vintage black glamour by nichelle gainer

The shots, ranging from 1900 to 1980, feature faces both familiar and unfamiliar, iconic portraits and unknowns, but all the women featured helped break down color lines, revolutionizing Hollywood just by existing beautifully. Three years ago she started a Tumblr, Vintage Black Glamour, and it’s now scheduled to become a coffee-table book set for release later this summer. Where are the portraits of Dorothy Dandridge? The party shots of Eartha Kitt? Writer Nichelle Gainer wondered the same thing when she started researching for a novel about black beauty pageants and uncovered stunning, little-seen images.

But the people those photo collections don’t usually include are the black singers, actresses, and starlets who were living an equally glamorous existence in front of flashbulbs. With its stunning photographs and insightful biographies, this book is a hugely important addition to Black history archives.“Vintage Hollywood glamour” usually calls to mind images of Audrey Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Grace Kelly - all those silver-screen goddesses who appear on posters and populate coffee-table books. Although talented, successful and ground-breaking, many of the women in these pages were ignored by mainstream media, but their life's work and attitude stand as inspiration for us still, today. Vintage Black Glamour is a unique, sumptuous and revealing celebration of the lives and indomitable spirit of Black women of a previous era. Alongside the familiar images and stories of renowned performers such as Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne and Aretha Franklin are those of less well-remembered figures such as Bricktop, Pearl Primus, Diana Sands and many, many more. Using rarely accessed photographic archives and private collections, inspired by her family history, Nichelle Gainer has unearthed a revealing treasure trove of historic photographs of famous actors, dancers, writers and entertainers who worked in the 20th-century entertainment business, but who rarely appeared in the same publications as their white counterparts.

Vintage black glamour by nichelle gainer