"At times he hums with the orchestra,"

Ruth Orkin

1921–1985

"At times he hums with the orchestra,", 1947

Where object was made: Lewisohn Stadium, New York, United States

Material/technique: gelatin silver print

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 24.4 x 16.7 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 9 5/8 x 6 9/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 19 x 14 in

Credit line: Gift of Esquire, Inc.

Accession number: 1980.1074

Not on display

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Politics, Race, Celebrity: Photographs from the Esquire Collection

Esquire’s magazine layout of Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) portrays the “pianist-composer-conductor” as an exuberant prodigy working largely in isolation. However, a closer look at the original photographs taken by Ruth Orkin for Esquire indicates that the singer Marian Anderson (1897–1993) had been edited out of the pictures and the resulting story. Anderson was an internationally acclaimed singer who was thrust into the civil rights spotlight in 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her perform before an integrated audience at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. With the help of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and others, Anderson sang instead from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in an open air concert for 75,000 people on Easter Sunday in 1939. In 1955, Anderson became the first African-American to perform with the Metropolitan Opera.