colour-separated negatives that were later combined or, in Bilotta’s terms, “assembled” into a “positive” colour print. Bilotta’s collection consists of the three negatives but not the final print. Thus, he assembled the negatives in a modern Photoshop process.

   If the Daily News had chosen to publish the image in 1949 Bilotta believes they would have used an assembly process such as “Carbro or perhaps Kodak Dye Transfer” that would have allowed for colour correction. The photographers noted on the sleeve that contained the negatives that Shearer had “light red hair, blue eyes, very fair complexion”. Presumably these notes would have been used as a guide to colour correction.    It is not known if the Daily News used the image. However, it seems unlikely as, when the next Sunday supplement was published on November 6^th, Sadler’s Wells had left town.

The original colour separation negatives.

Monochrome prints made by Scott Bilotta from the original negatives. These he then combined in a Photoshop process to create a monochrome version of the final image at right.

The completed colour portrait of Shearer printed by Scott Bilotta in a Photoshop process.