Cotton Club, Harlem

On a spring night in 1933, a tap dancer in Harlem catches air. Photographer Remie Lohsie holds him there, indefinitely suspending his split-second leap. As the dancer defies gravity, the picture overcomes compositional odds: the choreography is too quick, the stage too dark—it should not come together so well. Lohse is not even supposed to be there, covertly photographing from behind the dance floor with his miniature camera. After finding his footing in New York as a commercial freelancer, the Danish émigré developed a flair for theatrical work, isolating moments of unscripted levity onstage and off. Inspired by the “candid camera” tactics of German photojournalist Erich Salomon, Lohse outfitted his Contax with a right-angle telescope finder to snap subjects unawares.
Even from Lohse’s oblique angle offstage, the dancer dazzles. He is just a teenager—one half of the virtuoso Nicholas Brothers, who debuted their ebullient, acrobatic routines at the Cotton Club the previous year. In 1933, the duo shared a bill with Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters, and tapped alongside a shimmying chorus line. At the notoriously segregated venue, where Black ensembles performed for all-white audiences, the brothers resisted stereotypical routines, instead devising a refined vocabulary of vaulting jumps and synchronized, skating steps. Hurtling towards fame at the time of this photograph, the Nicholas Brothers would soon head from Harlem to Hollywood, but they have not previously been identified in Lohse’s work. In his monograph, the photographer refers to a “Tapdancing Negro” at center stage, but never names him. Nor does the 1934 Vogue feature in which the work was reproduced. (Instead, a magazine columnist takes the picture’s tonal range of bright whites and inky blacks as an ill-conceived analogy for nightclub race relations.) From his privileged place in the crowd, Lohse’s view of the stage delimits a tight perimeter of acceptance, past which only white patrons appear.

For Lohse himself, the work was a technical touchstone. He included a print of this image in his first solo show at Julien Levy Gallery, and later referred to it as “a scoop” in an age of slow-exposure film—one achieved by training his lens straight into the spotlight. He follows the dancer into its beam, where light laps his silk top hat and flicks the tails of his tux.