Walter Hanson exhibition at Mercer Gallery
Popular Photographer shows nostalgic images of 1950s stars of jazz, sport, stage and screen, including Alma Cogan, Dickie Valentine, Sarah Vaughan, Stirling Moss and many more at the Mercer Art Gallery from 13 September to 8 November
Walter Hanlon is a renowned photographer of the 1950s London jazz scene, who captured in his lens all the great British and American stars - Chris Barber, Annie Ross, John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, to name just a few. But the jazz world was not his only domain as a photographer. In Faces from the Fifties, his second show at the Mercer, Hanlon shows over 50 images of the glamorous celebrities of the 1950s.
Singers, actors, film stars and directors, writers, musicians, band leaders, show business impresarios, comedians, playwrights and racing drivers; these were the stars of almost 60 years ago.
Hanlon was born in Glasgow in 1926. After a wartime spell in the Merchant Navy he became a professional guitarist, and developed an interest in photography. In 1949 he left the music business for a career as a jazz and show business photographer that was to last for most of the 1950s. Hanlon recalls how he set about capturing a photo-portrait ...
'It was essential to establish as much rapport with the subject as possible, and I always tried to place them in a location that reflected their interests. Good reflexes are a must in order to fire the shutter on a fleeting expression.'
Some of Hanlon's photographs are posed, but many offer a candid view of life behind the scenes, for example the stars of the 1950 Royal Command Performance including Gracie Fields, Jack Benny, Bud Flanagan and the Crazy Gang - crowding onto the stage for rehearsal, all of them muffled up in coats and scarves against the cold. With his photographs of Beniamino Gigli,
actress Margaret Rutherford and comedian Frankie Howerd hamming it up in the recording studio, Hanlon evokes the years of austerity that followed the end of the Second World War, and the excitement of a brave new world of entertainment.
In the 1960s, Hanlon moved into television work and his photographs were consigned to his personal archive. When in 2004 he discovered some of them pirated in various publications, Hanlon set out to protect his copyright, and find a new audience for his work, with exhibitions at the Mercer Art Gallery and the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull.This was followed by a book, 1950s Jazz in London and Paris, Tempus, 2008, a display of work Jazz in London: Walter Hanlon appeared at the National Portrait Gallery, and the NPG acquired a collection of Hanlon's images.
This exhibition creates a visual catalogue of the 1950s, as Britain shrugged off the mantle of post-war gloom and looked forward to a happier future.