Iconic Beauty: The Golden Age of Hollywood Films Was Also the Golden Age of Celebrity Photos

Studio stills and the Hollywood publicity machine

Soon after movies reached the big screen, the studios were using staff and freelance photographers to produce pictures of the top stars. The most common were 8-by-10-inch stills sent to newspapers, magazines, movie theaters and fans.

“A studio publicity department would set up a shot and select the images they wanted,” said Simon Crocker, chairman of the John Kobal Foundation, a London-based group devoted to Hollywood fine art photographs and portraits. “These would be printed by the thousands. Captions and studio logos were typically printed on the photos.”

Because those stills were produced in such numbers, many survive, often with a studio caption or logo printed on them. They are the most common Hollywood photographs on the market and the usual starting point for a new collector.

Why collectors want the large celebrity portraits

Larger celebrity portraits, from 11 by 14 inches up to 16 by 20 inches, were made for specific purposes. “Photographers were asked to do exclusive prints, maybe for a specific magazine like Vanity Fair or another up-market magazine,” Crocker said. From each session a portrait was chosen by the photographer or with his approval, and a limited number of prints was made on high-quality paper, often by the photographer himself.

“Extra portraits might be printed for studio executives or the stars,” Crocker said. Greta Garbo had sets delivered as part of her contract. Most of these prints carry the photographer’s personal stamp.

The collector market focuses mainly on these larger prints, according to Grey Smith, director of Hollywood movie posters and photos at Heritage Auction Galleries. “Celebrity portraits are more desirable,” Smith said. “Whatever the size, these photos were all done for glamour. It was part of the Hollywood machine, telling everyone, ‘We have the most beautiful stars.’” The same stars reached children in a humbler form in the 1930s, on the picture lids of Dixie Cup ice cream.

George Hurrell and the birth of the glamour portrait

The people behind the camera included George Hurrell, Robert Coburn, Ruth Harriet Louise, Clarence Sinclair Bull, Ernest Bachrach and Otto Dyar. These photographers helped create the magic of Hollywood, said Karen Sinsheimer, curator of photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. “People like George Hurrell established a whole new way of doing portraiture,” she said. Sinsheimer worked on the John Kobal Foundation’s exhibit Made in Hollywood, more than 90 prints by Hollywood’s greatest portraitists, shown at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, through September 12, 2010.

These images “absolutely were the beginning of fashion photography,” Crocker said. “What we see today is straight out of what Hurrell created. Pre-Hurrell, portraiture was almost theatrical and rigid and unsexy. Hurrell brought glamour and sex and the close-up. He created a look that has never really been improved upon.”

Part of the appeal is how a still image can hold a star more firmly than film. “What people remember of those stars is not from films, but one essential photograph,” actress Louise Brooks (1906 to 1985) is quoted as saying in the book Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography. “When I think of Garbo, I do not see her moving in any particular film. I see her staring mysteriously into the camera.” A single portrait can fix a star’s image in the same way for Marilyn Monroe, whose studio photographs belong to the last years of the period.

Hollywood portrait photographers of the 1920s and 1930s

The golden age of Hollywood portraiture began in 1920 and lasted 40 years, according to Glamour of the Gods by Robert Dance and John Taylor, which calls the photographers’ work “perhaps the most perfect record available of the history of Hollywood’s first 50 years.”

George Hurrell (1904 to 1992). One of his first subjects was the aviator Pancho Barnes. Through her he met silent star Ramon Novarro, who commissioned a series of portraits. Novarro showed the results around Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and in 1930 Hurrell was hired as head of the MGM portrait gallery.

James Abbe (1883 to 1973). In 1932 he was the only American allowed to photograph Joseph Stalin, and world leaders became his specialty. His portraits of Rudolph Valentino, Mae West, Josephine Baker and Charlie Chaplin are icons of modern photography.

Edwin Bower Hesser (1893 to 1962). After serving in World War I he was a contract photographer for silent stars based in New York. His backlighting, which made hair look lined with light, influenced glamour images between 1925 and 1930.

Alfred Cheney Johnston (1884 to 1971). The New York native photographed Ziegfeld Girls and silent-era starlets, and as a member of the Algonquin Round Table he photographed Mary Pickford, Fanny Brice, the Gish sisters and Louise Brooks.

Clarence Sinclair Bull (1896 to 1979). Sam Goldwyn hired him in 1920 to shoot publicity stills, and four years later he became head of MGM’s stills department. Greta Garbo was photographed almost exclusively by Bull from 1921 to 1941.

Otto Dyar, Ernest Bachrach and the studio portrait galleries

Edward Curtis (1868 to 1952). Best known for his photographs of the American West and American Indians, he moved to Los Angeles around 1921, worked as a still photographer on Hollywood films and set up a portrait studio in the Biltmore Hotel.

Robert Coburn (1900 to 1990). A studio portrait photographer for three decades from the 1930s, he photographed Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Kim Novak and Carole Lombard, and in 1940 began 20 years as chief portrait photographer at Columbia Pictures.

Eugene Robert Richee (1896 to 1972). Employed by Paramount in the 1920s and 1930s and occasionally by MGM, he is perhaps the photographer who most often photographed Louise Brooks.

Otto Dyar (1892 to 1988). Dyar began his career at Paramount in the 1920s, where he was asked to make portraits of silent film star Clara Bow, according to the John Kobal Foundation. He left for Fox Pictures in 1933.

Ernest Bachrach (1899 to 1973). A still man with Famous Players-Lasky in 1920, he was at Paramount by 1925, where he was a favorite of Gloria Swanson. As head photographer at RKO he shot and custom printed most portraits of stars like Dolores del Río, Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn.

Elmer Fryer (1898 to 1944). He ran the stills department when Warner Bros. and First National merged in 1929, and in the 1930s photographed Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, James Cagney and Errol Flynn.

Auction prices for Hurrell photos in 2009

Prices from 2009 auctions give a sense of the market at the time. A George Hurrell photograph of Veronica Lake, made for Paramount in 1942 and measuring 10.5 by 13.5 inches, sold in March 2009 for $10,755. Hurrell’s Norma Shearer in Strangers May Kiss, made for MGM in 1931 at 10 by 13 inches, sold in November 2009 for $6,572.

That same November, a 1930s Paramount portrait of Betty Grable and a 1930s Hurrell portrait of Joan Crawford for MGM, both 10 by 13 inches, each sold for $2,390. The differences come down to the photographer, the star, the image and the print itself: a vintage print made at the time from the original negative, with the photographer’s stamp, is worth far more than a later copy. Buyers browsing listings such as those in What’s Selling on eBay do well to ask about the stamp and the paper before anything else.