In December 1958, right around Christmastime, LIFE magazine published a 200-page special issue
on the glories and absurdities of American entertainment. Such special issues were not exactly rare —
LIFE frequently ended the year with a double issue on a grand theme (“The Sea,” “The Bible,” “The
Great Outdoors”) — but we’d like to take a moment here and note one article in particular from that
1958 issue, “Without the Girls, Show Biz Is No Biz,” and its extraordinary portraits of showgirls
by LIFE photographer Gordon Parks.
Echoing the works of, for example, Toulouse-Lautrec and others who have immortalized entertainers
Echoing the works of, for example, Toulouse-Lautrec and others who have immortalized entertainers
— at work and at rest — through the centuries, Parks’ color pictures are at-once charged with emotion
and curiously prosaic. These are, after all, women with a job to do: the fact that they do it in front of
avid audiences, while largely undressed, only makes the evident tedium of the work all the more
poignant.
But the strength of Parks’ photos, in the end, is not that they offer oblique commentary on the drudgery
But the strength of Parks’ photos, in the end, is not that they offer oblique commentary on the drudgery
of labor, or that they somehow reveal something about “show people” that we never knew. Instead, the
pictures matter because they’re beautiful — and because they offer, as LIFE noted, “living, breathing
proof of the poet’s point that beauty is its own excuse for being.” | LIFE.com
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https://www.google.gr/search?q=erwin+blumenfeld&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=kNpWU4DSDMr_ygOQsYGoBQ&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=960&bih=509#q=erwin+blumenfeld+color+photos&tbm=isch&imgdii=_
Erwin Blumenfeld / Color photos
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