Page 65 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 65/146
emerged half a century before in the work of Gustav Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron and Henry Peach Robinson (see Peach Robinson: Bringing Home the May 1862) - it was Robinson who had written The Pictorial Effect in Photography in 1867, and given a name to this quest to marry photo- graphy with art. See also Aaron Scharf: Art and Photography 1968; and Juliet Hacking (ed) Photo- graphy-The Whole Story 2012). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Photography-Whole-Story-Juliet-Hacking/dp/0500290458
Edward Steichen: Gloria Swanson 1924.
One of the leading pictorialist photographers of the age photographs one of the new ‘stars’ created
over the previous decade by the Cinema as a femme fatale. We’re looking at a cinematographically-
inspired ‘big close up’ (BCU) of Swanson, full-face, nowhere to hide, yet still she is shrouded be-
hind her muslin veil - still unobtainable . The art of the Hollywood promotional photographic portrait
had emerged through the teens of the century, spawned by the millions of us falling under the spell
of the Movies - going to the movies often a twice weekly experience, and carried by new movie
magazines, fanzines, movie publicity stills and posters - and those real photographs - the publicity
stills - that appeared in the glass cases near the cinema entrances...
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/48855
By the mid 1920s, The Hollywood publicity machine was growing into a major economic sector, based upon publicity photographs of the stars, movie-stills, stories of the private lives and sexual mores of leading stars... A new democratic aristocracy was emerging, fostered by the ther big Hol- lywood film companies like MGM, whose lead-photographer Harriet Louise.