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Ruth Harriet Louise: Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and other publicity photographs for MGM 1925-1930.
Louise was as glamorous as the stars she was working to promote. She was the head photograph- er at MGM, running the MGM Portrait Studio from 1925-1930. During these years it is estimated that she made/art-directed around 100,000 images - most of them imbued with the style and panache and downright opulence that befitted the galaxy of stars under contract to MGM - one of 5 big Hol- lywood studios of this period. Ruth Harriet Louise, born in Brooklyn, became part of the Hollywood scene. Her brother Mark Sandrich was a director of several of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers mu- sicals. The glamour projected by the studio photographers - like Louise and George Hurrell - built the ‘star’ mythos..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Harriet_Louise
The promise of sharing in the Hollywood dream, of vicariously engaging in the tinsel fantasy world of imaginatively suggested Sex, Glamour, Wealth, ‘Sophistication’, in the remediated stories illus- trated by the best directors, cinematographers, stylists, art directors, costumiers, composers and musicians - the vast, glossy commercials of the American life-style and economic success...this was what the publicity departments of Hollywood studios excelled in.
“During the first half of the 1930s, the idea of glamour was changing. Early in the decade, the term referred to a particular category of character or star: the sophisticated, mysterious woman. But this type came to be represented in a recognizable way, turning glamour into a visual style that could be copied—within Hollywood and beyond. Soon, the word glamour had become a synonym for beauty itself.” (Patrick Keating: Artifice and Atmosphere - the Visual Culture of Hollywood Glamour Photography, 1930-1935. (2017)
Paul Hesse - like George Hurrell - formerly a painter/poster artist, resettled to Hollywood in the late 19830s, opened a studio on Sunset Strip, and specialised in colour portraits - Hesse was a pioneer in the use of commercial colour photography - itself a relatively new process, perfected in 1935 by Kodak, with their Kodachrome transparency colour film and in 1932 by Technicolor with their 35mm motion-colour process. Magazine covers became a major publicity medium for Hollywood Studios.