The three graces in Dorothy Wilding’s 1923 photograph Frieze were performers in The Midnight Follies, a new cabaret at the London Metropole hotel. Wilding’s picture, full of attitude in all senses, was designed to promote the show; the Follies promised a jazz age mix of comedy and dance and cocktails.
Two of the women in Wilding’s picture were known in the gossip columns. Red-haired Zoe Gordon, on the left, was a star of musical theatre and of the 1919 film The Sins of Youth. On the right of the sculptural trio is Sylvia Hawkes, “London’s Cinderella” (she was the daughter of a footman). Her success in The Midnight Follies led to a series of headline-making marriages – first to the heir to Lord Shaftesbury, with whom she scandalously eloped, and subsequently to Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks senior, from whom she inherited a $2m fortune, and Clark Gable.
Wilding, the photographer, was on a starry trajectory of her own. Born in Gloucester, her dreams of becoming an actor or a painter had been denied by the uncle who raised her; instead, self-taught as a photographer, she established a studio in London at 21 and became a celebrity portraitist, taking definitive shots of everyone from Tallulah Bankhead to Noël Coward. In 1937, she was the first woman to be made official royal photographer (her subsequent portraits of the young Queen Elizabeth were used by the Royal Mail, for its stamps).
This early image of the Follies shows her gift for making icons. It is included in a new exhibition in Wilding’s native city, devoted to her brilliant career. The show is supported by Hundred Heroines, a charity established to promote awareness of female photographers, and curated by Sisters of the Lens; it is a reminder that, a century ago, liberation was all the rage on both sides of the camera.