American photographer John Arnt (Jon C. Arnt 1906-1982) extremely rare, original vintage gelatin silver photograph of model Don Erdahl with a Pacific Northwestern woven fishing basket, Seattle, circa 1953.
 
Photograph, Don Erdahl #2, is 7.625 x 9.625 inches, vintage bronze-toned gelatin-silver matte finish on heavy paper with deckle-cut edges, in excellent condition.
 
Photograph is from the personal collection of nude male art photographs collected from the original photographers in the 1940s and 1950s by the late award winning Broadway and Hollywood costume designer Noel Taylor.
 
Photographer Jon C. Arnt, whose name is also frequently rendered John Arnt, was a Seattle-based commercial and physique photographer. Arnt began his photographic career at Boeing during the Second World War and afterward established a commercial portrait studio in Seattle. By the late 1940s he was concentrating increasingly on artistic male figure and physique photography. His surviving work is comparatively scarce, but it includes both classical studio nudes and conventional bodybuilding photographs.
 
Arnt remained active in the physique field during the early 1950s contributing work to Tomorrow’s Man magazine, confirming that his work was being distributed nationally by that date. Another collector-research source describes a documented Arnt nude as dating from the 1940s and remarks that only a handful of his photographs have been located. Arnt's work is recognized as extremely rare. 
 
The December 1953 issue of Tomorrow’s Man identifies model Don Erdahl : “Newcomer Don Erdahl is 18 and does his bodybuilding in Bremerton, Washington. Photo: Jon Arnt.” This establishes that Erdahl was born around 1935, trained in Bremerton, Washington, and modeled for Arnt by 1953. He appears to have been a young regional bodybuilder rather than a nationally prominent contest champion.