Glamour Photography and the Institutionalization of Celebrity

Abstract

This article documents the visual introduction of glamour to American popular culture through the development of “glamour photography.” As the result of artistic, institutional, and technological conditions that converged from the mid-1920s through the early 1930s, this new mode of publicity photography materialized, dramatically shifting the way film stars were imaged and the channels through which their images were disseminated. This aesthetic and institutional shift connected the somewhat ambiguous idea of glamour and the evolving technologies of publicity photography perfected by Edward Steichen and his peers in the late 1920s. Inspired Hollywood studio photographers, such as George Hurrell, established a “semiotics of glamour” by endlessly reproducing a set of visual signs, consisting of technical qualities (such as lighting, retouching, and focus) coupled with an increasingly sexualized, gender-specific appearance of subjects (including poses, costumes, hair, and makeup). No longer the domain of Continental imports Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, glamour was positively proven to exist through publicity photographs of all Hollywood beauties, becoming identifiable, reproducible, and therefore accessible. By the mid-1930s, studio publicists and advertisers had responded to the demand for glamour by recasting the formerly elusive, magical concept into a consumable, attainable, all-American mode of white femininity.

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