Vivian Cherry's New York

Vivian Cherry was born in Manhattan, New York on July 27, 1920. She briefly attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison before pursuing a dance career. She danced in nightclubs and burlesque and in a Coney Island side show. During World War II, she danced with the Lunch Hour Follies, an entertainment project of the American Theater Wing. In late 1944 and early 1945, she danced in the short-lived Broadway musical Sadie Thompson. After injuring a knee, she found a job at a photography lab and started taking her own pictures. After her knee healed, she returned to Broadway for a yearlong run in a revival of Show Boat. However, when the musical closed, she decided to become a full-time photographer.

In 1946, she joined the Photo League. Her work appeared in several magazine including Life, Collier's, Redbook, and Popular Photography. In the early 1960s, she took a break from photography for about 25 years. A series of photographs of radical Roman Catholic activist Dorothy Day that Cherry took in the 1950s for Jubilee magazine were used in the 2016 book Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker: The Miracle of Our Continuance. In 2007, Cherry published Helluva Town, a collection of her pictures from the 1940s and 1950s. Her autobiography, Vignettes: Chapters from a Life, was published in 2012. She died on March 4, 2019 at the age of 98.

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