The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers John Kobal
HoodQuarterly, spring/summer 2010
Mary Desjardins, Acquaintance Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dartmouth College
American films fabricated during the "gilded age" of Hollywood, the era when the film studios produced almost five hundred films a year, take held a place of esteem in art museums, higher picture societies, and academic departments for almost a century. Interest in the creative and historical values of the piece of work produced by Hollywood studio photographers, all the same, goes back only a few decades. Fabricated in Hollywood: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation, at the Hood from July ten to September 12, showcases the Hollywood photography collection of the private who is perhaps near responsible for sparking that interest amongst scholars, art lovers, and movie fans. John Kobal (1940–1991), a film fan since his babyhood viewing of a Rita Hayworth movie in post-war, Allied-occupied Austria, started his career in writing nearly film in the 1960s as a freelance journalist for BBC radio. His interviews with actors took him to New York and Hollywood. While his contemporaries treated the economic decline and cultural transition of Hollywood at this time with cynicism or through a nostalgic reverence for the by, Kobal's fascination centered on what could exist fabricated of the change. For him, Hollywood's most valuable surviving relics were the voluminous photographic collections of star portraits and moving picture product stills that the studios, now dissolving or being absorbed by conglomerates, were giving up or even throwing away.
Kobal's collection of Hollywood star portrait photos and film product stills serves as the ground for many of his books on picture history and stardom. The museum exhibitions he curated—the first major displays of Hollywood photography— inspired other collectors and fueled a growing involvement in charting a pop history of twentieth-century American culture through the fantasies and ethics created out of Hollywood and its stars. Kobal's authority as a historian and passion as a collector-curator arise from his sense that the value of these photographs is simply partially derived from the part they played in a particular economic system of mass cultural production, or their power to imprint on the public's imagination definitive images of particular stars. Instead, or moreover, every bit he states in his book The Art of the Cracking Hollywood Portrait Photographers, "These images belong to an feel." He goes on to argue that "the finest among them create an emotional empathy akin to that found in a bar of music, a line of poetry, or a canvass filled with colour." His study favorably compares Hollywood portrait photography to the works of the greatest portrait painters, whereas his delightful volume of interviews, People Volition Talk, reveals and records the experiences of stars and photographers in goldenage Hollywood.
Kobal's interest in what transpired betwixt star subjects and studio photographers is evident in his large collection of self-reflexive images of "the photo shoot," some of which are on display in the Hood exhibition. In all likelihood, these were taken either for the photographer's own portfolio or for use in the movie fan magazines so of import to the studios' promotion of their films and stars. The studios' need for publicity and promotion was the primary reason for the prodigious output—most 250 to 300 negatives per twenty-four hours—that they demanded from their staff photographers. These photographers specialized in creating one of 3 kinds of photographs: (ane) stills from the motion picture set (shot after the last take of an important scene or shot of a flick, such as the still taken by John Miehle on the set of Swing Time, or the amazing photo attributed to Milton Brown of Lillian Gish on the set of The Wind) for utilise on foyer cards, posters, and advertising copy; (2) portraits (normally shot in the lensman's own "gallery" on the lot); and (3) publicity shots (frequently taken off-site at a star's habitation or other location).
The portrait was the most important vehicle for the promotion of the studios' most valuable assets—their stars. It was used in the development of a persona that, to be sellable, had to projection both a recognizable "type" and the special qualities that made the star unique. This star persona was rarely fixed overnight, although Ernest A. Bachrach's 1940 collaboration with Orson Welles on a portrait created at the very moment the star-director arrived at RKO suggests a genius that had been preordained earlier he had even directed or acted in his debut film (Citizen Kane) at the studio. A comparison of Factor Korman'due south 1939 photo of Rita Cansino (subsequently Hayworth) to Robert Coburn's 1946 photograph of her for Gilda demonstrates the possibility inherent in the studio publicity shot. While the former presents the charming just not infrequent qualities of an as yet typical Hollywood starlet, the latter, i of the nearly reproduced star portraits of the studio era, reveals a perfect storm of artistry from Hayworth the performer, Coburn the photographer, and Jean-Louis the costume designer. While the scenic silk gown worn by the actress in both film and photograph hugs every bend of the star'south body, Coburn's lighting scheme, suggesting an environment of light and shadow that is at once ethereal and fabric, complements Hayworth'southward insouciant head tilt and casual bodily stance in creating a living, breathing woman who could even so be conjured in the fantasies and dreams of her fans as a being who was not of this globe.
Robert Dance, curator of the Hood exhibition, writer of Glamour of the Gods: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation, and co-author of a study of photographer Ruth Harriet Louise, notes that Kobal'south work equally collector, curator, and author between the tardily 1960s and 1991 resuscitated the careers of forgotten photographers and reintroduced them and their star subjects to a new generation of pic enthusiasts. Made in Hollywood: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation promises to practise that and more—to introduce the life'due south piece of work of John Kobal to a new generation of art lovers and motion-picture show fans.
Related Exhibitions
- Fabricated in Hollywood: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation
- Stacey Steers: Nighttime Hunter House
- Follow the Money: Andy Warhol's American Dream
Source: https://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/news/2010/03/made-hollywood-photographs-john-kobal-foundation
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