www.johnkobal.org

Glamour of the Gods, published by Steidl Publishing in July 2008, is a survey of Hollywood portraiture from the industry's golden age 1920-1960. All Photographs included are drawn from the extraordinary archive of the John Kobal Foundation in London. John Kobal was the last century's pre-eminent authority on Hollywood photography and was the first collector and later author who systematically sought to understand photography's important role in creating and marketing the great stars central to the Hollywood mystique. Garbo, Dietrich, Cooper and Bogart are among the great faces featured, and all photography will be taken from the archive's sparkling original vintage photographs. Film historian Robert Dance is the book's author and he has written about John Kobal's important place in Hollywood history, as well as provided a lucid overview of the still and portrait photographer's place in the Hollywood studio system. Critic and historian John Russell Taylor has provided an introduction drawing from his memory of many years of friendship with Kobal. Glamour of the Gods pays tribute to the many players whose images remains potent worldwide generations after they appeared on the screen. Additionally the book will be a serious study of one important aspect of the movie industry and should appeal to both fans and scholars alike.

Excerpts from Robert Dance's Essay for Glamour of the Gods - Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation*
* © Robert Dance.
Excerpts are for reference only and may not be reproduced without express written permission from the author.

Portraits from the Glamorous Golden Age of Hollywood (1924-1961)
Kobal first started seriously examining and acquiring Hollywood portraits and stills in the 1960s when this material was considered nothing more than insignificant Hollywood ephemera. Only a few film enthusiasts, including Kobal, scrambled and competed to acquire original studio photographs. Kobal did, however, collect better than the others, and in the end used his extraordinary collection in the service of restoring the reputations of the photographers who had helped create the stars in the first place.

Reviving the Work of Hollywood's Most Notable Studio Photographers
As his collecting grew more ravenous and expanded into acquiring original negatives as well as photographs, he persuaded [George] Hurrell to print his classic images once again. Vintage Hollywood would come alive in the darkroom as stars' faces re-emerged in the developing baths to be introduced to a new generation of film enthusiasts. And it was his acquaintance with Hurrell that gave Kobal the idea to look up surviving members of the circle of great Hollywood photographers, whose accumulated work is perhaps the most perfect record available of the history of Hollywood's first fifty years.

Studio photography: connecting fans to their favorite celebrities
Once the doors of Hollywood were open to Kobal, obsessive accumulation became the hallmark of his acquisition of star portraits. He acquired single prints, small collections and, when the opportunity arose, a star's or photographer's archives. These images were after all an important currency of Hollywood. A successful portrait session could introduce a new face to moviegoers and pave the path to stardom. The careers of legendary figures such as Crawford, Gable and Cooper, Kobal suggested, 'were made possible through photography and would probably not have existed without'. [Cooper, p.109] For these veteran performers and other stars, portraits remained an essential link to the ticket buying public who anxiously awaited new pictures each month. Studios distributed these images by the hundreds of thousands, mostly through the mail to fans, and a selection of exclusive portraits were sent to movie magazines and newspapers to feed a gluttonous appetite for the latest shot. Long before the paparazzi snaps, which replaced the portrait in the 1960s as the fan's favourite vehicle of connection to the stars, studio-controlled publicity photos chronicled the lives of stars on screen and off. Although these might seem artificial in contrast to the lively intrusion of the rapid-fire triggers of today's digital cameras, they recorded an era when fans looked up to the stars as templates of manners and fashion.

Capturing the glamour and essence of Hollywood
'What happened in the galleries' wrote Kobal, 'was an extraordinary thing, something that was beyond the ken of the studios and owed nothing to contracts, scripts or the publicity department.' [Art, p.87] Performers worked as hard, or, as Kobal saw it, perhaps even harder, in the portrait studio than on the set. 'To achieve the effects of the great portraits, it was necessary for the sitters to reach a state of trust with the photographers so total that they would unconsciously reveal the very hunger that had driven them to the place where they now found themselves.' [Art, p.87] 'I photographed better than I looked,' Joan Crawford told Kobal, 'so it was easy for me... I let myself go before the camera. I mean, you can't photograph a dead cat. You have to offer something.' [Art, p.109] Greta Garbo, whose languid style belies words like 'hunger' and 'driven', was nevertheless as great a portrait subject as she was a film actress. Kobal would have us understand that whatever it was that made Garbo Hollywood's greatest film star was also working at full throttle in the portrait studio. Katharine Hepburn put it succinctly, 'If you are in the business of being photographed, you must like to have your picture taken, otherwise you shouldn't be doing it. It's part of your job.' [PWT, p.330]

The challenges of collecting & chronicling Hollywood's Golden Age
By the 1970s a majority of the photographers who had worked in the twenties and thirties, like their subjects, were retired, and a few had died. What made Kobal's task even more complicated was the issue of photographer's credit that surrounded studio photography. While many portraits were embossed or stamped with the photographer's name, scene-stills were almost never credited. Slowly, and later frantically, Kobal set about attempting to discover just who had taken what picture. Kobal did not meet everyone who shot portraits and stills in Hollywood, but he was the first who tried to make sense of their important contribution to movie-land history. In his quest to discover the whereabouts of the surviving stillsmen, Kobal came to know, along with Hurrell and Bull, Laszlo Willinger, Robert Coburn, William Walling and Ted Allan. Each would share his memories and print from his negatives. In return, Kobal started what became his most important work - publishing the anthologies of the photographers' work that resuscitated forgotten careers.


Russell Ball Dolores del Rio for 'The Trail of 98' MGM 1928	William Thomas Carole Lombard Pathe 1929	Karl Struss Gloria Swanson for 'Male & Female' Paramount Pictures 1919 This print was printed by Ted Allan in 1980.


Arthur Kales Thomas Meighan for 'Male & Female' Paramount Pictures 1922	Ruth Harriet Louise Buster Keaton MGM 1929	Bertram 'Buddy' Longworth Greta Garbo and John Gilbert for 'Flesh & The Devil' MGM 1926


William Walling William Holden Paramount Pictures 1939	Clarence Sinclair Bull Gary Cooper MGM 1934	Ted Allan Myrna Loy and William Powell for 'The Thin Man' MGM 1934


Ernest Bachrach Katharine Hepburn RKO 1935	Ted Allan James Stewart MGM 1938	A.L. 'Whitey' Schaefer Loretta Young Columbia Pictures 1940


Ted Allan Robert Taylor MGM 1936	Scotty Welbourne Humphrey Bogart for 'High Sierra' Warner Brothers 1940	Ernest Bachrach Michelle Morgan RKO 1940


Laszlo Willinger Marlene Dietrich on the set of 'Manpower' Warner Brothers 1944	Laszlo Willinger Joan Collins rehearsing dance routines for 'Seven Thieves' 20th Century Fox 1959	Leo Fuchs Rock Hudson for 'Lover Come Back' Universal 1961


Davis Boulton Ava Gardner for 'The Little Hut' MGM 1956	Clarence Sinclair Bull Grace Kelly MGM 1956	John Miehle Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers for 'Swing Time' RKO 1936


George Hurrell Jane Russell for 'The Outlaw' RKO 1940 (year of this portrait session, the film eventually was released in 1943)	Bertram 'Buddy' Longworth Alice White for 'Show Girl in Hollywood' Warner Brothers 1930	Edwin Bower Hesser Jean Harlow Griffiths Park, Los Angeles,1929


Laszlo Willinger Donna Reed for 'See Here, Private Hargrove' MGM 1944	George Hoyningen-Huene Ava Gardner MGM 1956	Abbe Rudolph Valentino and Natasha Rambova for 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' Metro 1921


Ted Allan Chorus girls for 'Dancing Lady' MGM 1933	Ray Jones Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner for 'The Killers' Universal 1946	Frank Powolny Betty Grable 20th Century Fox 1943

To purchase Glamour of the Gods click here for Steidl Publishing