07.04.11
Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood portraits
Elizabeth Taylor, 1948 by Clarence Sinclair Bull © John Kobal Foundation, 2011
A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery will examine the importance of photography in creating the stars of Hollywood from 1920 to 1960.
Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits, Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation will include portraits of Marlene Dietrich, James Dean, Joan Collins, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe by nearly 40 photographers including George Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Laszlo Willinger, Bob Coburn and Ruth Harriet Louise.
Nearly all of the photographs in the exhibition will be vintage prints drawn from the archive of the John Kobal Foundation. This will be a rare opportunity to view these important artifacts of a now extinct Hollywood studio system. The exhibition will show both iconic and previously unseen studio portraits of Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Vivien Leigh, Loretta Young, and Carole Lombard among others. These portraits will be shown alongside film scene stills including Lillian Gish for The Wind, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for Swing Time and James Dean for Rebel without a Cause. Stills photographs which were used for lobby cards and posters and had to encapsulate the film plot, or be powerful and dramatic enough to attract film-goers in just one image.
The film studios in Hollywood between 1920 and 1960 exercised an extraordinary level of control over the image of the stars they represented. The portraits they released to the public and press depicted the actors as glamorous and inaccessible, imbuing them with mystique. The photographers in this exhibition were the leading photographers employed by the studios to shoot and oversee the star portraits.
The exhibition will include Davis Boulton, one of the few British photographers working for the Hollywood studios, and Ruth Harriet Louise, the only woman to run a studio photo gallery. Often stars would build up a relationship with a photographer as was the case with Greta Garbo and Clarence Sinclair Bull, and Joan Crawford and George Hurrell. This was a time before paparazzi, and these photographs distributed by the studios were the only vehicle of connection between stars and fans. Thousands of photographs would be sent out worldwide by the studios both to fans and to publications. To enable the photographs to be reproduced as widely as possible for publicity they were stamped ‘copyright free’, which resulted in the names of many pivotal studio photographers remaining uncredited for creating timeless and career-defining portraits.
John Kobal (1940-1991) was a collector and author who methodically sought to understand the role of photography in the Hollywood legend. He began collecting film photographs in the 1950s, visiting Los Angeles frequently when many of the major studios were being bought by corporations who cared little for the history of the film industry. At first his interest was solely in the stars and their films but his interest began to shift to the photographers behind the portraits, many of whom were still alive and accessible at this time. Kobal tracked down the surviving members of the circle of great Hollywood photographers and through a series of major exhibitions and books sought to gain them the recognition they deserved. As a result, the significance of the Hollywood photographers is now widely acknowledged for their contribution to both the film industry and twentieth century photographic portraiture.
A fully-illustrated paperback book, published by the National Portrait Gallery in association with Steidl, accompanies the exhibition, with essays by Robert Dance and John Russell Taylor. RRP £25
The exhibition will run from 7 July until 23 October 2011 in the Porter Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, London.
For further information please visit www.npg.org.uk/glamour
- Average Article Rating 0 Stars
-
Your Rating
Login Required!
Sorry - You must be a registered user & logged in to rate this.
Login | Register
Back to Categories