George Hurrell

George Edward Hurrell (born June 1, 1904 in Covington , Kentucky , † May 17, 1992 in Los Angeles ) was an American portrait and fashion photographer who brought out " glamor photography" with his black and white photographs of numerous Hollywood stars .

Life

George Hurrell was born in Covington, near Cincinnati , in 1904 . His father Edward Eugene Hurrell was of Irish - English descent and worked as a shoemaker. The mother, Anna Mary Eble, a native German from Baden-Baden , had moved to Cincinnati with her family as a child. George Hurrell grew up in a large Catholic family with four brothers and one sister. At a young age, he began to be interested in art and thus came into contact with photography at an early age. He completed an art degree at the Art Institute of Chicago and also took evening classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. At the invitation of the landscape painter Edgar Alwyn Payne, who had taken a liking to Hurrell's experimental painting style, Hurrell traveled to Laguna Beach , California in 1925 . From then on he earned his living there by capturing paintings and painters from the local artist colony. Hurrell, who actually wanted to be a painter himself, therefore increasingly took up work as a photographer.

Through the stunt pilot Pancho Barnes , with whom he was now good friends, Hurrell met the silent film star Ramón Novarro in 1929 , who made himself available to Hurrell for a photo series and then showed the resulting portraits to employees of MGM . So finally the actress Norma Shearer became aware of the photos. Shearer then had himself photographed by Hurrell in lascivious poses in order to use the photos to convince her husband, MGM's production manager Irving Thalberg , that he had enough sex appeal for the female lead in Die Frau für alle ( The Divorcee , 1930). Both Shearer, who later received an Oscar for this role , and Thalberg were so impressed by Hurrell's talent that he was hired as a senior portrait photographer at MGM in 1930. In the years that followed, Hurrell made numerous portraits of MGM stars, including Greta Garbo , Joan Crawford , Clark Gable , Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler . After a falling out with Howard Strickling, head of MGM's publicity department, Hurrell left MGM in 1932 and opened his own photography studio on Sunset Boulevard . He later worked for Warner Bros. , for whom he photographed Bette Davis , Humphrey Bogart , Errol Flynn and James Cagney , among others . At Columbia Pictures , he then helped build Rita Hayworth as a glamor star. He also portrayed stars from other film studios such as Marlene Dietrich and Veronica Lake .

During the Second World War he worked for the film division of the United States Army Air Forces . Then he returned to Hollywood. However, since glamor photography had gone out of fashion in the meantime, he went to New York , where he devoted himself to advertising and fashion photography in the early 1950s. In 1952 he returned to Hollywood again, where he founded a television production company with his wife Phyllis. In 1956 he settled in southern California. In the 1960s, he photographed young stars like Liza Minnelli , Paul Newman and Robert Redford . In 1976 he published the photo book The Hurrell Style . Even Sharon Stone , Brooke Shields and John Travolta were portrayed by him. He most recently worked with producer J. Grier Clarke and director Carl Colby on the documentary Legends in Light: The Photography of George Hurrell , the first major retrospective of his work. He died of cancer in 1992, three years before the documentary was published.

style

"The essential element of my style was to shape the face with shadows instead of flooding it with light," said Hurrell, describing his recipe for success. He used light and shadow to emphasize the cheekbones and jaw areas of his models. He developed his own techniques for lighting and soft focus . He was also considered a master of retouching . In addition, his black and white photographs in particular have a painterly composition.

reception

The men's magazine Esquire wrote in 1936 that “Hurrell's portraits relate to ordinary shots like a Rolls-Royce to roller skates.” In 1965, his photos were first exhibited in New York's Museum of Modern Art . Numerous worldwide exhibitions followed. For a long time, however, Hurrell's photos were known more for their famous subjects than for the skill of the photographer. Film historian John Kobal began collecting, restoring, and cataloging Hurrell's photos in the 1970s. Hurrell's photos are now worth thousands of dollars. In 1981 one of his portraits of Ramón Novarro was auctioned off at Christie's for $ 9,000. Up to that point no photo of this kind had been sold for such a sum. This very photo is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art . Hurrell is now one of the greatest American portrait photographers.

Exhibitions

2019: HOLLYWOOD ICONS - Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation. Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Alfred Hitchcock & Co. in the Ludwig Galerie Schloss Oberhausen

literature

• Mark A. Vieira: Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits. The Chapman Collection . Harry N. Abrams, 1997, ISBN 0-8109-3434-5 , 223 pp.
• Lynne Warren: Encyclopedia of 20th Century Photography . Routledge, 2006, ISBN 0-415-97667-7 , p. 767.
• Hans-Michael Koetzle: Photographers AZ . Taschen Germany, 2015. ISBN 978-3-8365-1107-0

Web links

• Literature by and about George Hurrell in the catalog of the German National Library
• George Hurrell in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• Official website (English)
• Hurrell Estate Collection (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ George Hurrell, Marlene Dietrich, 1938. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on December 4, 2017 ; Retrieved December 3, 2017 (American English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ "The most essential thing about my style was working with shadows to design the face instead of flooding it with light." , Lucy Davies: George Hurrell: The master of the Hollywood still . In: The Daily Telegraph , August 14, 2012.
3. ^ ^{A b} Matilda Battersby: George Hurrell: Hollywood's icon maker . In: The Independent , August 21, 2012.
4. ^ "A Hurrell portrait is to the ordinary publicity still, [...] what a Rolls-Royce is to a roller-skate." , quoted from Lucy Davies: George Hurrell: The master of the Hollywood still . In: The Daily Telegraph , August 14, 2012.