[quote=“Captain_Amazing, post:18, topic:737675”]
Here’s one:
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When and where was this discovered?
KISS were that way in the late 1970s too. This led to all kinds of rumors; the most ludicrous was that they were women, and Paul Stanley’s costume negated that! 
A more reasonable one was that they were black, which would have been an issue at the time WRT the kind of music they played.
Had Paul been black, he would had to have been very light skinned.
Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) is remarkably camera-shy; there are only a few photos of him out on the web.
It was the brief period between the invention of the photograph and the invention of the selfie.
Robert Johnson is one of the most famous figures in the blues genre. And he lived until 1938, when photography was relatively common. But there are only two photographs of him. (There was a recent claim that a third photograph had been found, but it’s apparently now been disproven.)
Harry Winston–a jeweler who once owned the Hope Diamond.
The Imam Yahia, head of state of Yemen in the late 1940s, was never photographed–he forbade it under pain of drastic punishment. On the day that a likeness of him appeared in a Ripley column in 1948, he was reported to have been assassinated.
There’s no known photograph of Willie Brown, a friend and associate of Robert Johnson’s (he’s mentioned in one take of Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues”, aka “Crossroads”) and an influential bluesman in his own right.
Early Delta blues singers sort of existed in a different, time-shifted era: poverty and Jim Crow made it much less likely that they’d have access to technologies like photography than their mainstream, urban counterparts (let alone white stars) of the same era. Charlie Patton was possibly the most famous Delta blues singer, and there exists one known photo of him.
I was about to make a similar point about George Orwell. Despite working for the BBC there are no moving images, or voice recordings of Orwell.
Actually, there is footage of Orwell (or at least of Eric Blair, since he hadn’t written anything yet).
New-ish heavy metal band Ghost has six members, and all of their names and faces are a secret. The singer wears King Diamond-esque makeup and is known only as Papa Emeritus, and the rest wear masks and are referred to as “Nameless Ghouls.”
I’m not sure any of those people count, though; their record labels obviously know who they are and there are bound to be pictures of them somewhere.
I don’t think it would have been that big a deal. There were a number of non-secret black hard rock musicians around at the time, or before; Hendrix (and Billy Cox) and Phil Lynott spring to mind.
Nick Drake (d 1974) was a not-unknown musician during his life - 3 albums released on a major label, even if they didn’t sell well - and there is no film footage of him as an adult, only still photographs. There’s also no authenticated live recordings or photos of his performances.
I think a distinction should be made between famous people of which there were no photographs and those that actively avoid photographs (like Watterson)
Why? The OP specifically referenced both.
Not if there was a single non-white member. But all of them? It could have been a big deal.
A decade later, along came Living Colour, a black hard-rock quartet, and nobody batted an eye at that (until the inferior knockoffs, the best known being 24/7 Spyz, came along).
Check out the excellent documentary “A Band Called Death” for some insight into race and music in the mid- and late 1970s.
So what? Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky were famous dancers. Their fame is baseupon movement. Technology existed to capture said movement, but wasn’t used. (Or at least only a few seconds.) Not recording them is something of a loss to history.
Orwell fame is not based on moving, or for his voice. It’s no huge loss that they weren’t recorded.
If we’re talking voice recordings, one surprising example is Adolf Hitler. There are obviously hours of recordings of him giving public speeches. But he deliberately used a “public” voice in his speeches. There’s only one recording of his voice speaking in the conversational tones he used normally.
Not sure I agree with that. A huge part of an author’s life is live readings of excerpts from their books, even if those are generally not attended by a large fraction of those who read the books.
Can’t say “Pynchon” without “J D Salinger.”
Perhaps he was very infrequently photographed in the first place.
There hasn’t been a new photograph of Steve Ditko (Spider-Man co-creator) in almost 50 years. He’s become something of a cult figure.