Step Right This Way: The Photographs of Edward J. Kelty
The successor to Barth and Alan Siegel's eye-poppingOne Man's Eye(2000) is also concerned with a particular person's vision, this time not photo collector Siegel's but that of a professional banquet photographer with a sideline in circus publicity. Edward J. Kelty's circus pictures, taken from the mid-1920s to the 1940s, consist of group portraits of clowns, sideshow attractions, bands, elephants, menageries, aerialists, equestrians, tractor and train crews, candy butchers (seen with their backs turned to show the "Baby Ruth Candy" logo on their smocks), and even everybody in the Ringling-Barnum cookhouse tent on July 4, 1935. He also lensed stars such as lion-tamer Clyde Beatty, teenage tightrope walker Harold Barnes, and Hugo Zacchini, Human Projectile (posed atop his cannon), and interior and exterior panoramas of circuses pitched in Tarrytown, Terre Haute, and other fair burghs. Kelty used a specially made "banquet" camera that produced 12-by-20-inch images. Reproduced here at about two-fifths that size and as originally tinted (sepia or cyan) when appropriate, they are scrumptious, sometimes outrageous (see "Cheerful Gardner," who worked with elephants--sheesh!) eye-candy.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved