She performed with the Helen Tamiris Dance Company; in nightclubs like La Conga and Le Bal Tabarin; in the Lunch Hour Follies, a wartime entertainment put on by the American Theater Wing; and the Broadway musical Sadie Thompson.
Cherry returned to Broadway once more, to dance in the 1945 revival of Showboat, but when that musical closed she decided to pursue a career in photography full time.
[3] She documented ordinary people amid the swirl of city life; one of her best-known photo series is of commuters traveling to and from work on the Third Avenue El.
[2] Cherry also traveled outside of New York City for her photo essays, including a pair that focused on issues of healthcare among the Navajo and Pueblo nations and among West Virginia coal miners.
The image illustrates the pervasive effects of racial terror in the United States, a theme that was of great concern to the leftist Cherry and her colleagues at the Photo League.
Its composition references the photo postcards of lynchings that circulated in the United States at that time, creating a disturbing contrast with the actual subject of the photograph, a Black child playing a game.
Although it is now one of her most prominent works, at the time Cherry could not immediately find a publisher for this photograph and others from the same series – when she submitted them to McCall's, the magazine rejected them.