While we still stargaze, we’re not as blinded by celebrity as folks once were. A less deferential media and actors who don’t always dress to the nines have made Hollywood’s elite less remote than in the days when Louis B. Mayer called the shots. We still love big screen personalities, but we’re under no illusion that they exist in another galaxy; we’re in on the artifice, hep to “narrative.” But when photographer George Hurrell aimed his lens at Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, and William Powell, film actors became almost otherworldly, less performers than exotic creatures caught in amber. Glamour ruled and Hurrell was the man with the magic to make it happen.
Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Age by George Hurrell—on view at the National Portrait Gallery—is a mighty reminder of the impenetrable allure that once enveloped screen stars. Deploying dramatic lighting and high contrast, Hurrell sculpted his images, transforming mere (though often beautiful) human flesh into something Olympian. Or, as once noted in Esquire, “a Hurrell portrait is to the ordinary publicity ‘still’ about what a Rolls-Royce is to a rollerskate.”
Born in Cincinnati in 1904, Hurrell attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before beginning his photographic education as an assistant to local portrait photographer Eugene Hutchinson. In 1925 he headed west with landscape painter Edgar Allen Payne, and settled into the art colony at Laguna Beach, California. In 1929, after Hurrell’s images of matinee idol Ramon Novarro appeared in the Los Angeles Times, MGM’s head of publicity, Howard Strickling, tapped him to serve as the studio’s in-house portrait photographer. Hurrell went on to work at Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures, with interludes as a freelancer.
“Hurrell believed the best portraits resulted from a creative exchange between photographer and subject,” notes Ann M. Schumard, senior curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. “As exemplars of this spirit, he spoke admiringly of ‘the enthusiasm of a Crawford, the humor of a Lombard, or the dedication of a Harlow.’”
The grand illusion Hurrell helped create didn’t last. Realism encroached, on and off the set. He continued working until shortly before his death in 1992. By then, his Hollywood was long gone. But thanks to his way with a camera, not forgotten.
Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Age by George Hurrell • National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC • to January 5, 2025 • npg.si.edu
