Wearing a diaphanous gown, a backlit dancer takes a break while leaning up against a studio wall. A variant of this image is held by the Cincinatti Art Museum.

Charles August Weddigen: 1895–1977

Amateur photographer C.A. Weddigen, a resident of the Cincinnati suburb of Norwood, was a founding member of the Cincinnati Camera Club in 1921, and active with the club throughout that decade. Another photograph held by this archive: The Miser, was exhibited in the Pittsburgh & Liverpool (England) salons of 1926. A notice in the American Art Directory for 1930 reveals he made his living at the American Laundry Machine Company, which manufactured commercial laundry, dry cleaning and textile processing machinery.

The location of this dance study has been discovered to be the Dayton, OH studio of important American pictorialist Jane Reece, 1868-1961. Reece, who held salons in the space, apparently gave fellow Ohio (and perhaps from other states) photographers like Charles Weddigen the use of her studio, as seen in this study. Reece was a pioneer in creating modernist dance photographs in the 1920’s: in 1922, she overlaid negatives of dancer Harry Losée with stencils to create modern geometric studies reminiscent of later work by Man Ray and later made a series of photographs featuring the sister dancers Hermene and Josephine Schwarz, who later founded the Dayton Ballet in 1937.