A show of ‘Vintage Celebrity Portraits’

Well before color reproductions and color snapshots became commonplace, pioneering photographer Harry Warnecke (1900–1984) and his associates at the New York Daily News’ photo studio created brilliant, eye-popping color portraits for the newspaper’s Sunday News magazine.

Employing a special one-shot camera of his own design, Warnecke began producing color images for the Daily News in the 1930s by utilizing the technically demanding, tri-color carbro process—the first practical method for color photography. Over the course of three decades, Warnecke and his team photographed hundreds of people in the news, from popular film stars and athletes to military leaders and government officials.

Drawing from the NPG’s collection of large-format, tri-color carbo photographs by from the Daily News Color Studio, a new exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery - Smithsonian Institution in Washington features 24 celebrity portraits from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s including Lucille Ball, Jackie Robinson, Babe Didrikson, Gene Autry, Ethel Waters, Generals Eisenhower and Patton, and comedians W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy.

The show comprises color photographic portraits of several noteworthy personalities from the last century or so mostly portrayed in black and white. Lucille Ball is there, and Laurel and Hardy, and Jimmy Durante. An assortment of powerful and maverick military heroes from the era World War II are posed in uniform. Literary as well as sports figures find a place.

Warnecke worked as a photographer for New York’s The Daily News. He understood much early that a newspaper with a color photo in it would enjoy an edge. This was in the 1930s. “He designed and built a one-shot camera that yielded the red, blue and green separations needed for color reproduction,” the exhibition note explains.

An essay by The New York Times writer Neil Genzlinger mentions: “Though various forms of color photography had existed for decades, the Everyman color snapshot was still a ways off, and certainly a color print in a newspaper was a rarity. People expected to see images in black and white, and though movies had begun the shift to color, newsreels and then early TV would define how the public imagined most of the people seen in this show. Many would live and work well into the color age - Durante died in 1980, Ball in 1989 after starring in several color series - but they’re forever black and white to me and others.”