Photo of a Young Woman

Jul 21, 2024 by D. M. Cross, in News

She sits at a piano, head bent looking at the keys and not the music stand. She looks serene, smiling slightly, as though she really knows how to play the piano when she doesn’t.

Behind her is a large poster of an upcoming play. On it, one can make out the name, Anthony Quayle; some of the title of the play, Rip Van Winkle; and the venue, the Eisenhower, one of the theaters in the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The woman pays no mind to the photographer; she may have said a word or two, giving him permission to take her picture.

Sometime afterward he gives her the photo, or perhaps it's a copy. She is impressed. Very few people, in her opinion, have ever taken a good photo of her. She thanks him and later puts it away with her many other photos from the 1970s.

Five decades later, the same woman decides it’s time to organize and identify the photos of her life before she forgets who people are and the things that she did. She comes across the photo from the days when she worked at the Kennedy Center’s Information Line cubicle and took breaks in the Eisenhower Theater’s Green Room. Checking the back of the photo for a date, she instead sees an autograph: “Keep sweet! Earl Sydnor”. She turns the photo over and for the first time notices that the embossed gold lettering is actually the photographer’s signature!

The internet helps her remember that Mr. Sydnor was not only a photographer but also an African American actor who appeared in A Texas Trilogy, the play that was actually running when he took the photo. Further research reveals that he had acted in so-called “Race” movies with African American filmmaker Spencer Williams. He had died in 1981. She had never seen him act in A Texas Trilogy, but because of current technology she could see him perform after all.

She returns the photograph to the other pictures from the 1970s, but it’s set apart in an acid-free protector. That way, everyone who sees it will know that in 1976 Earl Sydnor encouraged me to “Keep sweet!”