Overview

When Ruth Harriet Louise joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio with ""more stars than there are in heaven"", she was 22 years old and the only woman working as a portrait photographer for the Hollywood studios. In a career that lasted from 1925 until 1930, Louise (born Ruth Goldstein) photographed all the stars, contract players and many of the hopefuls who passed through the studio's front gates, including Greta Garbo, Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies and Norma Shearer. This book was designed to accompany a major travelling retrospective of Louise's work organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Containing over 100 images - reproduced from the original negatives - it attests to the talent and vision of a surprisingly unknown photographer who formed the images and helped create the popularity of some of our most enduring stars. Louise shot about 100,000 negatives that distilled the glamour, drama and excitement of MGM's feature productions. Louise's original photographs were circulated to millions of moviegoers, magazine and newspaper readers and fans. The movies and publicity machine that these photographs supported shaped the basic notions of stardom, gla

Full Product Details

9780520233478

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Reviews

Often surprising and always fascinating, Ruth Harriet Louise is a biography of Louise herself, a history of portrait photography in the early years of the Hollywood studio system and a showcase for some of her most accomplished work. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

Author Information

Robert Dance is a private art dealer in New York, specializing in Old Master paintings and drawings. Bruce Robertson is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and most recently the principal author of Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection (2000).

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