JAMES ABBE (1883-1973)

Born in Alfred, Maine, James Abbe's boyhood took place in Portsmouth, VA. His family owned the most important bookstore in that maritime city. At its counter James sold photographs of ship launchings and arrivals taken with an inexpensive camera. Saturated with the print culture of the period, Abbe realized that photography was underutilized as illustration in American periodicals. He began placing photo illustrations with magazines in 1916. In 1917 he moved to New York City. A sociable, witty man, Abbe had little trouble placing photographs in periodicals, but his break into the world of theatrical photography took place when he made a number of memorable portraits of the Barrymore brothers on stage in costume during dress rehearsals for 'The Jest' in 1919. A restless man with a strong curiosity, Abbe became fascinated with the nascent movie industry. He did portrait photography for several New York based cinema groups, especially for D. W. Griffith, and became the third New York based camera artist (after Karl Struss & Frank Bangs) to venture to the West Coast and work as a lensman in Hollywood. He worked for Mack Sennett for several months, even directing a now-lost comic two reeler, and as a photographer for Photoplay for another several month stint. He was the first bi-coastal entertainment photographer. He had a remarkable talent for inspiring trust in stars and Lillian Gish convinced him to come to Italy in 1923 to work as a lighting consultant and still photographer for 'The White Sister.' He closed his Broadway studio, abandoned his wife and children, and moved to Italy. He spent the next period of his life in Europe, photographing movie and stage productions in Paris and London and working as a photojournalist. Several landmark photographs of Joseph Stalin in a trip into the Soviet Union during the late 1930s would make him a celebrity of news photography during the late 1930s. His book, I SHOOT RUSSIA, was one of the important volumes of early photojournalism. He signed his vintage prints with his last name in red crayon on the lower left corner of his images. He used a credit stamp for publicity images. Despite the relatively short duration of his career on Broadway, he was one of the greatest portraitists of the great age of theatrical portrait photography

VIRGIL APGER

When Virgil Apger retired from his job as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's gallery portrait photographer in 1969, he had been there forty years. For twenty of those years he was the only gallery photographer on the lot.

Apger's interest in photography began when he was a child in Goodland, Idaho. His father, the local sheriff, took photographs of the town's criminals. Virgil worked as an usher and assistant to the projection- ist of the town's only movie theatre. His first job in films was as a transportation man and laborer for the Mack Sennett Studios. In 1929 his brother-in-law, Eugene R. Richee, who was head of the portrait gallery at Paramount, hired Apger as his assistant. Apger developed Richee's negatives, worked with the dryers, and made prints. He recalled: "Gene never left a sitting with fewer than a hundred negatives, which had to be retouched and printed." In 1930 Apger moved to MGM as Clarence S. Bull's assistant.

When Jean Harlow gave Apger his start as a production still photographer by requesting him for "China Seas"(1935), he had already worked for the publicity department. From then on he shot the stills on all her films. "Doing stills was invaluable training for gallery work," Apger explained.

Apger's enthusiasm on the set made him extremely popular with the stars, and Greer Garson, whose films he worked on, requested him for her portrait photographer. It was the stills he had taken on "Mrs. Miniver"(1942) that won him the only Academy Award ever given for Best Production Still.

In 1947 Apger was put in charge of the portrait gallery at MGM, and for the next twenty years he shot all of their stars: Esther Williams, Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Greer Garson, Judy Garland, Robert Taylor, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Kay Kendall, Stewart Granger, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor. Between 1948 and 1952, Apger had the distinction of having more magazine covers--among them, "Life", "Look", and "Photoplay"--than all of the other photographers at all of the other studios combined. Apger's work--stylish, glamorous, imaginative--stood apart even in the lackluster fifties.

ERIC CARPENTER

Eric Carpenter began working as a plasterer during the Depression. In 1933 he joined Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer as an office boy. He succeeded Virgil Apger as Clarence S. Bull's assistant and continued in that capacity until he got his union card.

With his spirited and beautiful portraits, Carpenter quickly became the favorite photographer of the studio's rising young stars, like Ava Gardner, Mickey Rooney, James Craig, Esther Williams, Judy Garland, and Lana Turner. His rapport with Turner began when she signed with MGM and lasted up to her departure from the studio in the late fifties. Carpenter was responsible for most of her torrid, memorable gallery portrait sittings. His photographs of her are lush and immediate in dazzling whites and sophisticated, plungingly deep blacks. More dynamic than almost any of the other glamour portraits of the era, their effect recalled the Harlow portraits and anticipated the ones of Monroe at Fox in the early fifties--acres of white fur, opalescent skin, poses inviting by their ease.

After the war Carpenter left the profession to join his brother in the shipyard business, but by 1950 he was back at MGM this time as a production still photographer--a job he held until his retirement in the sixties- working on films like "Quentin Durward"(1955). "Beau Brummel"(1954), and "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962)

JACK FREULICH

Jack Feulich had emigrated from Europe with his family, including brother Roman, a still photographer at universal until he left in 1945 to head a portrait gallery at Republic Pictures. Jack Freulich photographed all of Universal’s silent-screen stars, including Mary Philbin, Pricilla Dean, Erich von Stroheim, and Laura La Plante, and early sound stars like Bette Davis. (His photographs of her belied the studio's reason for canceling her contract: they said she had as much sex appeal as comedian Slim Summerville.)

Freulich committed suicide in 1936, shortly after being replaced as head of the gallery at Universal by his former still man, Ray Jones. Ed Eastbrook, who knew Freulich well, said that when the aging Carl Laemmle sold his interest in the studio in 1935, the broom sweeping through the organization cleared out many of the European Jewish émigrés related to Leammle or to the others on the staff, replacing them with gentiles.

ELMER FRYER

Elmer Fryer began working as a photographer in 1924. When Warner Bros. and First National Studios joined operations in 1929, Fryer replaced Fred Archer as head of the new Warner-First National stills department. During the 1930's he took portraits of Dolores Del Rio, Kay Francis Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Errol Flynn, George Brent, and other Warner Bros. stars.

BUD GRAYBILL

Bud Graybill--a native of Los Angeles--had his first contact with the film world in 1922 with a paper route near the MGM(then Triangle) studio, selling papers to stars, among them Mae Murray and Robert Z. Leonard. "I grew up at MGM," he explained. "Every summer from 1924 on I'd work in a different department. I worked as an extra, as a trick man, in the special effects department, in production, and in casting. I would make enough money scraping wax in the sound department to go to school all year."

Graybill's interest in photography began at UCLA. While studying \ business administration he started taking pictures for the school yearbook. When he graduated in 1933, MGM publicity head Howard Strickling hired him as a publicity assistant. After three years of writing handouts and campaign books, his intimate knowledge of the needs of the publicity department enabled him at last to join the photographer's union.

Graybill became so adept to pleasing the stars that they frequently asked him to photograph their parties, christenings, and other private affairs.

EDWIN BOWER HESSER

Hesser belonged to the generation of photographers who saw the marriage of image and performance as the future of the art. Born in New Jersey and apprenticed in photography in New York City, Hesser became smitten with the potentials of the art form. Prior to World War I he toured Northeastern theaters with J. Townsend Russell in a series of 'picture readings' illustrating Longfellow's 'Tales of a Wayside Inn. Townsend recited the poem accompanied by a string orchestra while illustrative photographs were projected on the screen. In 1913, Hesser introduced Roald Admundsen, the first man to reach the south pole, to New York audiences, presenting motion pictures to illustrate the trek. Using family money he incorporated on February 3, 1915, the Hesser Motion Picture Corporation with a capitalization of 50K$. the Later in the year, he was in Atlanta opening the Hesser School For Motion Picture Acting. With America's entry into World War I, Hesser joined the U. S. Army Signal corps with the rank of Captain and oversaw land photography. While in the service a scenario composed by Hesser, "The Freedom of the World," was made in 1918 into a semi-documentary feature film by Goldwyn. After the armistice, Hesser decommissioned, set up a photographic Studio in Manhattan employing as his assistant a talented Italian, Nino Vayana, to oversee production. He was drawn to the world of movies and worked as a contract photographer for numbers of silent stars based in New York, particularly Norma Talmadge, Irene Castle, and Marion Davies. A fire in 1922 destroyed his production facilities and his stock of early negatives. He began to make regular trips to the west coast for photographic sessions with Hollywood stars, and finally moved his pase of operations to the West Coast. By 1923 he realized that the real money in photography lay in periodical publication, not in the service of film publicity offices or stage PR men. He saw a particularly opportunity in the subject which the 1920s stage explored with great daring, but the screen, even in pre-code days, could not pursue: female undress. Throughout the late 1920s, he published EDWIN BOWER HESSER'S ARTS MONTHLY, and other titles, exploiting the association betweens art and nudity, and sold it to an anonymous readership of 'art students.' The magazine published work by Alfred Cheney Johnston, John De Mirjian, George DeBarron, and Strand Studio. Hesser's exploration of the netherworld of publishing brought him in contact with the Hollywood underworld. In 1928 he was arrested for suspicion of narcotics peddling, battery, and impersonating a police officer in connection with the death of starlet Helen St. Clair Evans, who was murdered by her husband Arthur. He was released, but the Depression shut down Hesser's successful exercise in niche publishing. Fortunately for Hesser, he experiments with color photographic processes and his experience with mass reproduction of imagery made him attractive in the eyes of the NEW YORK TIMES, who hired him as a technician. Later in the decade he returned to California. Hesser continued to practice photography until the late 1940s placing occasional pieces with magazines. His photographic archive is stored in the special collections department of UCLA library.

RAY JONES

Ray Jones began taking stills at Universal in 1922(Jack Freulich was head of the newly formed stills department), and he spent most of his career there, although he left from time to time to work for other companies. Jones shot stills and portraits for the Sennett Studios but returned to Universal in 1930 as Freulich' assistant. During this period he photographed such stars as Irene Dunne, John Boles, Jean Harlow, Boris Karloff, and Tala Birell, then being heavily promoted by the studio as their threat to Garbo and Dietrich.

In 1933 the cameraman's union called its people out in sympathy with the sound men, who were striking for recognition of their union, and many photographers moved to better-paying jobs at their studios. Ray Jones joined Fox to head their stills department, while Otto Dyar, formerly portrait photographer at Paramount, tool over their portrait gallery. During the year that Dyar spent in London in 1934 shooting portraits of Gaumont's stars to help promote them to the American public, Jones took over the Fox portrait gallery and photographed Lilian Harvey, Janet Gaynor, the Harlowesque Alice Faye,Lew Ayres, Will Rogers, and others. Jones left fox in 1934 to work as a freelancer, during which time to shot stills on two of DeMille's films, "Cleopatra"(1934) and "The Crusades"(1935), but he rejoined Universal the following year to take over Freulich's job.

In the next two decades at Universal, Jones was responsible for most of the portraits of the studio's top stars under contract, including Danielle Darrieux, Marlene Dietrich, and Maria Montez, and he shot most of the extant photographs of Deanna Durbin. Jones taught photography and wrote about it during his years at the studio and after his retirement in the fifties. For many years he was president of the cameraman and photographer's union.

DONALD BIDDLE KEYES

Donald Biddle Keyes, a pioneer photographer and motion-picture cameraman, started, out as a publicity photographer at the Ince Triangle studios at Culver City(later MGM). After World War I he moved to the Lasky studios, photographing such stars as Rudolph Valentino, Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, and Wallace Reid, and taking stills on a number of their films. He left the studio in 1922 and alternated working as first cameraman and still photographer. The photographs he took of Ann Sheridan to promote "Winter Carnival" (United Artists, 1939) appeared on the covers of seven national magazines, including "Life", which also ran a story on Sheridan. From 1945 until his retirement in 1954, Keyes was a contract photographer for Republic Pictures.

MADISON LACY

Madison Lacy began taking photographs as a child in 1907. He started working in a motion-picture lab and got into the stills department at the Griffith studio through Billy Blitzer, Griffith's cameraman.

In 1909 Lacy joined Hal Roach's company, where, as he puts it, “I had about nine occupations besides taking stills." In 1924 he went independent, working on Westerns "and on the early 'states' rights' pictures, which were really terrible. Real quickies. You couldn't do much of anything creative there. You couldn't do much of anything except shoot!"

For a time Lacy worked at Paramount, where he shot the stills on Erich von Stroheim's celebrated "The Wedding March"(1928)."Stroheim shot scenes in a brothel that could never have been shown on the screen, and I shot the stills," he explained.

In 1933, Lacy went to work at Warner Bros. Throughout the thirties and into the forties he shot stills on many of their films, besides doing publicity and specializing in "leg art"--those widely circulated Bubsy Berkeley "cuties." "Some of those girls, like Toby Wing, were used more for stills than anything else," Lacy explained. "It was difficult to make them look very different, because Bubsy Berkeley personally selected them, and they all looked alike!" Lacy also photographed Harlow look-alike Mary Dees, so catching the resemblance that she was hired to replace the deceased star in the uncompleted scenes of Harlow's last picture "Saratoga"(1937).

Lacy was proudest of his years with David O. Selznick, whom he joined after leaving the armed services, where he had worked in the photographic section. He shot many of the stills and special portrait work for "Spellbound"(1945) and "Duel in the Sun"(1947). "Selznick was a great publicist. Everybody working for him was proud to be having something to do with him."

During Lacy's fifty years as a photographer, he shot the most famous beauties to come out of Hollywood, some of whose potential first emerged in his portraits, such as the nubile seventeen-year-old Lana Turner. Lacy: "I think probably everything to do with glamour photography as we know it--originated with Hollywood."

BERT LONGWORTH

Between 1928 and 1939, Bert “Buddy" Longworth took the bulk of the celebrated stills for the production numbers of the kaleidoscopic Warner Bros. musicals("Forty-second Street", 1933;"Gold Digger",1933;etc.). He had started out in 1910 with his own portrait gallery in Detroit and had established the first postcard photo service in America before becoming a news photographer for the Chicago Tribune. Longworth joined Universal Pictures in 1921, where he shot stills for the "Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1923) and "The Phantom of the Opera" (1925), among other films.

At MGM Longworth shot stills for Garbo's first films. These pictures--including Garbo and Gilbert locked in embrace from "Flesh and the Devil"(1926)--are some of the most instantly recognizable images from silent films and became the most frequently reproduced stills in that era. In 1937 Longworth published a private edition of his photographs entitled "Hold Still Hollywood."

AL ST. HILAIRE

Al St. Hilaire began his career in photography in 1930, working for Ruth Harriet Louise during the last months of her term at MGM, washing and drying her prints and delivering them to the publicity department. "When I joined MGM I got a job in the script department at twelve dollars a week," he said. "I wasn't especially interested in photography, but at seventeen dollars a week the money was better." When George Hurrell was brought in to take over her studio, St. Hilaire became his assistant. "It was watching George work that made me want to become a photographer," he explained. In 1938 St. Hilaire branched out to become a still photographer, working at Columbia in the forties. In the sixties he photographed productions like Judgment at Nuremburg(1961) and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World(1963).

SCOTTY WELBOURNE

Scotty Welbourne replaced Elmer Fryer at Warner Bros. in 1941, photographing many of the studio's newer stars, including Lana Turner, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, Humphery Bogart, and Alexis Smith, as well as Marlene Dietrich and Merle Oberon. (During the shooting of "Fools for Scandal" (1938), he took 686 pictures of Carole Lombard in one day.) Welbourne believed that the proper use of light and shadow was the answer to most of the photographer's problems and that "the photograph or the photographer must never overshadow the subject in importance [but] must always be of secondary importance to the star."

Welbourne left Warner Bros. in 1945 to set up, with Madison Lacy and former MGM publicity photographer Bud Graybill, the stills department at Enterprise Productions, a short-lived production company that made three or four films, among them "Arch of Triumph"(1948).

Photographer's text courtesy of The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers Published by Knopf and also courtesy of Dr. David S. Shields