The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers John Kobal Pdf
FAMOUS FACES, FORGOTTEN PHOTOGRAPHERS
See the article in its original context from
June 30, 1981
,
Section 7 , Folio
xiiiBuy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive do good for home commitment and digital subscribers.
Nigh the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times'due south print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these manufactures as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other bug; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
THE Fine art OF THE GREAT HOLLYWOOD PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHERS 1925-1940 Past John Kobal. Illustrated. 291 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
IT seems probable that many more people have seen photographs of Greta Garbo than have seen her films, and the same may be true of Marlene Dietrich and all the other Hollywood stars. What lasts in the public memory is probable to exist visions of their faces, not scenes from their films.
In this book, John Kobal goes as far as to suggest that the acknowledged power of a star's looks depends on still images rather than motion pictures. His book ignores film makers and instead offers a gallery of photographs by the Hollywood studio prototype-makers, with some interesting comments about their methods, their relations with their subjects, and their uncharted upshot on our visual life. We are invited to believe that our mental images of the great stars owe their staying power more to the talents of George Hurrell, Ernest Bachrach or Laszlo Willinger than to accidents of bone structure.
Mr. Kobal begins with a very good essay on the whole enterprise of Hollywood photography and and then introduces a choice of portraits by these and other studio photographers, describing the special gifts of each and connecting them with their studio and principal subjects. At that place are pictures of Miss Dietrich by East.R. Richee, Don English and William Walling Jr. These were all shot, however, nether the centre of Josef von Sternberg, whom Mr. Kobal is careful to include amid his artists, since Sternberg ''directed'' all of Miss Dietrich's sittings as if they were scenes and did everything but snap the shutter. There is tragic Garbo by Clarence Sinclair Bull and delicate Garbo by Ruth Harriet Louise; incredibly lush Robert Taylor, dangerous Clark Gable and ferocious Joan Crawford, all by George Hurrell; glittering, quirky Katharine Hepburn by Ernest Bachrach. And at that place is a 1931 motion-picture show of John Wayne, taken by William Fraker for Columbia, that is null short of heartbreaking, in the true James Dean mode. Together they form a stunning body of piece of work, though this choice manifestly represents a tiny fraction of what was done.
During the period covered by this book (1925-twoscore), the new and profoundly effective picture close-upwards was first translated into a technique for studio portraiture. Information technology was a method especially designed to ''glamorize'' moving picture stars - to enhance their personal magic, which sold tickets no matter what roles they played. In those years of the star system, the eye and soul of whatsoever movie were the vividly lighted shots of the star's face at revealing moments. When the camera closed in on Miss Dietrich's parted lips, hooded eyes and back-lit hair adumbrated by feathers, the plot and dialogue ceased to matter, and the movie took on its true significance. The studio photographer's business organization was to fix merely such visions of unique dazzler that could transcend films fifty-fifty while promoting them.
And and so a new portrait genre came into existence. Unsupported past the painterly tradition that had inspired Baron de Meyer and the other modern portrait pioneers, information technology had to conjure romantic dazzler by purely Hollywood standards. The all-time of the Hollywood photographers managed to intensify the looks of the subject so adeptly as to expose the soul while masking the body's shortcomings. Doing this with the camera required an unprecedented coaction between each star'southward sense of his own distinction and the photographer'south sympathetic perceptions. There was an obsessive seriousness, a kind of shared conviction, in this early on ''glamour'' photography that allowed no room for irony, detachment or realism - everything that was the strength of dandy contemporaries such as Walker Evans. This is pure idealization, merely in quite a new fundamental.
Mr. Kobal does non blush to compare the force and originality of this work to that of Gainsborough, Raphael and Botticelli. He may have a betoken, in view of the admiration that has continued to grow for the beauty of those faces - Norma Shearer, Tyrone Power, Hedy Lamarr -even on the role of people with a rather dislocated sense of the films they appeared in. The chief divergence, of course, betwixt these artists and Gainsborough is that the public never knew their names. Mr. Kobal's examination of the Hollywood portraits ends in 1940 because he believes the side by side generation cared much less and worked less difficult later on the creative discoveries had been made and the traditions established. Peradventure the atmosphere of war tended to attenuated the production with synthetic cheer, phony sincerity and all the coy realism that is fatal to magic.
At the end of the book is a list of later on and lesser photographers, without illustrations of their work. Throughout, Mr. Kobal writes in the prose of an enthusiast, but he seldom overdoes information technology, and the fashion suits the subject. Amidst the many arresting footnotes, one calls attention to the fact that ''Faces,'' the pictorial calendar issued by the Museum of Modern Art, gives the names of all the artists whose works appear in it except the photographers of the motion-picture show stars, whose pictures are but credited to the museum'southward Motion-picture show Archive. For shame.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/30/books/famous-faces-forgotten-photographers.html
0 Response to "The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers John Kobal Pdf"
Post a Comment