Marlon Brando, in a still from John Engstead's 'A Streetcar Named Desire'; and Marlene Dietrich, on the set of 'High Tension', in a photograph by Laszlo Willinger; which can be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
A beautiful Rita Hayworth in a tight, low-cut dress with a smoking cigarette in her right hand and her fur coat in the other trailing across the floor for the poster for Gilda (1946); a very young Marlon Brando leaning against a column in a white T-shirt with a defiant look for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); or an Elizabeth Taylor in a bathing suit kneeling on the shore of the beach with her violet-eyed gaze lost on the horizon for Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).
They are images recorded in everyone's retina, as iconic as the films they represent, and which have contributed to making Hollywood history great. Now these, and up to around 70 more equally mythical snapshots, can be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in London from July 7 to October 23 in an exhibition that aims to discover the importance of photography in the creation of the stars of Hollywood from 1920 to 1960.
The "Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits" exhibition, organized in conjunction with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, brings together a selection from the archive of the John Kobal Foundation, a collector and film historian who In life, he treasured more than 5,000 images from the Mecca of film studios dated between 1920 and 1960 before the paparazzi burst in and changed the concept of star photography.
It will be the first time that these images are displayed in the London museum and include portraits of actors such as Marlene Dietrich, James Dean, Joan Collins, Marlon Brando, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Vivien Leigh or Carole Lombard, among others, some never seen in Europe, of around 40 photographers, as well as frames of Hollywood titles from the days of the big studios.
The National Portrait Gallery wants to examine the important role played by these images, which showed glamorous and inaccessible actors, which were used to illustrate movie posters, promote the films, and were sent by the thousands to fans and magazines all over the world. world from the studios of the movie Mecca. In short, they were their main marketing tool and helped shape the careers of many stars.
The importance of a photo
As the author of the book edited for the exhibition, Robert Dance points out, John Kobal (1940-1991), who began collecting magazine photos from a young age and ended up hobnobbing with Hollywood stars and photographers, was the first to notice the importance of this type of photography. And even the stars were aware of this: "It's part of your job," Katharine Hepburn acknowledged, and some even looked "better than I am in the photographs," as Joan Crawford confessed to Kobal.
Throughout his life, Kobal published 33 books on the subject, many of them illustrated with photographs from his own collection, which has become the most important from Hollywood's first 50 years.
Given that these snapshots were printed and distributed by the thousands and free of copyright, their authorship is unknown to many, but the vast majority are signed by great photographers who worked in the photography departments created expressly for this purpose by the studios, the first Paramount in 1920, followed by the rest.
The exploitation of glamor
Paramount and Metro-Goldwing-Mayer (MGM) were the most prestigious studios and the pioneers in exploiting the glamor of their stars, with whom they shielded exclusive contracts. Clarence Sinclair Bull, the author of the famous photo of Alfred Hitchcock directing the studio lion, who also photographed Greta Garbo practically exclusively from 1929 to 1941, worked for Metro throughout his career.
Also working at MGM was the only female portraitist in Hollywood, Ruth Harriet Louise, who did away with sober portraits to print the nuance of the sitter's sensuality, humanizing it but without losing its shine, as she did with Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, and Garbo. Another photographer who managed to make the stars was George Hurrell, who did his best work with Crawford, the actress who most enjoyed being photographed before Marilyn Monroe, and who managed to make Marlene Dietrich prettier than ever, according to Robert Dance.
For his part, Ted Allan was the main photographer for Jean Harlow and also built a good reputation with actors such as Robert Taylor, James Stewart, and the Marx Brothers; while Laszlo Willinger, who gave his images a European sophistication, was Vivien Leigh's favorite photographer and Eric Carpenter was commissioned to photograph the latest Metro stars, Lana Turner, Esther Williams and the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney couple.
At Paramount, Eugene Robert Richee headed the photography department for 20 years and was the first to exploit male beauty with memorable images of Gary Cooper, who, according to Kobal, felt a little embarrassed when photographed and preferred to be in front of him. of a movie camera.
Richee's replacement, who went to Warner Brothers, was A.L. 'Whitey' Schafer, author of most of the Veronica Lake portraits and who in the early 1950s worked with Paramount's rising stars Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift together in A Place in the Sun (1951); After she died in 1951, he was replaced by Bud Fraker, who was in charge of photographing Audrey Hepburn in her first two films, Roman Holiday (1953) and Sabrina (1954).
