Contrary to popular belief, the glamour of air travel didn't disappear with the crowded planes brought on by deregulation and cheaper prices. It started dissipating in the late 1960s, with the coming of jumbo jets and terrorist hijackings. “In the popular imagination,” writes architectural historian Alastair Gordon in his excellent book Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, “air travel was now equated with boredom and disaster.”
This Weather.com slide show on “Glamour in the Skies” reminded me of another change--this one a technological improvement--that eroded airline glamour around the same time: the disappearance of the staircase in favor of safer, more weatherproof indoor jet bridges.
If you're a traveler, you'd much rather walk directly into the terminal on a more-or-less level jet bridge. But the old stairs set the traveler apart from the crowds on the ground. They created a dramatic sense of arrival and departure. And they made for lots of glamorous photographs.
Nowadays, we still occasionally see such glamorous images of people set apart from the normal life that includes occasional jet travel. Some, like the star of Fergie's "Glamorous" video, are going up and down the steps of private jets. So, in a sense, are the others. But their private jets are publicly owned.
[Marilyn Monroe and her small "bodyguard" courtesy of Everett Collection and used with permission. We paid to use this photo, so don't you steal it. President Obama arriving in Ankara, Turkey, by Pete Souza and courtesy of White House Flickr stream.]
Model wearing nursemaid's kerchief by Lilly Dache. Photo: Gordon Parks, courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation
At theNew York Times' Lens photo blog, Deborah Willis, of the Photography and Imaging Department at New York University, looks at the fashion work of the late Gordon Parks, who would have turned 100 this year.
Parks is best known for his socially conscious documentary photography—he was the first black photographer for Life magazine—and for the 1970s blaxpoitation film Shaft, which he directed (and which is quite stylish too). But Parks largely got his start in the glamour industry, shooting portraits of society women in Chicago before eventually landing at the ne plus ultra of fashion magazines, Vogue, where he freelanced from the mid-1940s to the '60s.
Parks produced some of the magazine's loveliest images: models draped in furs and waiting for a bus; a woman dashing across an office, her sorbet-colored gown trailing behind her; girls in pert hats jumping in and out of taxis, or deep in conversation at a Parisian cafe. Willis writes:
With a clear understanding about how to “look” on city streets, in cafes and society balls, Parks’s fashion photographs are about the experience of being dressed. He communicated beauty, vanity and pleasure in his photographs of fashionably dressed women. ...
But there's something else that makes Parks's images so arresting, and that made them so radical at the time, and it's that they are alive. At the time Parks was beginning his career at Vogue, most fashion photography was done in a studio, with models posing like mannequins in front of artificial-looking sets or painted backdrops. Parks—along with Martin Munkácsi at Harper's Bazaar and Richard Avedon—was among the first to bring the model onto the streets, showing her interacting with the city and its inhabitants. And it made fashion photography more glamorous, because it allowed women to get lost in the narrative of a photograph, and imagine a world in which waiting for a bus or going to work was filled with romance and excitement and dramatic possibility. Before, fashion photography was about clothes; Parks and his peers made it about the women and the lives they lead in those clothes.
Click on the link to read Willis' article and see a slide show of Parks's work.
In this video, which accompanies a local newspaper interview, location scout Sylvia Schmitt talks about why the variety of locations available in the Palm Springs area make it so appealing for fashion shoots. The windmills are popular, of course, as is the midcentury modern architecture--and the automobile props that complement it. But so is the rugged beauty of Joshua Tree National Park. And Schmitt's Locations Unlimited website promotes even more desolate spots, including an abandoned mine, an abandoned prison, and an abandoned railway, as well as a couple of salt flat locations. Photographers apparently like the emptiness, which allows them to construct their own fantasy environments. Desert ruins also provide a contrast that heightens the vitality of young fashion models--an encounter between the beautiful and sublime.
The great fashion photographer Lillian Bassman has died at the age of 94. Here's the NYT obituary of this extraordinary woman. Here's a selection of her work from the Peter Fetterman Gallery. The clip above, from which I took the title quote for this post, is from a documentary on her life and work. You can see the full documentary, which lasts about 28 minutes (in two parts), and comments from Fetterman and Bassman's daughter, photographer Lizzie Himmel, here.
“He who seeks beauty shall find it” is the personal motto of 82-year old fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. He’s been riding around on his bicycle, photographing fashion on the streets of New York City for roughly half a century. And although his name and reputation are well established in the fashion world, his personal “fashion philosophy” is by no means conventional.
In the movie Bill Cunningham New York, Bill comes off as a mysteriously simple character, a happy man who loves what he does and does what he loves. But there’s more; in fact, there are many complex and profound ideas wrapped up in the way Bill views fashion and culture, all of which inform the pictures he takes.
When photographing runway shows in Paris, he says, “If it isn’t something a woman could wear, I’m not interested.” His down-to-earth, fun-loving attitude makes fashion approachable to all. He praises daring and originality in clothing choices above all. He’s not afraid to call an outfit boring, no matter who’s wearing it. He may ignore a celebrity on the street wearing a multi-thousand dollar gown in favor of a bag-lady digging in the garbage, whose overlapping patterned shawls and head-scarves he thinks are “marvelous.”
Bill Cunningham’s straightforwardness stems from his ethical commitment to honesty and to celebrating individual creativity. He takes a firm stance against fashion magazines’ “In & Out” lists for attempting to dictate from the top-down what’s “in fashion” and what isn’t. Part of his opposition is moral and the other part is practical. He understands that no matter what magazines and designers decree, real fashion—what is actually “in”—can only be determined from the bottom up, by what everyday people actually wear.
To me, it seems that Cunningham’s incredible ability to capture weekly street-style trends is made possible by his understanding of how culture works. Bill’s photographs show us that in the city, fashion is a silent dialogue between people on the streets. Some respond to the latest designs from Paris; others adopt and revise the looks of those around them, incorporating good ideas from anywhere they can be found. People’s clothing choices are also often responding to the conditions of the local climate and Bill traces these complex and spontaneous orders with skill and grace (see “Boiling Point,” documenting the woven, eyelet fabrics of the hot New York week of August 14, 2009).
In de-emphasizing the role of “top-down” dictates from the fashion elite, Bill Cunningham helps us see how we, as everyday people, have the opportunity to participate in the fashion world. “I’m not interested in celebrities with their free dresses,” he says, “I’m interested in clothes!” He calls our attention to the role each of us has as a potential contributor to the silent dialogue of fashion with the choices we make in front of our mirrors each morning.
Click here for a list of when and where the film is showing.
This rare photo of Greta Garbo smiling belongs to the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive, maintained by DG friend Louis D'Elia. It was taken by the great Hollywood portrait photographer George Hurrell in his one and only session with Garbo--a shoot to promote her 1930 film Romance.
Garbo did not like the antics Hurrell used to get his subjects to relax and look natural, and refused to work with him again. (Clarence Sinclair Bull became her photographer of choice.) But she did crack a smile when Hurrell tripped over some equipment, and he managed to capture the moment.
I examined the photos from this shoot when I wrote a catalog essay for a 2006 exhibit of Hurrell photos from the Pancho Barnes collection. (A version of that essay later appeared in The Atlantic.) While working on the essay, I noticed that the earrings in the Garbo photos reappeared in one of my favorite Hurrell portraits, this one of the woman Hurrell himself considered his "most mysterious" subject: Myrna Loy.
Remembered today mostly as the comedienne star of the Thin Man movies, for many years Loy was cast as an "exotic," thanks to her almond eyes. (For an amazing collection of Myrna Loy photos, from many phases of her career, check out this blog.) Like Garbo, she was an MGM star when Hurrell was the studio's chief portrait photographer.
As I've mentioned in my posts and article about the Debbie Reynolds collection auction, while MGM created lavish costumes, it also recycled them. The same was true, of course, of accessories, and here's the photographic evidence. As always, click the photo to see a larger version.
When I asked my Facebook friends to recommend photographers or stylists who could talk knowledgeably about hiding lamp cords, someone gave me a great tip: call Adam Fortner. An Austin-based stylist, Adam started on the editorial side of the profession, as the art director for Texas Architect magazine, later moving to Western Interiors & Design Magazine. In 2007, he founded Creative & Sons, which does photo styling of interiors and objects for editorial and commercial photographers, as well as art direction and production services. (He also has a cool blog, where you can find posts on subjects like decaying Victorian Lego houses and how stylists compose faux grocery lists.) We had such an interesting conversation, moving from lamp cords to other forms of styling magic, that I asked him to share some thoughts and experiences with DeepGlamour readers.
DG: How is styling interiors different from being an interior designer?
Adam Fortner: An interior designer creates spaces that are functional, and we show them off. The main difference is in the format our work takes. An interior designer creates a space that is meant to be experienced in three dimensions. The photographer and stylist’s job is to take that three-dimensional, fluid space and present it in a two-dimensional static photograph within a limited frame. Everything we do serves the photo, which can mean eliminating or moving things so they look best on camera, not necessarily so they function in the space. I tell people you can’t live in a styled room: the chairs are all at odd angles and the coffee table might be three inches from the couch; but look at the photograph and it’s magically transformed from what you see around you.
DG: How is a room different when it's been styled for a magazine photo shoot compared to the way it might look if the owner had cleaned it up for visitors?
AF: For the most part we try to leave the room as we found it, but once we’ve found the angle and framing of the final photograph, adjustments have to be made. At that point a stylist’s job becomes editing. It might be a simple tweak to accommodate the perspective of the camera and show off one detail or another, or filling spaces that might have become visual voids in the frame, or even removing or adjusting things to avoid overlaps or add the appearance of depth. In some cases the accessories or pieces that the designer or client chose just won’t work for a photo and you have to change it. A dark, rich duvet cover may look and feel luxurious in person, but it may fall flat in camera. I am careful to reassure homeowners or clients that it’s not about their personal taste, it’s about the composition and quality of the photo.
My favorite exchange about styling comes from a short-lived sitcom and goes like this:
– Who wants their room photographed anyway so everyone knows what their stuff looks like? – They don’t photograph your stuff; they bring in their own stuff. – Well why don’t we just have them come in and finish the room? – Because if your stuff doesn’t look fabulous in the first place then they don’t want to come in and change it!
DG: What's the purpose of styling a room for a magazine photo? What's the effect you're trying to achieve?
AF: Styling is often called the “hidden profession.” A lot of people don’t know it is even a career, and in fact, to be good at it, that’s the whole point: not to be noticed. So you have to find a balance of studied naturalness. A lot of it is also about aspiration. You want to create a space that people want to be in, one that exemplifies the way people want to live, not necessarily the way they actually live. Honestly, how many people wake up to a vase of flowers, a cup of tea and The New York Times perfectly folded on their nightstand?
DG: How does styling for architects differ from styling for interiors magazines or advertising?
AF: The architect is creating or defining a space, so showing off their work takes a different form. Architects understand and experience spaces in a different way. For them, an open and unadorned space is beautiful in and of itself. They appreciate the clean lines, textures, and light in a room. When styling a space for an architect, you often only need minimal adornments, and what you do use really needs to highlight the architecture. That doesn’t always sell the public, though. Empty spaces can look cold and uninviting at first glance, and it takes a little more time and effort to see the details. A magazine or advertisement doesn’t have that luxury; it needs to grab a viewers’ attention in a split-second. I try to recommend this approach to architects. By creating images that capture people’s attention, they then have the opportunity to guide clients deeper into the details, and have a better chance of communicating their thoughts and ideas.
DG: You've recently done some styling work for shoots done in photo studios rather than real interiors. How is styling different when you build from scratch? What does it teach you about styling in the “real world”?
AF: I think of styling as storytelling. When you work in someone’s home, the story is already there. They’ve created their own world with their own tastes: their books, their art, their furniture; we’re mainly there to enhance and document it. When working in a studio, you’re starting with a blank slate. You have to create the entire story–start to finish–and the sky’s the limit so that allows you a lot more freedom. I’ve been working with an excellent production designer who has taught me so much about that. I’ve taken those lessons back to the houses I work on give myself a little more room to create atmosphere, especially when faced with more challenging, less engaging spaces.
DG: When you see a photo of a room in a catalog or interiors magazine, do you think about how it’s been styled? What do you notice that a layperson wouldn’t?
AF: I can’t look at magazines or catalogs without noticing how they’re styled. I hardly look at the products in catalogs. In fact, I’m usually looking at the objects that aren’t for sale. Similarly, in magazines, I’m looking for those small touches that give the space personality. I also look at not only what is in the photo, but also how it’s placed, and why that composition works.
The DG Dozen
1) How do you define glamour?
Glamour is a magic combination of confidence, beauty, and ease that create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The word always conjures a flash of light in my mind’s eye… whether it be flashbulbs, the sparkle of a diamond, the sheen of beautiful fabric, or just that glint in the eye of someone at ease with themselves. But I also think that glamour is something ascribed, not inherent. Things are only glamorous because someone else thinks they are.
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon?
Alexander McQueen. A very good friend of mine gave me a book of his work for my birthday, and while I knew of him and some of his work, I was impressed/amazed by the range and drama and sophistication of what I saw from start to finish.
3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity?
For basic survival glamour is a luxury, but like the fine arts, it’s an unknown quantity that can’t be measured or explained, yet somehow makes life more enjoyable.
4) Favorite glamorous movie?
Auntie Mame. The interiors of her apartment are just amazing. In fact, it was those sets that got me interested in interior design. If I could pick just a scene from a movie, it would be the “Ascot Gavotte” scene from My Fair Lady. The amazing black-and-white dresses and hats against the simple, white, paper-like buildings (all dreamed up by Cecil Beaton) along with the stilted movements and poses are just brilliant.
5) What was your most glamorous moment?
When I was working for a magazine in Los Angeles we hosted a tour of the Case Study houses in Pacific Palisades, which was amazing enough, but in the evening they opened up the Eames house and lit up the lawn with strings of lights. I stood there taking in the crisp night air coming in off the ocean and thinking that I never could have dreamed I’d be there, yet there I was.
Not any one specifically, but an old house filled with lots of history.
8) Most glamorous job?
Is there a glamorous job? I think there are a lot of jobs that seem glamorous, but that’s because we don’t do them. If something looks easy and glamorous, it’s probably because there’s a lot of hard work behind it.
9) Something or someone that other people find glamorous and you don't
Working in the publishing industry. Like before, it often gets glorified in movies and on TV, and really it’s mostly hard work. Yes, there are moments of fun and excitement—that happens anywhere when you love what you’re doing—but there’s also the other 90 percent of the time that you are working and planning and coordinating to make that moment happen. But even I forget that sometimes.
10) Something or someone that you find glamorous whose glamour is unrecognized.
Space. Not the final frontier, but the absence of stuff. Space to do whatever you want: an empty room, an open field. It can be anything and everything.
When I went to the 2009 Anime Expo to talk to cosplayers about the appeal of dressing up as anime and manga characters, I was struck by how important posing for photographs is to that appeal. Yet most of the picture-taking at anime conventions happens with lousy lighting and lots of fans in the way—hardly the ideal way to record the costumes on which players lavish so much time and ingenuity.
Fortunately, L.A. photographer Ejen Chuang, whom I met at that same convention, has now given American cosplayers a worthy visual record: a beautifully produced 272-page book called Cosplay in America. The product of a year spent traveling to conventions around the country (and a maxed-out credit card), plus countless hours of selecting and retouching photos, the book features 270 cosplayers.
Naming it the Best Art Book of 2010, Deb Aoki, About.com’s Manga expert, declared that Cosplay in Ameria “captures the spirit of fun, camaraderie and creativity of the North American cosplay community.” Liz Ohanesian of the LA Weekly praised the “slick and beautiful tome,” which “showcases the diversity and creativity within the anime fandom,” later declaring on BoingBoing that “Chuang did what I hope more people will do in the future, portrayed cosplay as art.”
Ejen is still on the convention circuit, selling his book and giving cosplayers a chance to have their latest handiwork immortalized with professional polish. He’ll next be at Anime Los Angeles January 7-9. In between cons—and his regular work as a production stills photographer—he was kind enough to answer some questions about what he's learned from his experience photographing cosplayers. (To see more of his photos, including new shots and web exclusives, check out the CosplayinAmerica Flickr stream.)
See the end of the interview for information on how you can enter our Cosplay in America giveaway and have a chance to win a free copy of Ejen's book.
DG: Your book is called Cosplay in America. What is cosplay and how is it different in America?
EC: Cosplay is short for “costume-play” which is basically dressing up as characters based off anime, manga, and video games, though the term has become mainstream in the past few years and now applies to any source such as films, American cartoons, music icons, even products—I’ve seen a few Nintendo Wiis running around conventions.
From what I gathered (as I’ve never been to an event in Japan), Americans have a very do-it-yourself attitude. While there are shops in Japan to purchase cosplays, that necessarily isn't so here in the States. You almost have to be MacGyver to pull together many disciplines from sewing to prop making. Some make it from scratch, others purchase parts and put it together. It is the process of creating the outfit that is part of the fun and not necessarily just wearing the outfit.
DG: What inspired you to do a book of cosplayer portraits?
EC: I haven’t really seen a book done specifically done about American cosplay and I thought I'll tackle it myself. The culture has been growing for the past 20 years and is definitely getting larger in thanks to conventions and the internet.
DG: What’s the difference between cosplay and dressing up for Halloween?
EC: Cosplay usually refers to a specific character. For example, dressing as Capt. Jack Sparrow is cosplaying. Dressing up as a pirate is just.... dressing up as a pirate! In the broadest sense, you can say that when your father dresses up as Santa during Christmas, he is in fact, cosplaying.
DG: What’s the relationship between photography (whether professional or amateur) and cosplay?
EC: There’s an interesting relationship between the two. Obviously from a photographer’s perspective, the extravaganza of colorful costumes and makeup of the cosplayer is attractive to the lens, while on the cosplayer side, it is a chance to be in the limelight and have their work appreciated.
DG: How do cosplayers decide what characters to portray?
EC: Cosplayers generally portray characters they feel very strongly about. Talking to many, I understand they felt if they were to put that amount of work into a cosplay, they rather pick characters they feel a strong emotional response to. As many cosplayers tend to be in their teens to mid-20s, my thoughts are in addition to having fun, stretch their creative skills and hanging out with friends at cons, cosplay can be a way for them to try out different “personalities” of their source characters wherever if either male or female. Obviously it is easier for women to dress as male characters than males to dress as female characters.
DG: You took more than 1,600 photos. How did you decide on which ones to publish?
EC: In my youth I was into anime but until I embarked on my project, the last convention I visited was Anime Expo in 2000. In the years between then and 2009 when I started the project, I had been out of the scene so perhaps 90 percent of cosplayers I’ve photographed, I don’t know which series they are from. In a way, it is liberating. I have no bias or preconception about any series or character. I could choose based on their personality and pose. I specifically looked for something about that cosplayer that grabs me. From an edited collection of around 1,000 cosplayers, it took six months to narrow it down to the 260 cosplayers in the book.
DG: One of the cosplayers you interviewed called cosplay “a chance to escape that which binds us, holds us down in our everyday lives, and [it] gives us chance to let our imaginary spirits soar high above all that makes us feel weak. We can shed our everyday lives and feel free to express ourselves.” Another one said it’s “just a dorky little hobby where people play dress up.” What would you say is the appeal of cosplay?
EC: For the younger attendees, it is a chance to let loose and have fun, another layer to add to the convention experience. As a teenager, the need to fit in is strong and so in a way, this allows them to join a community.
For those older ones, it is just a release mechanism. Obviously in life we have our jobs, relationships, school and so forth and to take a vacation from that for one weekend is to take a moment out of the worries of bills, and other adult concerns. I spoke to several cosplayers who have graduated college and move to their working life—and use conventions as a chance to meet up with old friends—similar to a reunion.
For others, it is a chance to test out their abilities to create and personalize to their own individual tastes. For example, at one convention in Florida, I noticed a character whose outfit was filled with beads. The original character’s outfit did not include that large amount of beads but because the cosplayer so loved beads, she weaved her passion into it. In the end it still worked—the character is identifiable and the cosplayer has a chance to personalized the work.
DG: You’re still taking photos as you go to conventions to sell your book. Do you have any favorites to share with our readers?
EC: Truthfully, my favorite photos are the ones where I’m interacting with the cosplayer. So many folks have photos of themselves standing next to a cosplayer. For me, I like it if they point their weapon at me, or they are jabbing me, or something of that nature. Here I am at AnimeFest in Texas getting hammered by the gals of Street Fighter.
This was taken at Otakon, the largest anime con on the East Coast where Bender from Futurama chokes me—I didn’t have any beer with me and you know Bender loves beer!
This one is from Miami where Red Skull, a supervillian from the Capt. America comic books is about to execute me.
Despite all the work that goes into the book and the tour, it is definitely a life-changing experience! I plan to be at another 20 conventions next year and after that start working on other books related to cosplay but not necessarily about cosplay. Thanks for the interview!
We're happy to offer a free copy of Cosplay in America to one lucky reader. To enter, please leave a comment telling us a character you'd like to dress up as and why. (Don't worry about practical considerations; we won't make you model the costume.) The contest deadline is midnight Pacific Time on January 10, and the winner will be selected using Random.org. Contest open to U.S. residents only.
[All photos copyright Ejen Chuang and used by permission.]
Digital special effects are now used so frequently in films and television that we tend to take them for granted. Photoshop is so widely used to manipulate digital photographs that we seldom notice the changes, sometimes even when “realistic” advertising photos have missing, wrongly sized, or misaligned parts. (The website Photoshop Disasters adds funny comments to miscalculated images.)
The theater has always dealt in illusions, and we are perfectly capable of imagining that a bare stage or an abstract set (such as the one shown in the photograph) represents a fictional world. Shakespeare’s plays were first performed on bare stages: thus the characters often speak of the time of day and place.
With experience we also sometimes take theatrical conventions for granted. A proscenium stage is described as having an invisible fourth wall through which the audience views the sets and action onstage. A movie or television screen serves much the same purpose. We forget that we are looking at a flat picture plane once we begin looking “through it” to see images that seem to have dimensional qualities. The addition of 3D further heightens our feeling that we are seeing a dimensional reality, rather than the illusion of one projected onto a screen.
Stage and screen illusions depend partially on an awareness that what the audience will be able to perceive is limited. The fourth wall, for example, does not reveal what is going on above, behind, below, or to the sides of the stage. Cameras reveal only what is in front of the lens, concealing even the person operating the camera.
When actors and dancers perform onstage, they know where the fourth wall is, and they sometimes “cheat” by turning their bodies enough to insure that their speeches and actions are audible and visible to the audience. Dance studios have large mirrors so that dancers can develop some sense of how their bodies, costumes, and movements will look to the audience. In film and photographic work, actors and models learn to maintain an awareness of where the camera is, as well as the light.
In most dramatic productions, the prevailing convention is that the actors act as if the audience is not there, even though actors need to retain some awareness of them. In most film situations, such as the dining room set shown in the photograph, it is impossible to ignore the presence of the equipment. The ability to perform effectively while aware of the presence of an audience, or a camera and a set full of equipment, is a difficult skill, but one that actors must master if we are going enjoy the fictional illusion that they exist in a “real” world.
[The abstract set was built for a production of Sara McKinnon, an opera by Mark Medoff and Randall Shinn. Photograph by Carol Shinn. The photograph “Film set in the dining room” is by Flickr user ricardodiaz11. Used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.]
If my DG email inbox is any indication, people are getting increasingly paranoid about how they look in their Facebook photos. Or at least the publicists for various skincare and beauty products hope they are.
One PR query asks, "Is Your Face Facebook Ready?"
Did you know the there are more than 500 million active users on Facebook? Most people block their walls and photo albums, but profile photos are broadcast to anyone who cares to look—from new classmates to prospective employers. Don’t let a bad complexion ruin your image on Facebook… and beyond. Prep your skin for your close up with Vichy Laboratoires skincare solutions. Whether you have acne scars, puffy eyes or oily skin, Vichy will help you put your best face forward.
Another has the subject line, "Look Picture Perfect!"
Unfortunately, every picture you are photographed in isn’t always Facebook “profile” worthy and we’ve all had photos taken that we are not proud of. Luckily, Romy Fazeli of Kymaro Health and Beauty offers quick inexpensive tips to give you a photo-ready look.
Her mixed-bag of recommendations includes a teeth whitener, body shapers, and jewelry. I wonder what they have in common?
To the contemporary eye, this George Hurell photo of Carole Lombard (part of an enormous auction this Friday and Saturday) seems strange. She looks beautiful, and the lighting and pose are glamorous. But what’s with the plastic sheeting? Is that a shower curtain to her left?
Behold the glamour of cellophane. Like diamonds or crystal, cellophane has a sparkling, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t quality. Although transparent, when crinkled and lit correctly it creates a teasing mystery. In Glamour: A History, Stephen Gundle likens cellophane to “striptease, which achieved its effect by constantly making the unveiled body more remote.”Wrapped in cellophane, “products were available but untouchable and therefore inaccessible.”
In Hurrell’s photo, the shimmering plastic catches the light, creating a cool, translucent contrast to the soft opacity of Lombard’s feathered dress and the warmth of her skin. If you don’t associate plastic with cheapness, cellophane makes perfect sense as a glamorous material. Like glamour itself, it is alluringly artificial.In the 1920s and ’30s, cellophane’s appeal went beyond these intrinsic aesthetic properties. This new material epitomized high-tech modernity: “You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain / You’re the National Gallery / You’re Garbo’s salary / You’re cellophane!” sang Cole Porter in "You're the Top!"
Judith Brown in Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form, which I reviewed along with the Gundle book here, devotes an entire chapter to cellophane. She is interested, she writes, in the material as “pure surface...a protective veneer from dusty reality.” And she notes its ubiquity in the popular culture of the 1920s and ’30s:
Cellophane tablecloths glitter in an upscale nightclub in the Astaire-Rogers blockbuster Swing Time (1936); cellophane also appears in an earlier Joan Crawford film, Dancing Lady (1933), in the transparent swags at the back of a dance set, and again in the Broadway musical staged within the film. in this film, the cellophane also appears in costume form: a group of black-attired old women, complete with bonnets, lace collars, wire glasses, and bent-over backs make their way into a futuristic beauty parlor and emerge as modern bombshells, perfectly artificial with cellophane outfits and what might be plastic hair. Cellophane similarly appears in a swanky Chinese nightclub as the “The Girls in Cellophane” take the stage in W. C. Fields’s International House (1933). The pages of Vogue magazine also mark cellophane as haute couture, here as the “cellophane toque” that makes a “deceptively simple” garment cutting edge by newly framing the model’s face in the most artificial of head covers; and again, as an arresting sight in this newspaper photograph of an urban street. Cellophane fashion staked out a turning point: cellophane was chic and, above all, now.
This Hurrell photo of Joan Crawford, whose negative is in the auction, is from Dancing Lady. Although Crawford is not literally wearing cellophane, her dress has a similar sparkling, translucent quality. It makes her look like a star.
Amelia Earhart was daring, adventurous, modern, and beautiful, among the 20th century’s most enduring icons. Sixty years after her disappearance, high-profile advertising campaigns for Apple and the Gap were still employing her image as a symbol of independence and glamour. A movie about her must have seemed like a sure thing. Yet Amelia is a critical and commercial disaster. What went wrong?
It would be easy to blame the project’s specifics. Director Mira Nair did, after all, manage to turn Thackeray’s lively satire into the ponderous, unwatchable Vanity Fair. A less earnest director or more creative script might have produced a more interesting Amelia, one less reliant on half-hearted soap opera and more focused on the challenges of early aviation. But the real problem may be Amelia Earhart herself.
In the 1920s and ’30s, “the aviatrix was the ultimate glamorous and daring modern woman,” notes Kristen Lubben in Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, the catalog for a 2007 exhibition of Earhart images at the International Center of Photography. Earhart, of course, was the ultimate glamorous aviatrix. She achieved that status not because she was the best female pilot—many were better—but because she was media-savvy and able to embody the public’s multiple aspirations. She was feminist yet feminine, casual yet elegant, modern yet wholesome. “Hers is the healthy curiosity of the clean mind and the strong body and a challenging rebuke to those of us who have damned the youth of the land,” declared a 1928 essayist who saw her as an antidote to Jazz Age decadence. He concluded, “What a girl!” Such a glamorous figure makes an effective advertising icon but an emotionally flattened protagonist. She loses her individuality.
During her life, Earhart was transformed from a person into a persona—idealized, distant, and glamorous, her mythic allure heightened by the mystery of her disappearance. The more time passes, the more her individuality recedes. “She has become an increasingly abstract symbol—of the thrill and danger of adventure, of the possibilities for women, and of the courage to break with … conventional expectations,” writes Lubben. Eternally young, Earhart remains unblemished from the kind of eccentricity or controversy—or ordinary individual complexity—that could make her a compelling subject for a modern biopic. To preserve her glamour, Amelia must keep her at a distance, without flaws, doubts, or character development. We learn nothing of the struggles of her youth, her political commitments, or her limits as a pilot. She ends the film essentially the same as she began it—as an icon.
Here, another recent film about a pioneering aviatrix presents a sharp contrast. Currently making the film-festival rounds and expected to air on public television in the spring, The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club is a straightforward documentary made on a tenth of Amelia’s production budget. Yet for all its still photos and talking heads, it is far more entertaining. While Amelia struggles against the glamour of its heroine, The Legend of Pancho Barnes is imbued with its protagonist’s charisma. The contrast between the two pilots, and the memories they left behind, illuminates the distinctions between these two often-conflated qualities.
Recently up for auction, this Edward Quinn photo of Grace Kelly primping during the filming of To Catch a Thief presents an usual take on a common artistic subject: the beautiful woman at the mirror. From such classics as Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus and Kitagawa Utamaro’s portraits of beauties at their mirrors to this Mark Shaw photo of Audrey Hepburn, the usual composition uses the mirror to give the audience multiple views of the subject: front and back, the face from different angles, the woman as she sees herself and as she is seen by others.
Here, however, we see Grace Kelly entirely from the outside. We do not see the reflection she sees. Rather than a woman of fragments and angles, she appears in a unified view. The photo is a study of surfaces and textures: the shiny, soft hair she is brushing, the lacy gloves, the ornate top, the golden down on her tan arm, the shiny mirror overlaid on the dull trailer. The focal point, framed by her crossed arms is Grace’s face, made even more focal because we know she, too, is looking at it.
The glamour of the toilette points up the difference between male and female audiences (or, to use a phrase encrusted with all sorts of ideological theory, the male and female gaze). For male audiences, portraits of women grooming themselves have traditionally had a voyeuristic quality and were often an excuse for nudity. Projecting himself into the image, the viewer does not generally identify with the subject but with the scene; he imagines not being the subject but being with her. A female viewer is more likely to identify with the subject. She sees herself in the mirror—or longs to.
That feeling was articulated by many of the movie fans interviewed by Jackie Stacey for her study Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. Recalling their youthful filmgoing in the 1940s, women expressed longing and identification when talking about the stars they loved. “It wasn’t Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire, it was me,” said one. Another said, “My favourite was Rita Hayworth. I always imagined if I could look like her I could toss my red hair into the wind…and meet the man of my dreams.”
For women in particular, there is a second kind of glamour of the toilette: the makeover fantasy, which combines the desire for transformation with the idea of being pampered by professionals. “It’s exciting to have important people do stuff for you,” said a nurse from rural Arkansas on ABC’s Extreme Makeover. Hollywood stars not only represent the promise of beauty and fame but also—thanks to their squadrons of makeup artists, hair stylists, wardrobe designers, and, nowadays, everyday fashion stylists—the dream of having an aesthetic entourage on call.
One of my father’s best friends in college became a professional studio photographer, and more than once he practiced his glamour-shot skills using my father as his model (as seen at left). I have numerous photos of my father taken with elaborate studio lighting, usually smoking a cigarette or pipe, sometimes bare-chested, and almost always looking intense. His friend, the photographer, clearly was in charge of the photo sessions, and knew the various looks that he wanted. In a few of these photographs my father was directed to scowl, and in those he can look quite frightening.
Few of us have had occasion to be photographed in a situation where we are there to serve the photographer’s desire to add images to his portfolio. If we hire a professional photographer, it is typically to create a personal or family portrait, or record an occasion such as a wedding or graduation. Even in this situation, the photographer typically exerts a great deal of control relative to the outcome, using experience to produce results that will please most customers.
This is typically the situation with high school yearbook pictures, and I have used my own to illustrate. So that everyone would conform, the photographer had a supply of different-sized white jackets on hand. Since no high school girl would want a single wrinkle to show, the studio was set up with soft lighting. In contrast, the harder lighting used for my father’s portrait shows every wrinkle on his face.
Adding to the softness of the yearbook portrait is the relatively narrow depth of field. My right eye is in sharp focus, but my hair, right shoulder, and ears are not. Compare the sharp focus of my father’s hair with the soft focus of mine. The wider depth of field used for my father’s portrait allows the hair on his arms to be as sharply focused as his eyes.
The softer look is often felt to be more flattering, as it tends to make skin look smoother. But in my father’s portrait the sharp focus and harder lighting creates a sense of frankness that is clearly what the photographer intended. The crucial point is that both images are partly illusions that the photographer created by his choices of lighting, depth of field, and direction. As I recall I was told to tilt my head and look slightly to the side of the camera, whereas my father’s gaze is inescapably direct.
To get a sense of trying to visualize results, imagine what I might have looked like in the conditions used to photograph my father, and then imagine him photographed as in my yearbook photo. Doing so is not easy, but it’s an interesting exercise. Another is to look through a fashion magazine, see if the models’ eyes reflect the location of a main light source, and, if so, then look for the shadows cast by that light. Asking such “what if?” and “how did they light this?” questions can help us understand how various photographic effects were achieved, and possibly how to better achieve them ourselves.
Car blogger Chuck Goolsbee posts some great photos under the heading “Car Photo of the Day.” The one above, featuring two of the world's most glamorous artifacts, is a particular favorite of mine. I’ll return to it in a moment.
In a post last month, Chuck contrasted two photos of the same car. The first is the kind of snapshot-as-note-taking that I shoot all the time. Since it’s mostly to jog the memory, the composition doesn’t matter much. Hence, the headless car buffs, with particular emphasis on the guy in the orange polo shirt and shorts.
The second shot, a photo within the photo, is this closeup of the Jaguar. “This is the photo in my minds-eye whenever I see an XK,” Chuck wrote. “That luscious bonnet and fenders, with all those light-capturing curves.”
Since cropping was the only manipulation required to produce the second photo from the first, few documentary purists would object. Recreating the photo held in memory didn’t require retouching the mechanical reproduction of the scene, only focusing closely on one piece of it.
But go back to the photo of the E-type Jaguar and the windmills (click the photo or here for a larger view). Simply by recording a still image, the scene has been glamorized, portraying the car and windmills as autonomous icons of technological grace—no maintenance or transmission lines required. At the same time, however, the photo calls attention to distractions that would have gone unnoticed in person: the rough asphalt in the foreground and the fence interfering with the car’s lines in the middle distance.
A glamorized version of the photo would remove or downplay these distractions, focusing the scene on its emotionally meaningful components. Profiled in The New Yorker, Pascal Dangin, today’s leading retoucher of fashion photos, called blemishes and flaws “anomalies,” suggesting that they distract from the truth. A retouched scene would be literally false. But would it be more emotionally truthful?
One possibility would be to clean up the photo by cropping it, producing something like this.
There are fewer distractions now, but the photo seems cramped, with less sense of movement and the open road. Cropping may be journalistically legitimate, but it's emotionally unsatisfying.
Having read this interesting post in which photographer Mark Harmel discussed the sort of minor retouching he does to clean up distractions, I asked him what he would do with the Jaguar and windmills photo. He sent back this subtly altered version of the photo.
“The wide angle lens stretched the car out—especially in the front end,” he wrote. “I compressed it and cleaned up the grass some. I compare my style of retouching to wearing those Bose Noise-Canceling headphones. My job is to remove the visual distractions. In this photo I also cleaned up the grass some to fill in a hole. I might actually do more so there is that fluffy seed-top runs all the way across.”
The side of the road is less distracting, though the grass is now a bit too regular. And by correcting the car's front end, he made the photo more realistic—but less glamorous.
“Bring out the best, conceal the worst, and leave something to the imagination,” was George Hurrell's formula for creating glamorous portraits. That prescription runs contrary to journalistic full disclosure. It also acknowledges the selection involved in all creative presentations. Neither an article nor a photograph reproduces the world in all its continuity and complexity. Ultimately, the correct selection depends on the creator's purposes and the audience's expectations.
So which version of the car and windmills photo do you like best? Or can you do better?
Aspiring models and aspiring fashion photographers share a Catch-22 problem. Neither is likely to find paid work without a portfolio of professional quality photographs. To have such a portfolio, the model needs to have been photographed by skilled photographers, and the photographer needs to have photographed beautiful models. But how do you develop a professional-looking portfolio before working professionally?
One answer is to pay a professional model or photographer for their time. If a top agency signs a model, they may pay a professional photographer to create a portfolio. For an aspiring model to do this herself would be expensive. This makes young women who want to try modeling vulnerable to scams, and there are many disreputable agencies and photographers who will gladly take their money.
Yet aspiring models do need good photographs to demonstrate that they are photogenic (not always the same as being beautiful in person). Normal human vision is stereoptic and three dimensional. A single-lens camera can only record two-dimensional information, and our perception of shapes in photographs depends on the angle and quality of light that falls on the subject, as well as on how the subject reflects that light back. Faces with strong bone structures and unusual features may photograph
beautifully because they reflect back well-defined shapes and shadows (notice the above model’s unusual eyes).
Makeup can also be used to create dimensional illusions. Experienced photographers are always concerned about how the light falling on a subject defines it dimensionally.
Conversely, aspiring fashion photographers need to work with photogenic models in order to build their portfolio. They can ask their friends and acquaintances, but as one workshop for aspiring photographers put it bluntly, you need the chance to work with models who photograph at 8 or above on a 10-point scale (something few people do). Photographer workshops sometimes provide students with models and some coaching, but for workshops the students must pay a fee. In better workshops the ratio between students and models is low, such
as 2:1. In the photo at right the student is getting a chance to work
with a model 1:1. Notice how side lighting is helping the muscles in the model’s leg look exceptionally well-defined, but also leaves her face in shadow. One solution would be to have an assistant use a white reflector to bounce more light to her face, but finding a solution first requires consciously noticing the problem—that the light falling on her face fails to define her features in a way that a camera can clearly record. If the student does notice the problem, then he might decide to add light, change her pose, or change locations. He has to learn to be constantly aware of the relationship between his subject and the direction and quality of various sources of light.
While researching this post I looked at several websites listing
would-be models. Looking at some of these sites made me sad. (Two
examples are here and here.)
Many individuals listed would appear to have no chance of becoming paid
models (as is true of most people). But, regardless of that, far too
many of them were represented by terrible photographs. Many have posted
casual snapshots of themselves taken by someone who was obviously not a
photographer. These snapshots typically featured no careful hairstyling
or makeup, a depressingly mundane location, and truly horrible
lighting. Such photographs work against any chance they have of being hired as models—their photographs brand them as non-professional.
One possible solution to building a strong portfolio is a barter system. Realizing that it can be mutually beneficial for good models and photographers to work with each other, there are a number of internet networking sites for them. Some members of these sites will exchange their time for either CDs of
images (TFCD) or prints (TFP). In this way both models and
photographers can build their portfolios. Naturally, the more work the members have
booked as paid professionals, the more likely they are to seek monetary payment for their time.
Flickr contains photographs from a number of fine photographers and photogenic people, and Flickr images can be easily searched. The image at right and the first image in this post were found on Flickr, and both contained a link to the Canadian site Model Republic, a fashion networking site for people working in all aspects of the industry. You can find some impressive model and photographer portfolios on other networking sites (such as Model Mayhem and iStudio). Some of these sites require potential members to submit images which are screened for quality before they are allowed to join.
Aspiring models need to be cautious about donating their time. They don’t want to find themselves posing for an untalented and potentially creepy GWC (guy with camera). A t-shirt proclaiming the wearer is a Professional GWC is not a reference. If a photographer has done good work, he or she should be willing to show samples.
One tongue-in-cheek member of Model Mayhem is GWC, a fictional nerd photographer from Baltimore who offers “drive-by shooting workshops.” For these workshops “students” pay a fee to sit in the back of his pickup, and, beginning and ending at a Hooters parking lot, he drives around spotting “hotties” to photograph on the move. His gallery of photos includes an out-of-focus portrait and a magazine cover titled “Perfect 5½” that features “the best models we can afford.” His fictional character personifies just the sort of GWCs that models hope to avoid.
Workshop photo shoots happen all over the world (the workshop shown here was in Singapore). People in some Asian countries seem particularly open to posing for and taking glamour shots. I have often seen young Japanese women strike fashion poses as soon as a friend turns a camera their direction.
The young men shown in this workshop photo shoot are likely enjoying themselves, despite the 6:1 student-to-model ratio. Perhaps each fantasizes that someday he will be paid to take photographs of an endless supply of beautiful models. It’s an unlikely dream, but if nothing else they are learning by trial and error that you need a lot more than just a camera and a beautiful subject to produce a professional-looking fashion photograph. Aptitude, and hard-won knowledge and experience are also essential requirements.
["Ariana" and "City Style and Living Shoot" are from photographix.ca's Flickr photostream. "Posing Jess" and "Railroad Shoot" are from madaboutasia. All are used under the Flickr Creative Common's license.]
The deadline for Annie Leibovitz to settle her $24 million debt to Art Capital Group has come and gone without public comment from either party. But that doesn’t mean Leibovitz’s problems have disappeared, only that no one is talking to reporters.
Amid the mass of commentary on the photographer’s financial troubles (including Andrew Goldman’s definitive New York narrative of how she got in such a mess), an interesting theme emerged. If Leibovitz forfeits the copyrights to her work—part of the collateral she put up to borrow all that money—what might the new owners do with them?
My hope is that they’ll make reprint rights easily and cheaply available to authors working on books about glamour. (I’m particularly interested in this photo.) But the speculation involves a much larger market.
“Until now, Ms. Leibovitz has closely guarded the right to reproduce her photographs,” the NYT’s Allen Salkin wrote. “But should she lose control of her archive, her famous portraits of Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Nicholson and the like may one day be found on postcards in Times Square.”
Losing the copyrights, wrote the LAT’s Paul Lieberman, “could result in the outright sale of her photo copyrights to a party who might decide it’s better to market her images in lots of 1,000, or on postcards, not the fine-art limited-edition approach she has embraced.” And in a Sunday Timespiece cobbled together from pieces of American journalism, the unbylined author referred to “the worst-case scenario” in which “her classic portraits of the likes of Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper may end up on postcards.” (Emphasis added.)
What’s so bad about postcards?
One argument is that postcard printing is usually less than ideal and therefore makes the photo look worse than the artist intended. Some of Leibovitz’s photos are already available as postcards, however, as the photo of the boxed set above demonstrates; singletons are plentiful on Ebay and also available on specialized sites.
Besides, postcards aren’t a substitute for fine-art printing. They’re made for an entirely different market, one prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single picture. Berenice Abbott’s photos of New York, particularly Nightview, have become iconic, and literal, “postcard clichés,” but collectors still buy original prints. (And let’s not even talk about Ansel Adams.)
What’s especially interesting about the objection to Leibovitz postcards is that her famous portraits, like this one of the pregnant Demi Moore, were originally made for mass-market magazines printed in large quantities on relatively cheap paper with type surrounding the portrait. The difference between an Annie Leibovitz photo in Vanity Fair and an Annie Leibovitz photo on a hypothetical Times Square postcard would be noticeable, but it’s not exactly the difference between The Birth of Venus on the walls of the Uffizzi and The Birth of Venus on the corner tabacchi’s souvenir rack.
The postcard problem—which may or may not be something Leibovitz herself is concerned about—suggests that the value of art, particularly of photography, lies in its physical scarcity. Postcards are just too cheap and common. Unlike magazines, which have limited circulation, they keep getting printed as long as the demand is there.
Now there is, of course, an economic calculation to be made by whoever owns the rights to an image. What sort of licensing will maximize revenue? That's a pragmatic question that requires some market research and educated guesses.
But for artists and critics, postcards ought to be unalloyed good news. They enlarge the audience for the image and embed it more lastingly in the culture. Most portrait photographers can only dream of creating an icon like Alberto Kordo’s photo of Che Guevera or Sam Shaw’s photo of Marilyn Monroe with her white skirt flying up.
Putting Annie Leibovitz’s photos on widely distributed postcards would provide a tough artistic test: Can these images hold up as icons? How much does the celebrity of their subjects matter to their appeal? Does Leibovitz’s composition rely too much on gimmicks? Take a look through some galleries (here, here, and here) and see what you think.
From Marlene Dietrich and Buster Keaton to Aretha Franklin and Bianca Jagger, George Hurrell captured some of the 20th century's great faces, in hats that added an extra dimension to the characters they portrayed, in film or in life. Click here to see the show.
Tonight’s DG party celebrating the glamour of hats (and our first anniversary) includes some rarely seen highlights from two museum-quality collections, both hidden away in Los Angeles-area homes.
The first is the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate, the largest privately held collection of vintage George Hurrell photographs, to which we also owe the beautiful photo of Dorothy Jordan that alternates with Rick Lee’s woman in sunglasses as our masthead. At the party, we will have an ongoing slideshow of more than 40 Hurrell photos of people in hats, including many rare treasures like this perfect-for-the-occasion shot of Buster Keaton.
The photos range from the Golden Era glamour of Marlene Dietrich, Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, and Carole Lombard (and, of course, the beautiful Anita Page photo on our invitation) to portraits from the 1970s and ’80s. It's an unusual Hurrell show, where Aretha Franklin and Bianca Jagger appear more often than Joan Crawford. But Crawford will be making a special appearance, since Lou D’Elia, the collector behind the Pancho Barnes archives, is also lending us one of the large-scale, limited-edition prints recently issued by the Estate of George Hurrell.
The second collection is Wendy Ann Rosen’s House of Hats, the best collection of 20th-century hats outside a museum. Wendy Ann, a makeup artist by trade, not only collects hats. She keeps them in a world-class collection of vintage hat boxes. Some of her hats are included in the V&A’s recent Hats: An Anthology exhibition, curated by Stephen Jones. Those hats are still traveling the world, but others will be on display at 5th & Spring--and available for purchase, since Wendy Ann is, as they say in the museum business, deaccessioning a few of her more than 600 chapeaux.
Wendy Ann is one of L.A.’s hidden treasures, someone only a few aficionados know about. Working on her own, mostly in the 1990s, she researched the history of 20th-century millinery and identified, bought, and preserved the best examples of the milliner’s art. (Here's a fashion spread featuring some of her hats from the 1920s, aquired through the Adamson Estate.) In addition to hats and hat boxes, she collects tools of the hat-maker's trade, signs and other ephemera, and the adorable cupcake-sized mini hats and boxes that were used as milliner's gift certificates since hats were custom-fitted. (Alas, she's not bringing any of the mini hats. Partygoers will have to make do with literal cupcakes.)
Although some of Wendy Ann's hats are from famous fashion designers, including Chanel, Dior and Schiaparelli, many are from hat specialists like Madame Georgette who were renowned in their day but are now forgotten. “I want to make sure that they're recognized and remembered. That's my main purpose,” she says.
DG's party, "You're the Top: A Celebration of Glamorous Hats & the People Who Wear Them," is free and open to the public as part of the first Downtown Fashion Walk. RSVPs are appreciated but not required. See our invitation for details on the location. Ample parking is available in the garage at 530 S. Spring for $5. The map for Downtown Fashion Walk is online here.
Taken in the 1930s, this vernacular (i.e., anonymous) photo represents one of the visual motifs particularly effective in creating a sense of glamour: a silhouette of someone contemplating a landscape vista. (In this early DG post, I discussed some condominium ads that used a similar composition.) Mysterious and stylized, the darkened figure invites us to identify with her and the longings she feels as she looks out on the landscape beyond her enclosed surroundings. This particular photo also creates a contrast between the settled world of bent-wood chairs and ashtrays and the wilderness beyond. Its composition glamorizes the possibilities of the distant hills. We could imagine, however, a reversed composition that made the interior seem cozy and inviting.
The juxtaposition of a shadowed foreground and a lighted vista can arouse similar yearnings for escape even without a human subject. This photo, contributed to the DeepGlamour pool by Flickr user Michele Strudwick, contrasts the open possibilities represented by the sea and lighthouse with the constraints of the darkened room from which we view that landscape.
The shadows are not entirely negative, however. They give the scene its mystery and, by framing the landscape, enhance the vista's grace. They show us just enough of the outside world to make it tantalizing.
This famous photograph by Howell Conant recently sold at auction for $2,400. It originally ran on the cover of Collier’s in June 1955 and helped establish Grace Kelly as an exemplar of a new style of “natural glamour,” a graceful, elegant sexiness without the obvious artifice of the Golden Age studio photographers like Clarence Bull and George Hurrell.
From Botticelli’s Venus to Ursula Andress in Dr. No, the beautiful woman rising from the sea is an alluring archetype. This photo adds an element of mystery, concealing the body below the surface of the water. The bare shoulders suggest nudity, but her swimsuit is in fact just visible.
In Life: Remembering Grace, a collection of Conant's photographs, Kay and Digby Diehl write that the photographer and star together “broke the mold of the traditional movie star ‘glamour’ photograph....We feel we are seeing the candid, unguarded ‘everyday' Grace, unassisted by hairdressers or makeup artists. The natural glamour of this 25-year-old woman is both timeless and seductive.”
Despite the absence of stylists, however, that glamour is not as effortless as it appears. (Glamour never is.) Though it may seem spontaneous, the photograph is carefully composed. The bathing suit’s straps have been removed to showcase those shoulders. The lighting is not entirely natural; Kelly’s sister Peggy held a light reflector. Both photographer and subject (and presumably Peggy as well) had to stand carefully on tiptoes to avoid the spiny sea urchins on the sea floor. And the pose wasn’t casual. To disguise her square jaw, Conant avoided shooting Grace facing the camera straight on. She posed first with a scuba mask but, after many shots, he decided it concealed too much of her face. He then took eight different shots of her before achieving this one.
Architectural photographer Julius Shulman, who created many of the most iconic images of modern architectures, has died at 98.
This image, while not one of his most famous, is one of my favorites. The convertibles, the gloves, the Pegasus, the pristine gas station, the orange trees in the background (soon to become Disneyland)—it exemplifies the exuberant glamour of mid-century Southern California auto culture. (As always, click the photo for a larger version.)
I asked Shulman about it in 2006, when I was researching this Atlantic column. Here's the transcript of our conversation.
“An architect friend Whitney Smith and his partner Wayne Williams were commissioned by Mobil Gas to do a mockup for a new type of design for the Mobil Gas image, including the flying horse. In the background what do you see?”
A Shulman interview always felt like an oral exam. Bushes, I said, people.
“Those aren’t bushes. Those are trees. They’re orange trees. There’s a story....The architect’s wife was there. She was driving an Alfa Romeo convertible, with white gloves. I had her pull her car up just far enough that the bumper would not come inside that shadow line. And then her arms would show. She’s just coming in to get gas, to that station. It’s a story-telling picture.”
Was that her real car? I asked. Or was she posing in someone else’s?
“Yes, that’s her car. My sedan, my blue Ford sedan, which I used for my work, was elsewhere, in another picture. But I got another convertible here. I asked the man to stay there for a minute while I took a photograph. I’m sure he was happy to do it. He pulled in. The moment he pulled in—I had placed her already—I ran over there and said, ‘Would you mind? I have a young lady with a car waiting for me, with a convertible.’ He loved the car. He came over to look at it. I said, ‘Would you stay in your car while I photograph it? I’ll have the attendant talking to you, How many gallons do you want?’ Everyone cooperates. It never fails. So we took this photograph in black and white and color, a series of them. Especially in color, it’s wonderful.”
Information on the new Shulman documentary film Visual Acoustics, currently touring Australia and New Zealand, is here.
UPDATE: This FastCompany.com slide show by DG friend Alissa Walker features a number of Shulman's lesser-known photographs, as well as some iconic ones, with comments from a range of critics including me.
[Mobil Gas Station, Anaheim, California, 1956, Smith & Williams Architects, courtesy of Getty Center, in conjunction with the Modernity & the Metropolis exhibition. Julius Shulman in his office, 2006, by Virginia Postrel.]
In 1863 Abraham Lincoln made a famous speech at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg that began: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The phrase “four score and seven years” was not normal speech for the time. This was a momentous occasion, and Lincoln used it to deliver a short, highly-poetic speech that would cause many people to rededicate themselves to winning the war. His use of the words “our,” “we,” and “us” throughout the speech is masterful.
In Sin and Syntax Constance Hale wrote that, “When occasions call for eloquence, you need poetry, not Plain English.” But using a high style requires preparation, work, and the ability to be comfortable with style. At the moment we have a president and a first lady who are comfortable with eloquence and style. This is not always the case.
Dwight Eisenhower used to hold rambling press conferences with what might be called the “well-meaning, befuddled-uncle” style. Oliver Jensen, a reporter who covered the White House during the 1950s, suggested that if Eisenhower had written the Gettysburg address it might have begun: “I haven’t checked these figures but 87 years ago I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain European areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement...”
I can imagine George W. Bush, in his down-home style having said something like, “A while back our folks decided that in America we ought to treat other folks as if they were just as good as us.”
All his life Lincoln understood that he was not a handsome man, and frequently mocked himself as being ugly. But as he aged, he understood that he could look presidential. As Harold Holzer wrote for U.S. News and World Report about the image at left, a portrait done by Mathew Brady:
There, Lincoln discovered the power of his own image. At Mathew Brady's
plush Broadway gallery, he posed for a brilliantly arranged portrait
that softened the harsh lines in his face and emphasized his powerful
frame against the evocative backdrop of a classical pillar and a pile
of thick books. Brady transformed the prairie politician into a
statesman. Widely copied and distributed during a presidential campaign
in which, true to the tradition of the time, Lincoln did no campaigning
of his own, the picture became his surrogate before image-starved
voters. Months later, the victor acknowledged: “Brady and the Cooper
Union speech made me president.” He had come to understand that images,
no less important than words, could make or break political reputations.
We all want to put on the style. It is part of presenting our public self, like getting dressed up for a party. Often, when we actually get to the party all gussied-up, we’ll take great pains not to act that way, to show that the high style hasn’t really changed us, that we’re still just folks....We are, we like to think, what we are, whether in public or in private. No back-stage/front-stage difference divides our lives. This is an illusion, but we cherish it.
Unless we are used to it, we can have difficulty with style. I have often noticed the unease that many women seem to demonstrate when accepting a compliment on their appearance when they dress up. Instead of gracefully thanking whoever told them that they or their outfit look great, they often deflect the compliment by saying things like “Oh, I got this on sale,” or “I’ve had this for years,” or (to a close friend) “Does it look too tight right here?” Or you see women relentlessly adjusting their shoulder straps or frequently tugging at some part of their outfit. Such responses and actions seem to imply either that they themselves don’t feel their outfit is all that special, or that they are insecure about how they look and feel in it. Such demurring and fidgeting can greatly undermine the effectiveness of an outfit.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg address has been much studied, and it’s effectiveness was not accidental. As Civil War scholar Shelby Foote remarked, “Lincoln was highly intelligent. Almost everything he did was calculated for effect.” Some suggested sources for various aspects of Lincoln’s address have been Pericles’ famous Funeral Speech (431 BC), Lincoln’s mastery of the language of the King James Bible, a sermon by Theodore Parker, and a speech by Daniel Webster.
Lincoln was used to making such speeches. He had been making remarkably eloquent speeches for years. So when he spoke at Gettysburg, he did so with assurance. When you’re going for high style, appearing comfortable and assured is a vital aspect of the overall effect.
Weddings are often occasions for mixed emotions. This photograph was taken after a wedding in Somerset, England. The photographer informed me this attractive young bridesmaid did not know he was taking her photograph, and he doesn’t know the reason for her mood.
Some photographs capture a human mood so well that we long to know the story, but here the mystery can never be solved. We can only guess. This occasion was clearly not going well for her at this moment, and I find it hard to look at this photograph without wondering why. Why has she gone off by herself? Why is she downcast? Does her age factor in? What is her relationship to the bride?
In trying to understand her mood, we may go back into our own history, or the history of people we know. We may try to remember if there was an occasion when in the midst of a celebration, we found ourselves wanting to be alone because we did not share the celebratory mood. The photographer has frozen one such moment for us, and we invite our readers to speculate on her mood. What do you imagine the story to be?
This portrait of Marilyn Monroe posing as Jackie Kennedy is from what's known as “The Lost Sitting,” because these transparencies from Monroe's final photo sessions (“The Last Sitting”) with Bert Stern were missing for decades. A portfolio of prints from the session is up for auction next week.
Despite the signature dark wig, it’s striking how little Monroe looks like Kennedy. With her barely parted mouth, off-the-shoulder blouse, and possibly sprawled (though concealed) legs, she not surprisingly appears more sexually suggestive than the first lady. Again not surprisingly, she’s also more vulnerable, and childlike. And she’s sweeter, a characteristic that points up an essential contrast between the glamour of these two icons. Jackie may have spoken in a similarly breathy whisper, but she carried herself like a steely aristocrat. Here, the clothes are less like armor, the abundant pearls less restrained (and more obviously faux), the hands unconcealed by gloves, the body language more open. Monroe was not just a sex symbol but a comedienne whose screen persona appealed to women as well as men.
Architectural photographer Julius Shulman created some of the most glamorous images of mid-century architecture and mid-century Los Angeles. In his most famous photo, of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22 in 1960, two young ladies converse in a glass-enclosed living room that thrusts out toward the sprawling city grid of tiny lights. The architecture critic Paul Goldberger called it “one of those singular images that sums up an entire city at a moment in time.” Commentary on the photo often describes the women as models or dressed in the height of style (“elegantly dressed,” wrote Goldberger). In truth, they were neither, as Shulman explained to me when I was reporting this Atlantic column. The girlfriends of two architects who worked for Koenig, they were wearing ordinary, comfortable summer dresses. The photographer’s art made them, the house, and Los Angeles itself glamorous—symbols of the ideal life.
Our mystery woman didn't generate the 10 possible captions required for prizes, but eight readers did contribute some excellent ones. So we've decided to let you pick a winner anyway. Vote below.
Readers were split on whether the photo is glamorous, but a majority thought not. Seven out of 25 voted it not at all glamorous (1 out of a possible 7), with 13 out of 25 giving it a 3 or less.
Given the stylistic elements--a hat, a cigarette, and an androgynous face--this is an interesting result. These are all traditional markers of glamour. Take this photo of Marlene Dietrich, for instance, or this more feminine one. Head coverings, cigarettes, and androgyny all create an intriguing bit of mystery, drawing us to look more closely. In the right hands, a cigarette will not only produce a veil of smoke--at once concealing and calling attention to the smoker--but also amplify the smoker's grace, another essential component of glamour. So why doesn't La Femmina here appear more clearly glamorous?
One reason, I suspect, is that the photo is too calculated. It's obviously a pose and, hence, lacks the effortlessness associated with glamour. But the main reason is that it doesn't arouse projection or longing. She does not draw viewers into her world. The photo inspires humor, not desire. Longing is as essential to glamour as mystery or grace, and it cannot be created merely by assembling standard props.
DeepGlamour Flickr pool member dariya1 simply calls this portrait "Femmina." What caption would you give it? What's the backstory? Post your ideas in the comments below. If we get at least 10 responses, we'll award a prize to the best.
Philip Gardner blogs about dance and opera at Oberon's Grove, a site he describes as the online extension of a diary he's kept since he was a child enamored with opera. To kick off Dance Week at DG, we asked him to share some thoughts about ballet and glamour.
DG: When did you first get interested in dance?
PG: As a child I liked dancing around the house and I always enjoyed social dancing but becoming interested in dance as an art form came about when I was in my 20s when - quite by chance - I spent a summer working for a small ballet school on Cape Cod. It was after that that I began attending performances, and it soon became a passion.
DG: Have you had training in dance yourself?
PG: At the above-mentioned school on the Cape I took class and danced in performances, and I took class for 3 years altogether. Of course I was in my mid-20s, way too late to consider doing it as a profession. It seems I had a natural affinity for it and if I had been aware of dance as a viable career choice when I was very young my life might have turned out very differently. But I grew up in a tiny town with no possible exposure to anything like dance classes. Now when I watch dancers in class, rehearsing or performing I am keenly aware that it's probably what I should have been doing all these years.
DG: How did you get started blogging about dance?
PG: Since I was about eleven, I always kept a very detailed diary. For many years it was mainly about the opera performances I attended; when I started going to the ballet I would write about that also. Of course at first I knew nothing about what I was seeing, only that I loved watching people in motion. When I finally moved to NYC in 1998 and began going to dance performances with great frequency, I would write about them on one of the internet dance sites. Meanwhile, Kristin Sloan of the New York City Ballet had started her blog The Winger and I became very intrigued with that. When I got in trouble on the site where I was posting (for being sarcastic!) I was inspired by Kristin to start my own blog. It quickly became far more successful and popular than I ever would have guessed and it has led me to meet several fascinating people in the dance and music world.
DG: How is the glamour of ballet different from (or the same as) the glamour of modern dance? What does glamour mean in each context?
PG: This may seem odd, but I think the glamour of the ballet comes from...toe shoes! Yes, the satiny pointe shoes have their own mystique and give the ballerina an elegance that is quite unique. There are other elements too which make ballet especially glamourous: the beauty of classical port de bras, the traditional style of costuming and make-up, the theatricality of it. Modern dance is usually earthier, sexier and less calculated. Also the music of the classical ballet - Tchaikovsky, Minkus, Adam - already has its own built-in sense of glamour. Modern dance choreographers tend to be far more experimental in terms of musical choices, which can often be very exciting in its own way. In the quest for finding beauty in music and movement, I think the two worlds (ballet vs modern) compliment one another very well.
DG: Onstage, dancers tend to seem quite glamorous. How much do dancers try to maintain their personas offstage? Has that changed over time? Or is it simply a matter of personality?
PG: Offstage, I find most dancers do not cultivate a glamorous image these days. For one thing, many of them are very young and they like to dress and behave like other young people when they are not onstage: meaning ultra-casual dress-down style - which in its way can be attractive. Some of the ballerinas, as they mature and rise to the rank of principal, become more aware of projecting a sophisticated image offstage. When I look at old photos from the Diaghilev era of off-duty dancers in public settings, I feel there was more awareness of creating a persona. It seems to me that during the 60s and 70s there was a concerted effort both in opera and ballet to humanize the performers, to make the public feel that soprano x and ballerina y are just normal folks who happen to be talented in a special way. The high-profile glamour of a Callas or a Markova began to fade. On the other hand, I always feel when I encounter dancers in an offstage setting that they have their own internal element of glamour or elegance which runs deeper than just their clothing, make-up and hairstyle...their talent, passion and commitment give them their own brand of glamour.
Photo by Kyle Froman from Christopher Wheeldon's MORPHOSES. Used with permission.
DG: Your blog features many compellingly graceful photos of dance performances. Dance is all about movement, but the photos are stills. What makes a good dance photo?
I love still photos of dancers and I've come to know several dance photographers. Many of my favorite dance photographs come from rehearsal or class situations; I have always been intrigued by the process of creating dance and these photos can be very poignant because they show the work behind the finished product. Some of the best dance photographers are dancers themselves: Kyle Froman, Erin Baiano, Matt Murphy. In capturing dance in a still photo, timing is all. To catch the exact moment when a photo will give an illusion of movement must be extremely tricky. Paul Kolnik of New York City Ballet and Erik Tomasson of San Francisco Ballet certainly have the knack, as do several others. I think a good dance photo is one that makes you want to go see the dancer or the work that has been photographed. I spend a lot of time looking at dance photos both in books and on-line, hoping to find pictures that will enhance my blog. The photographers I have dealt with have all been extremely generous; they want their photos to be seen. And of course if you are trying to describe the look and feel of a particular dance piece, a picture is worth a thousand words.
DG: It has been said that part of ballet is creating the illusion of defying gravity, and that in contrast modern dance seems more grounded. Do you agree?
PG: In general, yes, though I seen some high-flying modern dancers and also ballets that seem heavier and more earthbound. Again I must say that it is dancing on pointe that seems the dividing line for me between ballet and modern. Watching the girls defy gravity as they hover and spin on pointe really gives ballet its special quality. It's certainly unnatural, and very intriguing.
DG: You also blog about opera. How does its appeal to you differ from that of ballet or modern dance? What's similar?
PG: I loved opera long before I discovered dance as an art form. Opera was the companion of my dark, unhappy teenage years where I found solace in the passion and beauty of the human voice. The last great heyday of opera in New York (the 1960s thru the mid 1980s) was a thrilling time for me. Going to the opera nowadays can still be exciting but the atmosphere has changed and there are surely far fewer interesting vocal personalities around. Dance I find to be on a steadier trajectory in terms of holding its appeal. For me, everything is emotional. I'm not sure I believe in intellect, really. I simply want to be moved or thrilled by people doing something I cannot do. Both opera and dance can provide this: in a way it's replaced going to church for me. It's spiritually nourishing.
DG: You've written a couple of recent posts about bad audience behavior at both ballets and operas--all sorts of things that break the spell for others. What do you think is going on? Has a substantial portion of the audience stopped seeing the performance as an immersive experience?
PG: Ah, my pet peeve...bad manners at the theatre! I should not get started on this but in brief I believe that the performing arts have simply become too accesible. Yes, I'm a snob. I do not think one can go to the opera or ballet casually, just to be entertained, as one might go to a film or a sports event. Of course the opera and ballet companies need to bring in new audiences but with that goes the need for people to learn how to behave. It's hard for me to imagine people paying money and making the effort to attend and then squandering the opportunity by talking, eating, checking the cellphone. It seems that people are too self-absorbed, too accustomed to being spoon-fed their 'culture' without making any real effort to connect with music or dance beyond the surface realities. Opera and dance can still be immersive, but the viewer must be willing to be immersed. That means being attentive and putting aside other concerns and distractions while the performance goes forward. In general I think many people have simply never been taught how to behave in such a setting; I learned how to sit still and be attentive by being taken to church for many years by my parents. What it comes down to is: common courtesy. That seems to be a forgotten concept.
Photo by Kyle Froman of New York City Ballet. Used with permission.
DG: Do you find that the audience for dance dresses more casually now than when you first started attending? Do audiences for ballet tend to dress differently than audiences for modern dance?
DG: Yes, things are far more casual now in terms of dress but I do not think that being well-dressed necessarily enhances one's enjoyment of the performance. However, it does make the event more 'special' in a way. Both ballet and modern dance audiences tend to dress for comfort mainly - gala nights aside, of course.
PG: Since you have been following dance for some time, do you sometimes find that a change of performers seems to change the content (meaning) of a dance (even when the choreography remains essentially the same)? If so, does this change of meaning surprise you? How do you react to it?
PG: I have always loved to see (dance) and hear (opera) many different intrepretations of a given work. It's exhilirating to find a dancer giving a new slant to a familiar piece and I always find it intriguing how even a change of one dancer in a cast of - say - twenty can alter the tone of a ballet. In the world of Balanchine's ballets, where I spend so much time, self-styled purists often get upset when they feel the boundaries of a given work are being pushed by a given dancer. My feeling is that only Mr. B could say if something was right or wrong, and everything I have read about him makes me feel he would always have been open to a fresh approach. (I also get the feeling he was far more adaptable about altering steps for individual dancers in a given ballet than his advocates today are...he never seemed to me to be writing in stone.) What keeps ballet alive is the ever-changing casting as the years pass by...so that Mozartiana for instance never became 'fossilized' for me in Suzanne Farrell's interpretation but rather I looked forward to dancers like Kyra Nichols, Miranda Weese and Wendy Whelan dancing it...and whoever will dance it next! It's almost like a new ballet every time. For me, that's the best tribute to Balanchine's genius: it's the music that we are seeing and the dancer is the vessel.
DG: Can you say what is it about ballet and modern dance that can bring you back to see works performed more than once? Do you have any thoughts on what makes dance so compelling to you?
If I like a ballet or dance work, I will want to see it dozens and dozens of times. Invariably it is the music that is the primary appeal of a piece. Some works - like Balanchine's Serenade or Tudor's Jardin Aux Lilas - are like a drug: you feel an urgent need to see them whenever they are on offer. I like to be moved, to weep and be transported by the music and by the beauty and poetry of the human body in motion. Dance is very sustaining and elevating for the human spirit; in a way, dance and music are my religion.
The DG Dozen
1) How do you define glamour? Elegance and self-assurance.
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon? Maria Callas
In 431 the church declared the Holy Virgin the Mother of God, thus sanctioning the cult of Mary. Her popularity became staggering. In France alone more than a hundred churches and eighty cathedrals were raised in the name of Notre Dame, Our Lady, including the cathedrals of Paris, Chartres, Reims, and Amiens.
To counter the massive illiteracy of the Dark Ages, in the 6th century Pope Gregory the Great overruled the commandment forbidding the making of idols, declaring that "Painting can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who can read." To fill churches, cathedrals, and private chapels, hundreds of sculptures, frescoes, and paintings were commissioned of the Madonna and child. Many of these images are remarkably beautiful, typically showing us a serene young mother holding her clear-eyed young son. Images of Mary and her son became so widespread that when people had spiritual visions in this period, they most often saw the Virgin Mary.
Images of the Virgin Mother presented the church's two desired states for fertile women: either chaste virgins or married women bearing children. Celibacy was much championed in the Middle Ages. The church encouraged young women to remain permanently chaste by becoming a nun. The cult of courtly love that arose in France praised young women who
remained unattainable, who steadfastly resisted the pleas of their wooers.
Unmarried women who failed to remain virginal until married were regarded as
loose, immoral, and even sexually aggressive. Men supposedly feared that such
seductresses would tempt them like the Biblical Salome, but many were fascinated by the ancient femme fatale archetype.
Hard and fast categories like virgin, mother, or immoral seductress are of little use to most contemporary women, and in modern culture images abound of women in multiple and varied roles. We see images of women as doctors, lawyers, writers, mothers, athletes, business owners, models, police officers, fire fighters, and fighter pilots.
One striking advertising image shows Danica Patrick's face split into the roles of race car driver and glamorous woman. In one case a helmet completely masks her identity--she seems a mysterious black knight. In the other case hairstyle and makeup create another kind of mask--she seems an unstoppable seductress. Neither image is false, but neither represents ordinary reality. Both are stylized, artful portrayals of a woman who has been successful as both a race car driver and model. Contemporary women can choose to play multiple and varied roles, and most no longer rely on patriarchal authorities in choosing which roles to pursue. For an individual woman, balancing the multiple roles that interest her can sometimes become one of the challenges of modern life.
[Detail of Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, photo by Virginia Postrel. Photo of Danica Patrick billboard courtesy of Luis Rodriguez Gonzalez (Spain), whose Flickr sets are here.]
"Glamorizing" usually implies an active effort at editing out flaws: retouchingphotos, showing cigarettes without smoke smell or cancer, celebrating cliquish bullies as Queen Bees and Gossip Girls. But, as these two contrasting passages from classic works illustrate, glamour can also arise from the audience's willingness or proclivity simply to overlook flaws.
"Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments," he said; "that house is a mere dungeon: don't you feel it so?"
"It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir."
"The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes," he answered; "and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark. Now HERE" (he pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered) "all is real, sweet, and pure.
No words of mine can tell you how Wendy despised those pirates. To the boys there was at least some glamour in the pirate calling; but all that she saw was that the ship had not been tidied for years. There was not a porthole on the grimy glass of which you might not have written with your finger "Dirty pig"; and she had already written it on several.
As anyone who has ever framed a photographic shot only to notice dirt on the window or wires across the view knows, the mind always does some unconscious editing. (Those of us in love with Florence rarely notice theubiquitousgraffiti.) But I think there's a deeper truth here that applies equally to overt glamorization: Glamour only works on the receptive imagination.
Some peopleare--tosaytheleast--as immune to Barack Obama's glamour as Wendy was to that of the pirate calling. Even the "world's most glamorous couple" gets mixed reviews. “I fail to see the glamour of this couple,” writes a website commenter about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “They usually look like aged hobos.” Although Princess Diana remains a touchstone of late 20th-century glamour, there are plenty of skeptics. A “glamorous” person, setting, or style will not produce glamour unless that object resonates with the audience’s aspirations, and unless the audience is willing to entertain the illusion.
[Paris photo courtesy of Flickr user smallish fish, copyright and used with permission.]
In the 20th century, photographers like Margaret Burke-White and Charles Sheeler portrayed industrial plants with remarkable glamour. Nowadays, we're less excited by the products of industry and more likely to focus on negative environmental effects. As a result, we tend to think of such places as eyesores. As these photos contributed to the DeepGlamour pool by Flickr user beef.200% demonstrate, however, portraits of contemporary industry can also be glamorous. Instead of the crisp black-and-white geometries of earlier photographers, here the trick is building an enticing sense of mystery with the plants' high-intensity lights and the night-time mist. (I'm guessing these are refineries or chemical plants, but I don't know for sure. Check out the rest of the photos in the set here.)
With the Oscars this Sunday, I thought Dallas photographer Mark Oristano's work might get you in the mood for the old glamour of yesteryear, when studios matched stars up on the red carpet and picked out their Oscar gowns. Believe it or not, there was a time before the professional freelance stylist.
"Stylists are a relatively new phenomenon in fashion. Orginally, stylists worked as fashon editors, dressing-- or "styling"-- models for fashon shoots for magazines or catalogs. But as the number of formal affairs exploded in the 1990s, from the Oscars and a few premieres to an avalanche of paparazzi-line red-carpet events, stylists saw the birth of a new niche: dressing celebrities. Stylists went freelance and starting signing up movie, television and music stars."
But Thomas goes further, explaining the timeline of the once and future stylist.
In the 1950s, following the advent of television and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as the Hollywood Anti-Trust Case that forced studios to sell off their theatre chains, the industry suffered a financial slump and changed the way business was done. Actors and technical staff--including costumers--were gradually released from their studio contracts; many costume departments were shut down. To make matters worse, films began to take on a more realistic tone, with actors in more everyday, normal clothes--no ermine-trimmed peignoirs or sequin siren gowns required. By the mid-1960s, movie costume designers were nearly an extinct breed...
With no more Edith Head or Helen Rose or Jean Louis to provide glamorous wardrobes gratis, stars were forced to shop themselves for premieres and award shows, including the Oscars.
So at Oscar time, as Thomas writes, stars criss-crossed Rodeo Drive looking for their gowns. "The problem was most stars didn't have cultivated taste and they didn't have the studio costumers to guide them anymore."
Then, disastrously, the stars decided that they could design their own outfits. See: Demi Moore in bike shorts and a gold capey-skirty thing in 1989 and Kim Basinger in 1990 in her futuristic a-bomb gown (also see 1989, when Jodie Foster wears a baby-blue prom dress with a giant butt-bow, plucked from a Milan shop window).
Enter Armani, who decides he wants stars wearing his clothes. After seeing poor Jodie Foster in her taffeta, Armani's director of entertainment industry communications, Wanda McDaniel, contacted Foster and offered to dress her in Armani for the 1990 ceremony when she'd be presenting. McDaniel also dressed Michelle Pfeiffer that year and, writes Thomas:
The next morning Women's Wear Daily ran the headline: "The Agony and the Ecstasy." Under it were two pictures: Kim Basinger in a freakish self-designed one-sleeved white number, and luminous Pfeiffer in her understated, utterly tasteful Armani... Women's Wear Daily dubbed it the Armani Awards...more important, it gave Americans a glamour they could actually imagine wearing.
Ah, but back to Oristano. His clients want the studio-conceived glamour, the kind that Edith Head could whip up and immortalize in a Hitchcock film, so he's got his own stylist on call to give his clients make-up treatment and costume consultations.
Says the photographer, "I've always been a huge fan of the photos of George Hurrell, the photographer who set the pace in the 30's and 40's in Hollywood.
I've also studied with Michael Grecco, who is one of the top portrait photographers working today. He got me interested in using the same kind of 'hot' lights that Hurrell used. I just kept fooling around until I got it right."
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there.... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
--Ezra Pound, "Patria Mia," New Age, September 18, 1912
Taken in 1932, Berenice Abbott's "Nightview" is one of 60 iconic New York photos in this exhibition at the Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe. (Check out the link to see more.)
The exhibit's most glamorous shots are from the 1930s and '40s, when New York was the symbol of American modernity, and many of them are night views, with windows bright with promise. These aren't realistic photos of city streets but abstracted, suggestive portraits that spark the imagination.
In his brilliant book Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies James Sanders points out that the New York of classic movies--the city of penthouses and jazz clubs--was a glamorous composite created by homesick New York writers exiled in Hollywood:
The city they were creating was not just the one they were remembering, however romantically. The writers were, after all, professional imaginers, and it was an imaginary city they were bringing into being. It would be animated not only by the memory of what once had happened there, but by all the things that could have happened, or should have happened. To memory was added imagination, and it would be these two potent faculties that would animate the dream city and give it special force and flavor.... If the real New York had many tall buildings, it had plenty of low ones as well, especially in its outer boroughs and residential districts. But the dream city would seem to be all vertical, every scene playing in a penthouse, on a terrace, in a rooftop nightclub, every window looking onto a view of rising towers.
Every scene. The mythic city, the dream city, the city of imagination is less a place of stories than a series of scenes--static shots into which the audience members can project their own longings. The glamour of the setting lingers in memory after the particulars of plots and characters fade, encouraging the audience to imagine their own stories in that glamorous version of Metropolis.
The most powerful cinematic image of the mythic city, Sanders suggests, is thus not a glamorized version of the real New York but a fully imaginary shot: the Emerald City of Oz.
Dorothy and her friends indeed stand transfixed—but not by aesthetic pleasure. In that gleaming skyline, they see the fulfillment of their dreams. In that place, perhaps only in that place, will each find the special thing he or she is looking for. These towers will somehow change their lives. This is what makes the view so powerful, so moving. From a distance, the skyline is everything they could have imagined, and more. Soaring, glistening, grand but comprehensible, its upward leap precisely mirrors the feeling in their hearts. Its very improbability—all those slender, dizzying towers, bundled tightly together, cresting ad the center—simply adds to its impact. For how could their lives be truly transformed, after all, in a place of ordinary appearance? Magical events call for magical settings. Through a kind of urban grace, the skyline of New York—in one sense simply the overscaled product of technology and real estate—became the locus of one of the most potent collective emotional experiences in the life of America. Into Manhattan’s towers were focused the hopes and dreams of millions, until the very girders and facades were permeated and charged with a sense of human possibility, as the skyline’s own skyward aspirations became fused with the personal yearnings of millions. The dream city, even in this most unworldly of guises, lets us share that transactive spark.
Thanks to everyone who commented on my original Constructing Glamour post with the Toni Frissell photos. These two were the favorites, both among commenters and people I happened to talk to.
Glamour exists in the audience's mind, so there's no right or wrong answer. But I believe the evening shot on the right is by far the most compelling of the group.
As the comments made clear, having a pretty model in a luxurious outfit isn't enough to create the magical quality called glamour. Glamour must invite the viewer into a special world, one that holds the promise of escape and transformation. In both these photos, the model seems to be in such a world. In both, she appears graceful and self-contained, also qualities that create glamour.
But the lighting in the evening shot adds drama and mystery. In the daylight shot, the dress looks heavy and a bit dull and wrinkled. In the evening shot, it glistens, and its weight is less obvious, enhancing the model's grace. As commenter Irene noted, the photo's glamour comes in part from the allure of light and shine. That allure is not just glitz, however. Shadow and contrast are just as important. To see the shimmer of the dress, you need the shadows. Similarly, the distant obelisk is more compelling in the evening shot. In contrast to the flat form in the daytime, light and shadow play on the shaft as it rises from the trees, and its tip glints with just a spot of light.
As commenter DMC noted, in the daytime shot the model does have an appealingly confident "queen of her empire" quality. I prefer the more contemplative evening shot, with its active hands and hint of yearning. But what really makes the difference between the two is not the central figure but the background: the enticingly illuminated monument, lights on the opposite shore, and a barely seen boat sculling along the river. (You have to look at the large version of the shot to see it.) The scene shimmers with possibility.
These photos are from a photo shoot by Toni Frissell, whose photos of the Tuskegee Airmen are featuredin the post below. One picture was used in an advertisement for a Washington, DC, department store, but the whole session is in the Frissell archive at the Library of Congress. Representing only a small selection of the whole shoot, these photos demonstrate how a photographer experiments with lighting and composition to achieve a result.
Frissell presumably had constraints (notably showing the dress) other than evoking glamour. But suppose that was the sole goal. Which photo do you find most glamorous, and why? I'll comment in a later post, but let's hear from you in the comments. (As always, click on the photo to see a larger version.)
With the Tuskegee Airmenheaded to the inauguration, let's take a moment to remember what they looked like when they were young and glamorous--and, of course, just how subversive that glamour was. The airmen were not just warriors but aviators, the epitome of masculine modernity: brave and daring, yes, but also masters of complex machines, with all the discipline and intelligence that implied. Their very existence refuted the ideology of white supremacy.
In April 1945, the Airmen were photographed by Toni Frissell, a noted fashion and society photographer (she did the photos at Jack and Jackie's wedding). Frissell knew glamour and, unlike many of her contemporaries, she didn't need a studio or heavy retouching to create it. Her photos of couples cuddling in the park are as appealing as her shots of models on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. And she loved natural light.
Frissell was the ideal photographer to capture the Tuskegee Airmen for posterity. As this DG slideshow illustrates, she captured the glamour--and dignity--of these young men, whether posed looking skyward, working on engines, listening to briefings, playing cards, or receiving "escape kits" of cyanide. And, presumably for hometown newspapers, she noted their names and hometowns, which are included in the slideshow captions.
Not all the aviators will make it to the inauguration, of course. Many, indeed, never made it home from the war--something I was reminded of when Googling Ronald Reeves, the Blair Underwood lookalike in a few of the photos.
Alice and Peter Gowland have a show of their photographs of the Santa Monica Beach milieu opening tomorrow at g169 gallery, 169 West Channel Rd., Santa Monica Canyon.
The Gowlands' shots of glamour girls, Hollywood starlets, surfer Miki Dora and Playboy models helped form the image of California and the good life during the war years and after. Peter, who's in his ninties, is also famed for his large-format cameras .
And any student of photography would do well to take a look at their books.
Think about it--a life spent photographing beautiful women--and getting paid for it.
(This black-and-white image can be found in the "Hollywood Beach"
section of the Gowlands' exhibition at g169. Photo courtesy of Alice
and Peter Gowland)
With this post, Paige Phelps joins the DG team as a regular contributor. Paige is a Dallas-based style writer and all-round glamour puss, as you can see from her bio here. We're delighted to have her on the team.--Virginia
Come on, admit it, you do. You and your friends (and sometimes your friend’s mom) went to the mall looking like hell--acid-washed jeans, tight-rolled at the ankle (or if it was your friend’s mom, a sweater with holiday icons on it and a broom-stick skirt) and crazy amounts of hairspray in your hair.
But no matter how suburban mall-rat you looked going into Glamour Shots, you always left with photos portraying you as the backlit Queen of Lamé, a woman who knew when to pop her collars and hold them, give a tilted-head nod, and silently seduce the camera lens. That and plus your hair was way bigger than when you went in, which was cool.
From their press release: "Davis and [photographer Heather] Hillard offer glamour photo shoots with the added allure of posing with six-figure dream cars."
Two decades ago, Glamour Shots were all about capturing the "trickle down” wealth that allowed us to splurge on rhinestone necklaces and feather boas. This time around, it’s all about capturing the moment when houses cost a penny, later sold for 10 bazillion dollars, and everyone is (was?) king of their McMansion.
“Whether your blue ribbon ride is a black Ferrari F430, an Aston Martin DB9, or any other dream car you’ve worked hard to attain--you should have it professionally photographed by exotic and sports car photographer Josh Davis.” I love the should.
Yes, and it only costs you $1,000 (plus travel expenses; posters are extra). BUT if you are in a cash crunch and can't live without a photo of your car (or a close substitute), you might want to consider Josh’s boudoir photography. Fewer clothes for fewer bucks: three hours and your choice of four cars for a bargain basement $699.
I guess this trend all comes down to the fact that secretly we want to be captured for posterity at our sexiest, our richest, our most gaudy--if for no other reason than to tell the world, “I had the time and money to do this.”
My only question is, Like the Glamour Shots of yesteryear, is that something your dad will display at his office? Yowza. That’s one way to get ‘em talking.
“The great promise of photography was that it would tell the ‘truth’. Yet the ‘truth’ of photography is only a more convincing illusion, selection and artifice lurking behind the seemingly impartiality of the mechanical eye. Fashion drawings often give more accurate information, yet it is the photographic image that has captured the feel of modern clothes, and in doing so influenced them. Lartigue, who was taking informal photographs of fashionable ladies just before the First World War, Baron de Meyer, who flourished between the wars, and Steichen, whose work continued into the post Second World War period, all took pictures that reproduced the illusion of movement, and so the suggestion of movement became an element essential to fashionable dress. Black and white photography intensified the importance of line, contrast, and abstract, architectural form. Photography paradoxically enhanced both the mystery and the suggestiveness of fashion—and fashion magazines come on rather like pornography; they indulge the desire of the ‘reader’ who looks at the pictures, to be each perfect being reflected in the pages, while simultaneously engaging erotically with a femininity (and increasingly a masculinity) that is constantly being redefined.”
Last week, Fox News set off a short-lived controversy when it attacked Newsweek for not retouching the magazine’s larger-than-life cover photo of Sarah Palin. Calling the headshot “ridiculously unfair to her,” anchor Megyn Kelly declared that “any respectable magazine should be doing a little retouching.”
Demanding that a news magazine manipulate photos in order to remain “respectable” may seem odd, all the more so since Governor Palin looks quite attractive in the photograph. But the criticism reveals more than ratings-plumping partisan grievance. In an image-savvy culture, we’re increasingly forced to consider just what constitutes a valid portrait. The way most of us instinctively answer the question demonstrates the difference between objectivity and truth.
Consider the apolitical act of selecting a personal headshot: a bridal photo, a website image, an author portrait. You don’t just face the camera and accept the first photo that come out. That’s for driver’s licenses, mug shots, and security badges—the ID photos most people find not only embarrassing but somehow untrue. At the very least, you want to choose a shot where your eyes are open, your smile looks genuine, and your cowlick is under control.
If strangers’ snap judgments matter, you go for a bit more artifice. Take an attractive single friend of mine. When she moved to Los Angeles, she signed up with an online dating service, using a handy snapshot to illustrate her profile. She got no inquiries. Then she hired one of the many local photographers who specialize in actors’ headshots. With exactly the same profile information but a more professional photo, my friend was suddenly inundated with emails from prospective dates. She didn’t even use retouching or special makeup. The difference she says, “was the lighting, the camera angles, plus the sheer volume of shots.” She had hundreds to choose from.
Partisans demand that magazine portraits glamorize their heroes for the same reason my friend hired a professional photographer. Humans seem hard-wired to assume that good-looking means good and, conversely, to equate physical flaws with character flaws. We may preach that beauty is skin deep, but we’re equally certain that portraits “reveal character.” In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.
Through this Sunday, October 5, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is exhibiting studio portraits and movie stills from the John Kobal Collection of classic Hollywood photos. In the '60s and '70s, when Golden Age glamour was out of fashion and studios were dumping their archives, Kobal bought and preserved prints and negatives, befriended aging stars and photographers, and documented their stories. Most of the classic images you see reproduced today come from his archives, now licensed by Getty Images. (The George Hurrell photos occasionally featured on DG are exceptions. They're courtesy of our friends at the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive.)
The photos all present idealized versions of the stars--but what a range of ideals they represent, from the refined elegance of Grace Kelly to the sultry seductiveness of Rita Hayworth's Gilda, from Vivian Leigh in hyperfeminine white ruffles to Marlene Dietrich tough and dominant in a crisp blouse and slacks. And those are just (a few of) the women.
Taken at the 2007 Academy Awards, this photo of Cate Blanchett (which I dug up to illustrate the Fug Girls interview) deconstructs the usual red carpet glamour. It's almost a behind-the-scenes shot. Rather than spotlighting an autonomous star in a "Who Are You Wearing" pose, it includes a jumbled crowd of anonymous faces and partly seen suits. The red carpet itself is hidden and, as if to emphasize the makeshift nature of the de facto outdoor set, a bit of scaffolding is evident on the left. Blue sky peeks through the clouds, emphasizing the bizarre nature of the ritual--stars promenading in evening dress while it's still afternoon, a concession to East Coast schedules. This is the clutter you see on the scene, not the edited version on television or in magazines.
Instead of the usual cropped and constructed scene, the photo provides something more compelling: a glamorous vision of a poised and radiant star. With her smooth pale skin, Blanchett stands out from the dull background as if she were the only truly present and vital person there. She is at once self-contained and responsive to her unseen interviewer, who appears as a still life or synecdoche for "Hollywood reporter:" red nail polish, notebook, and digital recorder. The occasion may not appear glamorous, but Blanchett does. She is at once the center of attention and a mysterious universe of her own. She evokes aspiration. Wouldn't you want to be like that?
Blanchett is not glamorous because she is pretty or dresses well. Glamour is not something you can get from a stylist. It's not about what you wear. It is not taste. These are merely tools. Glamour is an imaginative quality, something you create in an audience's mind, and it requires a certain amount of distance. As reader Randall Shinn aptly notes in a comment on the Heather and Jessica interview, "Cate Blanchett's glamour may partly come from her desire for mystery." He quotes her: "I don’t want behind-the-scenes footage, I don’t want to know about the actor’s personal life. I want to experience their revelation of what it means to be human, to see somebody transporting me to another world."
Blanchett seems to have solved the essential dilemma of 21st-century glamour: how to preserve translucence in a transparent society. In this interesting post Grant McCracken discussed Blanchett's chameleon glamour, citing an assessment from Scott Rudin: "She's very shrewd about what capital she gives up and when. When she gives you the tiniest bit of insight into why the character's behaving the way she is, you gobble it up. I think it's a combination of alluring and elusive."
As I've written before, the aviator is one of the most enduring icons of masculine glamour. Amelia Earhart gave that glamour a feminine face, and feminine grace. She was modern and sexy, but in a ladylike way. Her mysterious disappearance only heightened her glamour.
Last June I was lucky enough to catch this exhibit, "Amelia Earhart: Icon and Image, at the International Center of Photography in New York. Through a host of images, ranging from news photos to Steichen portraits, the exhibit documented how Earhart, her husband, and an enthusiastic press constructed an image of the iconic "Lady Lindy"--a representative of the "new woman" but also of the traditional values of modesty and hard work (as opposed to decadent flappers). This slide show of images offers a small sample of the exhibit. Although Earhart was far from the best of the era's female aviators, she was the most photogenic and image-savvy. And it didn't hurt that she looked remarkably like a feminine version of Charles Lindbergh. ICP's Kristen Lubben writes in the excellent exhibit catalog:
Before visiting the National Building Museum's exhibit, "Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future," which runs through Sunday, August 23, I had thought of Saarinen as the designer of such icons of optimistic, swoopy modernism as the TWA Terminal (pictured here), St. Louis Arch, and tulip chair. I was ignorant, but not unusual.
What's been largely forgotten by the non-expert public is that Saarinen's future-shaping architecture included the design of many corporate research campuses, including those for Bell Labs, IBM, and GM. These facilities were just as forward-looking and glamorous in their day as any airport. "Coming to work at the Tech Center was like stepping into the future," Wayne Cherry, GM's vp for design, told Metropolis magazine in 2003. (Great slideshow here.) In December 1955, Architecture Forum called Saarinen's GM Technical Center "nothing less than the Industrial Versailles--the nerve center, the capitol of an empire whose corporate directors and managers believe in what GM stands for and what it does even more firmly than Louis XIV ever believed he was divine, and have declared themselves (as he did) in the way they built."
Click here, or on the photo above, for examples of Saarinen's work from the National Building Museum exhibit.
DeepGlamour explores the magic of glamour in its many manifestations, from movies, fashion, advertising, and cars to real estate, politics, sports, and travel.
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, “air travel was now equated with boredom and disaster.”
A very good friend of mine gave me a book of his work for my birthday, and while I knew of him and some of his work, I was impressed/amazed by the range and drama and sophistication of what I saw from start to finish.
. The interiors of her apartment are just amazing. In fact, it was those sets that got me interested in interior design. If I could pick just a scene from a movie, it would be the “Ascot Gavotte” scene from 
. The amazing black-and-white dresses and hats against the simple, white, paper-like buildings (all dreamed up by 
, Stephen Gundle likens cellophane to “striptease, which achieved its effect by constantly making the unveiled body more remote.”Wrapped in cellophane, “products were available but untouchable and therefore inaccessible.”
, which I reviewed along with the Gundle book 
. A less earnest director or more creative script might have produced a more interesting Amelia, one less reliant on half-hearted soap opera and more focused on the challenges of early aviation. But the real problem may be Amelia Earhart herself.
, the catalog for a 
. Recalling their youthful filmgoing in the 1940s, women expressed longing and identification when talking about the stars they loved. “It wasn’t Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire, it was me,” said one. Another said, “My favourite was Rita Hayworth. I always imagined if I could look like her I could toss my red hair into the wind…and meet the man of my dreams.”
, however, as the photo of the boxed set above demonstrates; singletons are
, a collection of Conant's photographs, Kay and Digby Diehl write that the photographer and star together “broke the mold of the traditional movie star ‘glamour’ photograph....We feel we are seeing the candid, unguarded ‘everyday' Grace, unassisted by hairdressers or makeup artists. The natural glamour of this 25-year-old woman is both timeless and seductive.”
Constance Hale wrote that, “When occasions call for eloquence, you need poetry, not Plain English.” But using a high style requires preparation, work, and the ability to be comfortable with style. At the moment we have a president and a first lady who are comfortable with eloquence and style. This is not always the case.
wrote for 
Richard Lanham wrote:
, when you spend at least $25.
links, including purchases you make while on 
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