Glamour Pusses

Former Reason Editor and Substance of Style author Virginia Postrel has an interesting photo-essay up at Slate about George Hurrell, one of the biggest photographers of the Hollywood studio heyday.

She writes in part:

In the 1950s, when the studio system broke down and stars became just like us only prettier, Hurrell's style fell out of fashion. Actors were demystified and desexualized. Technology changed, as photographers adopted 35-millimeter film and stopped retouching their shots. "When we stopped using those 8 x 10 cameras, the glamour was gone," said Hurrell, who turned to shooting stills of TV shows.

Check it out here.

While there's no question that actors--along with most media-related elements of American society--have been demystified, I'm not sure they were desexualized. Cinematic sexuality, always a complicated phenomenon, took on many different forms as the studio system crashed, most of them moving away from the highly stylized, "cool" static poses evinced in 8x10 stills and into something more "natural" and active in the '60s and beyond (think Newman and McQueen for men and Christie and Dunaway for women).

The whole piece, which is well worth reading, is here.

Comments

[Douglas Fletcher]

One of my high school English teachers had his classroom walls lined with old framed MGM publicity stills from the 40's on back. Kind of an odd representation of human beings, they looked more like ducks on the wall than people.

(And yes, there were a few rumors that he was gay...)

[sage]

Judging from the sheer number of posts here, I can safely assume you will all watch the oscars this Saturday. Because you care about that kind of stuff.