Hollywood portrait photography existed for two reasons: The first was to sell the stars that people paid to see – the photographer’s art pressed into the service of advertising.

The second was to articulate and preserve beauty for all time, in a more compressed way than the movies themselves ever could.

This second reason is why we still gaze at these photographs in appreciation and sometimes awe.

The Norton Museum of Art’s new exhibit, Made in Hollywood: Photographs from the Kobal Foundation is a selection from the private stock of the late John Kobal, the world’s leading Hollywood photo archivist. Kobal had a private collection of 3,500 prints, and the Norton’s show contains about 91 shots, including most of the major stars of Hollywood’s classic age, from Garbo to Brando.

Kobal was a lapsed actor, a sometime writer – his best book is a collection of interviews entitled People Will Talk – and an entertaining, flamboyantly theatrical personality.

The show, nearly all vintage prints, provides a capsule history of the shifting ideas of beauty over nearly 50 years, and of how various artists such as George Hurrell, Laszlo Willinger, Clarence Sinclair Bull and Robert Coburn coped with the profusion of faces trooping in front of their cameras day after day, year after year.

"There’s a sense in which the true image makers were the photographers," says Karen Sinsheimer, the photography curator of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which assembled the exhibit. "The studios would hire young actors for six months or a year, and they’d cap their teeth, change their hairstyles, pluck their eyebrows, then hand them over to the still photographers to see what they could do with them."

Fueling the work of the photographers were dozens of fan magazines (Photoplay, Modern Screen, etc.) that had a cumulative circulation in millions. The photographers had to crank it out for the magazines’ ceaseless demands. The major studios were in the still business nearly as heavily as they were in the movie business; MGM had 12 photographers on staff making scene stills, and that didn’t even count the people working in the portrait studio.

Building a new image

Established stars sometimes went for a change of image in the stills before they did it in their movies. Norma Shearer felt her screen image was dowdy, so she went to George Hurrell for a makeover that emphasized rumpled hair, off-the-shoulder outfits, and a come-hither look that surprised even her husband, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg.

The result, says Sinsheimer, is that "Shearer looked better in Hurrell’s stills than she ever did in the movies."

For decades, the portraits were made with 8 by 10 negatives that produced superb prints and blow-ups, not to mention making retouching comparatively easy.

"The photographers were superb craftsmen," says Sinsheimer. "(MGM chief portrait photographer) Clarence Bull was consistently good, the only photographer (Greta) Garbo allowed to shoot her. She didn’t want George Hurrell because he wanted to control makeup, hair, everything. He would tell actresses, ‘Just show up and I’ll do it.’ Garbo would have none of that. She didn’t like him."

The primary difference between the star photography of the silent and sound eras was that the silent era tended toward a more restricted emotional palette; the photographs are more or less made on an Edwardian model, with a discreet distance between lens and subject, as with Baron de Meyer’s portrait of Mary Pickford. Nothing too intimate, nothing too hot.

There are some exceptions – such as 1920s photos of Garbo that scream sex – but generally men were eroticized more than women. In the sound era, despite the strictures of the Production Code, which narrowed what was permissible in stills as well as in films, the images were much more sexual, probably because the photographers got closer. As Charles Laughton observed, "They can’t censor the gleam in my eye."

"The early sound era portraits had an eroticism which still works for us," says Kevin Brownlow, the premiere historian of silent film, and the recent winner of an honorary Oscar for his efforts.

"Whereas the silent era photographs were often artistic triumphs, using specially ground portrait lenses, gauze and the most exquisite lighting, they did not aim for such outright eroticism. Perhaps they were scared of it after the scandals of the early 20s .

"The men were more overt – George O’Brien and Ramon Novarro were sometimes portrayed virtually naked. Evelyn Brent was an exception, as was Clara Bow; they conveyed powerful sexuality however much the photographer might have toned it down. And some looked into the lens with such honesty, charm and intelligence that you fell for them on the spot."

The show features a section devoted to stills from the films of Cecil B. DeMille, who had an abiding interest in still photography – there are 3-D stills from DeMille films as early as 1920.

He hired Karl Struss, who had been part of Alfred Stieglitz’s group in New York, as a cameraman as well as still photographer, and there are a couple of great Struss portraits in the show. DeMille also hired Edward Sherrif Curtis, the early chronicler of Native American portraits, to shoot stills for his first version of The Ten Commandments in 1923. Curtis’ work for DeMille is present in one stunning example in the Norton show, a deep blue Cyanotype.

Stars’ reactions varied

Some stars didn’t mind working in the portrait gallery, others did it grudgingly. Spencer Tracy was notoriously recalcitrant and acted like he would rather be having a root canal. Joan Crawford worked as hard in her stills as she did in her movies. Garbo was the consummate professional – never late, always doing her job, and at 5 p.m. she was gone.

With portraits, as with so much else in the movies, everything began to change in the 1950s. The studios were in financial decline so cutbacks often hit the photography staffs first. The 8-by-10 cameras were out in favor of smaller formats that didn’t produce such luscious surfaces.

Most importantly, the paparazzi ethic infiltrated the movie industry. "People didn’t want to see glamourized, sanitized photographs," says Sinsheimer, "they wanted the real person."

Today, we have reality thrown at us 24/7, so it’s a relief to retreat to the celebratory stylization and deep chiaroscuro of these photographs, with their startling resonance that was not always apparent when they were made, and which accompanies the beauty that was always there.

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