In 2005, John Coleman and his wife, Anastasia, were coming home after a Friday night dinner out. Stuck in a cab at 72nd Street and Madison Avenue, John happened to glance out his window. “A bus pulls up alongside of us and I look over and it’s me in this picture on the side of the bus in an ad for Match.com,” he said. “I was like, am I dreaming? What’s going on here?”
The photograph on the bus, “The Dance Class,” taken by iconic photographer Elliott Erwitt in 1977, was featured in an ad campaign for the online dating site. It shows six-year-old John Coleman in the center, along with two of his classmates from Saint David’s School and three little girls, attending a dance class at the Knickerbocker Cotillion. In the ad, the photograph appeared above the tag line, “Love is complicated. Match.com is simple.”
“The Dance Class” is one of 100 photographs selected by Erwitt himself for the current exhibit at the International Center of Photography, Elliott Erwitt: Personal Best. Attending a press preview of the exhibit on May 19, I noticed that one of the boys in the photograph was wearing a Saint David’s blazer. Having a connection to the school (my son graduated in 1998), I decided to track down the boy in the photo. Michael Imbelli, a longtime teacher and advisor at the school, supplied the name and gave me John Coleman’s email address. When I contacted him, John was unaware that the photograph was in the ICP show. A few weeks later, we were able to meet at ICP to talk about the photograph.
I asked John if he had any recollection of being photographed by Erwitt, whose subjects have included many presidents and celebrities. “My memory is that [the class] was being filmed for television. You see these chairs,” he said, pointing to the folding chairs that ringed the dance floor. “I remember that I put my foot behind one and then, when I got up, I purposely tripped because I thought it would look funny on television.” The dance instructor, John recalled, didn’t think it was so funny and came rushing over to make sure no one was hurt.
John was first made aware of the photograph in the mid-1990s. One of his Saint David’s classmates had moved to New Jersey, but the families kept in touch exchanging Christmas cards each year. One year, the Christmas card arrived along with a page torn from a magazine showing the photograph. “Doesn’t this look like John?” was scribbled on the page. John’s mother responded, “Yes, it does. What magazine did it come from?” The classmate’s mother didn’t remember. “We kind of gave up [the search], and then, when we saw it on the bus, we figured it out,” said John.
The Match.com print campaign used at least one other Erwitt photograph showing a newly married couple alongside a second man with a quizzical expression on his face. “The Dance Class,” however, seemed to crop up in more places in the city at that time, John said, possibly because the scene would stir memories among New Yorkers who also grew up in Manhattan and remembered attending dancing school.
John identified the two other boys in the photo as his classmates at Saint David’s (one, he recalled was student council president in eighth grade, the other briefly pursued acting and was in a Broadway play), but can’t remember the name of his dance partner. According to an ICP official, Erwitt particularly liked the expression on the face of the little girl dancing with John. One of the other little girls, however, looks familiar to John. Years ago, the all-male Saint David’s accepted girls into its nursery program as a convenience for parents with boys in the upper grades. John suspects the girl on the right side of the photo was his classmate in the nursery class.
John now works for Clean Value Partners, an energy-focused hedge fund. He and his wife, Anastasia, have a three year-old daughter, Campbell. Despite his auspicious start in the world of dance, he said that he has not continued with lessons, and he admitted: “The instructor that we hired to help us get ready for our wedding told me that I was a terrible dancer.”
Elliott Erwitt: Personal Best
International Center of Photography
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