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Many of Robinson’s friends and colleagues, male and female, were homosexual or bisexual, and Robinson’s images provide a window into 1950s gay lifestyles and cultures of creativity. His friends and colleagues, mostly artists and designers, recognized his talent and assisted his development in the playful spirit that characterized the local arts community after World War II. Robinson quickly got a job as a graphic artist in an ad agency.
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The polite, soft-spoken homosexual artist from Mississippi found the Quarter to be the perfect place to spend his early twenties. Preservation efforts had lagged in the 1950s, but the Vieux Carré continued to attract artists, writers, actors, and entertainers, many of whom were war veterans, with its twin advantages of low rent and vital bohemian culture. Like authors Lyle Saxon, Sherwood Anderson, Roark Bradford, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Shirley Ann Grau, Harnett Krane, and Anne Rice, Robinson found his early inspiration in the life and characters of the French Quarter. From the photographs and interviews with Robinson’s friends and associates, the story of his life and the place and culture that shaped his art emerged. Other subjects were important benefactors and participants in the arts and entertainment community and local “beautiful people” in 1950s New Orleans society. In spite of Robinson’s creative spelling and frequent use of only first names, I identified many subjects, some of whom were, and still are, locally well-known and productive Gulf Coast artists. The visual impact of the photographs and their revelations about the community of southern artists and bohemians in New Orleans were astounding. The contents of many older envelopes had not been examined, and the gallery was more than happy to have a historian take an interest in their contents.
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The Jack Robinson Gallery and Archive, which opened in Memphis in 2002, had its hands full preserving and promoting Robinson’s 1960s photographs of famous and beautiful people. There were also dozens of older envelopes from the 1950s with unfamiliar names and a few simply labeled “Mardi Gras.” The names of some of the most famous people of the twentieth century were scrawled on the envelopes. 2Īfter Robinson’s death, his heir, Dan Oppenheimer, in whose studio Robinson worked, discovered in the artist’s modest and austere apartment banker’s boxes filled with envelopes containing thousands of negatives and contact sheets. He seemed to gain control of his drinking and found work designing stained glass in a local studio, but Robinson was bitter and difficult to work with. He never worked as a serious photographer again and even hid the fact that he had been such a success. Jobs dwindled as the alcohol took its toll, and in 1972 Robinson left New York and moved to Memphis, where his parents and brother lived. By 1970 he was purportedly downing a fifth of vodka a day.
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His photographs of Andy Warhol and The Factory indulging in New York City nightlife seem to include the photographer as a participant and hint at Robinson’s own homosexual identity and self-destructive lifestyle. On some occasions, Robinson’s personal life entered the frame. From 1965 to 1972, Robinson’s work was published in Vogue more than five hundred times, and his portraits advanced the careers of Joni Mitchell, Clint Eastwood, Tina Turner, Warren Beatty, Lily Tomlin, The Who, Rod McKuen, and dozens more. Editors Diana Vreeland and Carrie Donovan recognized Robinson’s genius and tapped him to shoot portraits of 1960s rising stars in music, art, film, fashion, and entertainment. In 1955 Robinson left the South for New York City and the world of fashion photography. He was back in New Orleans by 1951 and had started taking photographs. He graduated from a Clarksdale high school in 1945 and attended Tulane from 1945 to 1948 but left after his junior year without graduating. Very little was then known about Robinson’s life in the South. A few letters, two clippings, and a postcard were about the extent of the primary written record from the period, but hundreds of negatives from the 1950s promised to provide clues to the artist’s past. As a Memphian and southern historian, I took it upon myself in May 2004 to unlock the mysteries of Robinson’s life growing up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and honing his skills as a photographer in his twenties in New Orleans.