Vivian Cherry

Vivian Cherry (July 27, 1920 – March 4, 2019) was an American photographer best known for her street photography. She was a member of the New York Photo League.

Early life Vivian Cherry was born in Manhattan on July 27, 1920, and grew up in the Bronx, New York. Her parents, Sasha and Ida (Agranovitch) Cherry, were Russian Jewish immigrants. After arriving in the United States, her father anglicized his name to Sam worked as a house painter, while her mother was a homemaker.

When a knee injury put her dance career on hold, Cherry found work at a photography lab for the news service Underwood & Underwood. One of these photographs, Playing Lynched, East Harlem, New York (1947), was taken when Cherry witnessed a group of children playing a game that reenacted, in pantomime, the scene of a lynching. The image illustrates the pervasive effects of racial terror in the United States, a theme that was of great concern to the leftist Cherry and her colleagues at the Photo League. Its composition references the photo postcards of lynchings that circulated in the United States at that time, creating a disturbing contrast with the actual subject of the photograph, a Black child playing a game. Although it is now one of her most prominent works, at the time Cherry could not immediately find a publisher for this photograph and others from the same series – when she submitted them to McCall's, the magazine rejected them. In 1948, her larger series "Game of Guns" looking at violence and children's play was published in the French magazine Regards; it wasn't published in the US until 1952. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY: 25 prints (as of December 2019) International Center of Photography, New York: 3 prints (as of December 2019) The Jewish Museum, New York: 3 prints

Exhibitions Solo exhibitions Vivian Cherry: a Working Street Photographer, 1940s–1990s, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, 2000

Group exhibitions Life of the City, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002 Photography Collection: Rotation 4, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006–2007