Lena Horne Edward Cronenweth photo Swing Fever MGM 1943 cropped and color added 2013 Canvas Print

When her films were shown in the South in the 1940's her musical numbers were placed in the movies so they could be easily cut out. The South was not desegregated until the mid 1960's. This prevented her from playing lead roles.

'Most theaters in the South refused to show films that portrayed blacks in anything other than subservient roles to whites, and most movie studios did not want to take a chance on losing that particular source of revenue. Lena did not want to appear in those kinds of stereotyped roles (and who could blame her?)'

Dorothy Dandridge, in turn, did play the lead in the Otto Preminger 1954 directed "Carmen Jones."

"She was so superb in that picture that she garnered an Academy Award nomination but lost out to Grace Kelly in The Country Girl (1954). Despite the nomination for her performance, Dorothy did not get another movie until she appeared in Tamango (1958), which was an Italian film. She was to make six more motion pictures, of which...

I first became obsessed with photography and motion pictures while growing up in post WW2 Manila in the Philippine Islands in the late 1940's/early 1950's. Film noirs were a particular influence. But my first love remains the theater. I acted in numerous amateur productions from 1958 to 1978. In 1979 I earned a MA in drama from the University of Arizona; earlier getting a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, where I co-founded the first film society on campus and ran it for four years. While at the U of A, I studied with the master black and white photo essayist W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) the last year of his life. I am the last person cited in Jim Hughes' definitive biography of Gene, as I wrote about attending his final...