Still photography, comprising both studio portraiture and the work of publicity-department ‘stillsmen’, made a significant contribution to the Hollywood film industry, especially during the heyday of the studio system from the 1920s to c.1950.
Portraiture
The pre-First World War emergence of the star system, with its attendant publicity apparatus and fan magazines (e.g. Photoplay, founded in 1912), boosted demand for glamorous images. Until c.1920 it was met by commercial operators like Underwood & Underwood in New York (promoters of Theda Bara) and Nelson Evans and the Witzel studio in Los Angeles. Screen actors often invested heavily in promotional portraits. With the consolidation of the studio system, however, portraiture became part of an elaborate star-grooming process conducted in-house. Leading star photographers, who worked in ‘portrait galleries’ on the studio lot, included (over longer or shorter time-spans) Ruth Harriet Louise (1903-40), George Hurrell (1904-92), and Clarence Sinclair Bull (1895-1979) at MGM, Eugene R. Richee at Paramount, Jack Freulich (d. 1936) at Universal, and Ernest Bachrach at RKO. Freelances like Tom Kelley (b. 1914) and André de Dienes (1913-85) were hired by MGM and Selznick International as required. There was also, as the work of figures like Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Edward Steichen demonstrates, a dynamic relationship between Hollywood portraiture and contemporary fashion and advertising photography.
Although some stars hated photography and others would only work with a favoured photographer—Greta Garbo with Bull, for example, from 1929—most either revelled in the process or accepted it for the sake of their careers. Using 20.3 × 25.4 cm (8 × 10 in) studio cameras, and every artifice of lighting and make-up, Hollywood portraitists strove to create images of unearthly perfection and allure. Blemishes like Garbo's mole or the young Joan Crawford's freckles were eliminated by retouching, and the final results vetted by studio executives before release to fans, the press, and publicists. Portraiture was a serious operation, with photographers sometimes taking hundreds of pictures a day and teams of retouchers and lab technicians turning out thousands of prints. Paramount issued over 1, 700 different portraits of Carole Lombard while she was under contract (1930-7). Styles shifted over time, and from studio to studio, with MGM portraits, like its films, the most elaborate and stylized, while Warner Bros. favoured a more informal, naturalistic approach. Eroticism was curbed by censorship, and the rules of the Advertising Advisory Council (f. 1933) kept retouchers busy trimming curves and masking cleavage. Stars immortalized as much by their portraits as their films included Louise Brooks, memorably photographed by Richee in the late 1920s, but also portrayed—as flapper, vamp, and ‘jazz baby’—by others including Muray and Steichen; Garbo; and, the ultimate siren, Dietrich.
Stills
Studio stillsmen were less prominent and well paid than portraitists, and their work was more varied. Each production was assigned a photographer, who had to record publicity-related events before and after principal cinematography, make any photographs required as props (e.g. the election posters in Citizen Kane (1940)), and take stills during every important scene. The results were used for record, continuity, and publicity purposes, and as raw material for posters. Finally, stillsmen had to take general-purpose pictures of the stars ‘at home’ and in society for fan magazines and the press. (Here they were competing with the less sycophantic efforts of the Hollywood press corps and magazines like Life and Look.)
Stillsmen usually wielded 20.3 × 25.4 cm cameras, or 10.2 × 12.7 cm (4 × 5 in) ones for action shots, 35 mm being rarely used before the Second World War. The work demanded both diplomatic and technical skills, since directors' attitudes to still photography varied considerably: whereas Cecil B. DeMille, Erich von Stroheim, and Josef von Sternberg, for example, valued and were even influenced by it, others like John Ford regarded it as a nuisance. For practical or security reasons, scenes sometimes had to be completely reorganized for stills: those for Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), for instance, though creepy, give an entirely misleading idea of the plot. Some stills became more famous than the film itself: Garbo's face superimposed on the Sphinx, for example, and Marilyn Monroe's billowing-skirt publicity shot for The Seven Year Itch (1954).
Stills were produced in huge quantities, and many were destroyed after use. By the late 1930s, however, they were being collected, with pre-1920 examples especially sought after. They are often historically important, showing ‘archaeological’ details of the film-making process, or scenes or characters cut from a finished film, and facilitating the reconstruction of truncated masterpieces like Stroheim's Greed (1923) and The Wedding March (1927). Stills, rather than frame enlargements from actual footage, illustrated much of the older literature on cinema.
With the decline of ‘classical’ Hollywood from the late 1940s, both stars and photographers became freelances whose activities were organized by agents rather than studios. But the star-as-freelance still needed an image, and the cinema's need to compete with other entertainments made publicity and marketing even more important than before. Film-makers arranged photo opportunities for their productions, and photography on or around film sets became a significant aspect of photojournalism, as Magnum photographers' work demonstrates. And, while fan magazines declined, celebrity, gossip, and ‘lifestyle’ ones multiplied, all hungry for star pictures. Especially from the 1960s onwards, Hollywood image making merged with the broader industry of celebrity photography.
— Robin Lenman
See also cinema and photography.Bibliography
- Kobal, J., The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers 1925-1940 (1980).
- Davis, R. L., The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood's Big Studio System (1993).
- Finler, J. W., Hollywood Movie Stills: The Golden Age (1995).
- Magnum Cinema: Photographs from 50 Years of Movie-Making, introd. A. Bergala (1995).
- Hicks, R. W., and Nisperos, C., Hollywood Portraits: Classic Shots and How to Take Them (2001)
