Biografia   

Indirizzo: 707 Broadway, New York

He was Jose Maria Mora, a young dashing Cuban refugee. Born in Cuba around 1849 to a wealthy family, he was sent to England to study painting and when the Cuban Revolution forced the rest of his family to emigrate to the States, he joined them in New York. He quickly found employment at Napoleon Sarony’s photography studio, which at the time was the most artistic and well-regarded studio in the city.In 1870 Mora opened his own studio and immediately became one of the biggest rivals to his old boss, Sarony. It didn’t hurt that he hired Sarony’s background painter, Lafayette Seavey, and soon had the largest collection of hand-painted backgrounds in the world at that time–over 150 different ones ranging from snowy city streets to Moorish ruins to forests, not to mention an arsenal of papier mache columns, balustrades, and rocks. Sitters would drape themselves over these objects in poses startlingly natural compared to the stiff positions into which other photographers literally clamped their subjects. These innovations paid off, and by 1878 Mora was making $100,000 a year shooting the stars of opera and stage in this new fashion of portraiture. (A more in depth discussion of Mora’s studio can be found here.)

An advantage of his well-born life was that he was able to mingle easily with the upper classes of New York. Mora became the photographer of choice for the constant fancy-dress balls, tableaux, and other events of this era that required the upper class to get dressed up…which they did amazingly often. His epic array of props added drama and intrigue to every image. These pictures also fed into the post-Civil War rise of the public’s fascination with the “lifestyles of the rich and famous,” and helped to create a visual definition of what that lifestyle entailed.

alcune fonti lo danno morto il 28, altre come wikipedia il 18