Jerome Zerbe Gets Social At The Beinecke

Flash. Margaret Hope, Lilian Sayers, Hermoine Gingold and Hope Hampton are gathered at the revamped El Morocco nightclub. They are dressed in elegant attire and dripping jewelry, ready to get their picture taken by Jerome Zerbe. The camera flashes. Their smiles are memorialized for years, maybe forever.

They are just a few of the subjects in Life of the Party: Jerome Zerbe and The Social Photograph, running at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library through Aug. 12. In the exhibition, curator Timothy Young has displayed several of Zerbe’s many scrapbooks, with pictures taken throughout Zerbe's fascinating career. Each scrapbook is meticulously labelled with the people pictured.

The show, chronicling the work of the Yale grad turned eager shutterbug, reads as a kind of timeline packed with the glittering socialites, errors, war heroes and characters of the recent past. In many, people laugh side by side, dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns and shining accoutrements. Some clutch their purses and dates, others hold tight to their drinks. They are wonderfully in the moment, as if the evening could go on for a very long time.

Some of the most interesting images unfold within the über-exclusive El Morocco nightclub in New York City, where people would line up to get their picture taken. Each night, the show explains, Zerbe would take photos of attendees and sell them to the local and national magazines and newspapers to gain exposure. Club-goers bought into that model: they often came dressed glamorously in hopes of being plastered on every newspaper the next day.

But the show offers an expansive look at Zerbe’s oeuvre too. When the photographer was enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942, his photography captured elements of his life at sea from fellow soldiers to fires that would occur at piers. We get to see, through his eyes, a lot of behind the scenes of what was happening during the war. When Zerbe was stationed in Guam he started to focus his photography on the effects that the war had on the people and the environment.

The exhibition also incorporates the work of other photographers during the time that Zerbe was active. While Zerbe took more candid pictures of his time in the navy, other photographers captured more of the staged pictures that would circulate during the time. According to Young, Zerbe wanted photos taken during his time in Guam to capture the repair of the island after it endured the effects of war.

In the exhibition, these images of war show considerable growth in his photography. From capturing the destruction on the island to depicting ships mid-attack in front of him, the pictures begin to deliver a story.

Much of the exhibition does that storytelling work. As his photography began to expand beyond both carnage and the world of New York glamor, Zerbe began to take pictures for advertising. His subjects grew to include models, face soaps, and sunglasses, all trademarks of an American life that was available to those who had financial means. After the war, he also indulged in more simplistic photos. He would take pictures of houses and the interior design. His albums started to consist of architecture rather than people.

“It created a sort of mystique of what the good life was in America,” said Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the library.

In that sense, the exhibition connects New Haveners with an era where people from around the world came to the U.S., hoping to join the picture of the “good” American life. Or, maybe, to picture it for themselves.

Eventually Zerbe began to put together a collection from his photo albums and published the book Happy Times in 1973, filled with his favorite photographs. As the exhibition explains, it allowed his photography to expand from the older demographic and gain exposure with the younger generation.

Young said the purpose of the exhibition was to “integrate the conservative material that is provided here and get people to share their ideas,” and it ultimately does just that. The collection of photographs ends with a picture of Zerbe taking a picture with his camera in front of a mirror, one small step in the creation of the infamous “mirror selfie.”The photo is displayed alongside Kim Kardashian's book Selfish, showing how photography hasn’t changed much from the time when Zerbe would take pictures.

Life of the Party: Jerome Zerbe and The Social Photograph runs at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library through August 12, 2019. For library hours and more information, visit the Beinecke's website. This piece comes to the Arts Paper through the second annual Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New Haven Free Public Library. From April through June, ten New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) students work with Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman and YAJI Program Assistant Melanie Espinal to produce four articles, for each of which they are compensated. Read more about the program here or by checking out the"YAJI" tag.