John Engstead: A Total Professional with Celebrities and More

John Engstead was born on September 22, 1909 (some say 1912) in Los Angeles, California.  Engstead began his career in 1926, when he was hired as an office boy by Paramount Pictures' head of studio publicity, Harold Harley.

In 1927, Engstead pleased his boss by arranging a photo session for actress Clara Bow with photographer Otto Dyer using an outdoor garden setting which was unusual at that time. The resulting photographs hailed Harley as "Clara Bow's best sitting."

In 1928, in response to fan magazine requests, Engstead appointed Paramount magazine contact that he wear a suit and tie every day.

Engstead's creative direction of photographs of actress Louise Brooks led to a promotion to art supervisor, where he oversaw the production of Paramount's publicity stills.

In 1932, due to a strike by photographers, Engstead assumed the position of studio portrait photographer, despite having never previously photographed anyone. Actor Cary Grant posed for his practice shots. He returned to his job as art supervisor after the strike was resolved.

In 1941, Paramount Pictures fired Engstead, and Harper's Bazaar hired him for freelance advertising and portrait photography assignments. From 1941 to 1949, he took fashion photography assignments from numerous other magazines, including Collier's, Esquire, House Beautiful, Ladies Home Journal, Life, Look, Mademoiselle, McCall's, Vogue, and Women's Home Companion.

In the 1940s, Engstead photographed many celebrities, including Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Maureen O'Hara and Shirley Temple. Unlike other photographers, he often shot his subjects at home or outdoors, and his portraits of a young Judy Garland in Carmel, California were particularly successful. During this decade, he built a studio in Los Angeles that became a gathering place for celebrities.

He remembered the stars well.  Marlene Dietrich, to whom he later became her official photographer for her celebrated one-woman show, recalled that for her last film with von Sternberg, Paramount's "The Devil is a Woman" (1935), the designer Travis Baton and Dietrich produced an enormous Spanish comb which supported a large mantilla.  The comb was anchored to Dietrich's head with wire cutters, and "Marlen fell forward, arms and head resting on her dressing table, exhausted from pain.  When she came up, tears were running down her face."

Another was Gary Cooper.  Engstead supervised Cooper's sessions when they were both at Paramount and he photographed him a great deal in later years, he had this revealing insight on Cooper:  "Cooper knew more about how to be photographed than any other man I know.  The way he handled his face and his six-toot-three-inch frame led me to surmise that he must have done considerable homework.... He moved with the grace of a panther.  I don't think he either liked or disliked photographic sessions, but he endured them because he realized that they were part of his business... One thing that made it easy for Cooper to make stills was his appreciation that cameras photograph the mind.... Cooper carried this professionalism to the care of his body, which he kept in top physical condition until his last illness."

Carole Lombard, who bought most of her clothes with the still camera in mind, was a photographer's delight.  She approached each sitting with almost as much care as a screen role. She would meet with the photographer perhaps a week before each session to discuss the type of photographs that would be taken, te backgrounds, the wardrobe she should get for it.  In her eight years at Paramount the studio released more than seventeen hundred portraits of her--and this does not include all the other types of stills and portraits taken when she was on loan-out to other studios.   Engstead, who adored Lombard and loved working with her, praised her contribution to the success of her portraits:  "Carole always gave her complete cooperation.  she loved good photographs--knew about lighting and how to pose--and had no inhibitions about being photographed, so it was possible to shoot her any way you wanted and she gave all the time it needed."

He also photographed an up and coming star named Sharon Tate.  His photographs of her are timeless and he says: "She was a sweet girl.  I hated how she died."

From 1942 to 1954, he photographed celebrity clients outdoors and at home, an innovation in fashion photography.  Then he  photographed the annual spring and fall collections for Adrian.

From 1959 to 1970, he continued commercial work and society portraiture. 

Engstead continued to photograph movie stars and other celebrities through the 1950s (Marilyn Monroe) and 1960s. He produced promotional material for many television personalities, including Pat Boone, Carmel Quinn, Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, Eve Arden, and Lucille Ball. He also shot cover photos for albums recorded by singers such as Peggy Lee and Connie Francis.. His work extended into governmental figures in the 1950s, including then-Second Lady Pat Nixon. Engstead closed his studio in 1970 but continued to accept special portrait and television assignments until his death on April 15, 1984 at age 72 in West Hollywood, California.

Engstead's images are represented by the Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive and can be viewed by the public at MPTV.net.  Also, he is listed in books such as Star Shots, Masters of Starlight and The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photograghers by Kobal.

Ingrid Bergman

Natalie Wood

Marilyn Monroe

Carole Lombard

Audrey Hepburn

Cary Grant

Hedy Lamarr

 Gary Cooper

 

 

Marlene Dietrich

Sharon Tate

Elizabeth Taylor

Veronica "Rocky" Cooper: The Best Photographer of Husband Gary Cooper!

Veronica Balfe was born May 23, 1913 in Brooklyn, New York. 

In 1933, Cooper met twenty year old Veronica Balfe, known as Rocky to her friends.  A New York debutant socialite (with Park Avenue and Southampton addresses), her father, Harry Balfe, Jr., was the son of a wealthy industrialist and financier and she was the neice of Cedric Gibbons, the well known Hollywood art director at MGM (as well as the designer of the Oscar, the Academy Awards Statue), whose wife was the actress Dolores Del Rio.  In 1930 Rocky moved to Los Angles (with a chaperone, since she was only seventeen and had just abandoned her finishing school) to flirt with a movie career under the name Sandra Shaw.  By her own admission she wasn't the world's greatest actor, but she had a beaufiul face and gorgeous figure--not particularly unusual in Hollywood.  What was disarmingly unusual was her poise and intelligence, well-bred, elegant style, and being ironically, something of a tomboy.  She was a national skeet-shooting champion and loved swimming, skiing, and riding.  Cooper was immediately smitten and soon he and Rocky became something of an item in Beverly Hills society.  The year she met Cooper she'd been in Hollywood three years and had made three films.

Just six months after they met, Cooper asked her to marry him, and the wedding took place in New York on December 15, 1933.  Rocky maintained her own identity even though her husband was a celebrated movie star, and Cooper surprised the gossip columnists by leaving behind his party-going bachelor days quite happily.  Their only daughter, Maria, was born four years later.  Marriage and fatherhood did nothing to damage his image as the most elegant man in the movies, driving around Hollywood in his chartreuse Duesenberg convertible, aptly named "The Yellow Peril" because of his fast driving habit.

His daughter, Maria Cooper Janis says:

With her camera, my mother, Veronica Cooper documented the life of our family in the group of personal photograghs I've selected for this book (Cary Cooper: Enduring Style).  "Rocky" was a great shot and she kept many meticulous red-leather bound albums.  The pages were filled with festive events, and intimate and private moments with my father.  But she also set about preserving more adventursome memories of their skiing forays in Sun Valley and Aspen, shooting, riding, and their many trips around the world.  There are pictures of poeple well known to the public as well as family friends, interspersed with shots of my father taken by some of the  premier photographers of the day, along with a few pictures he took himself.

She passed away in February 16, 2000 in New York, New York of natural causes.

Here are some examples of her work:

 

With Grace Kelly

Elizabeth Taylor and Tony Curtis

 

Below are a few of Cooper with "Rocky":

 

 

With his family including Maria:

 

 

And the other part of his 'family', love of animals:

 

 

Here is Maria's celebratory book of her father:

 

I highly recommend it!  Thanks for shaing the memories, Maria!

The Great Hollywood MGM Photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull

What is there to say about the legendary Hollywood photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull that has not already been said? 

One of the most well known and--along with George Hurrell--one said to have helped invent the modern idea of Hollywood Glamour in photography.  Bull was born in Sun River, Montana (some sources say he was born in Michigan) in 1896.  For a time he studied with the great Western painter Charles Marion Russell.  But his real interest lie in photography.

He went to Hollywood in 1918 and became an assistant cameraman for Metro Pictures.  During breaks from film production, he began taking photographs of the various stars of the time.  In 1924, when Metro Pictures became Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Bull became head of MGM stills department.  He remained with the studio until the end of his career. 

Bull was very well accomplished in everything to do with his specialty from lighting to printing and retouching.  He photographed many of the first-rate stars of the day including Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Leslie Howard, Katherine Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Hedy Lamarr, Vivian Leigh, Spencer Tracy, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Jean Harlow, John Gilbert, among many others.  Of course, he is extremely well known for his numerous photographs of Greta Garbo. 

Katherine Hepburn said of Bull:  "One of the greats.  Clarence Bull!  And the National Portait Gallery!  WOW!"

From the book, 'Glamour of the Gods':

Clarence Sinclair Bull's long association as a photographer with the studio that would become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer began when producer Samuel Goldwyn hired him in 1919. Managing to survive the commotion of the consolidation of Hollywood in the early and mid-1920s, Bull found himself at the helm of MGM's stills department when the studio was formed in 1924, and stayed there until retiring in 1961. The enormity of MGM's output of films in the 1920s--they advertiesed a new feature every week--saw Bull's domain grow. He was responsible for managing MGM's staff of photographers and the large support crew of technicians needed to develop, re-touch, print and collate the hundreds of thousands of prints distributed annually by MGM's publicity department. At least one photograph from the 1920s shows Bull with twelve stillsmen who juggled the task of shooting photos on as many as a dozen films that might be concurrently in production. At MGM, like the other studios, these men--and it was an almost exclusively male profession--worked six days a week and often long hours each day. Generally one photographer was assigned to a production and, as filming was underway, he would document each scene using an 8 x 10 view camera. These cameras not only had lenses with sharp resolution, but contact prints could be made from the negatives quickly and in enormous quantities. The stills made for each film were numbered sequentially and gathered together for a book. Stills photographers also created the images used for poster art, lobby cards and other forms of advertising conceived by imaginative publicity chiefs and their staffs.

In later years, the famous documenter of all things Hollywood, John Kobal inherited the extensive work of Bull after he became good friends with Bull and his wife, Jeanne. So many of what is now known as the Kobal Collection contains Bull's work.

Note: Read more about Bull in the post about Ruth Harriet Louise:

http://vintagemoviestarphotos.blogspot.com/2011/02/first-great-hollywood-woman.html

During the 1920s, Bull continued to take portraits (even though he was a very busy man with administrative duties.) Chances are, if you have seen a portrait of Garbo other than Edward Steichen's iconic image, it is the work of Bull. With the exception of one session, Bull and the reclusive actress worked together exclusively in the portrait studio from 1929 to 1941 and their collaboration resulted in a body of imagery unmatched in Hollywood photography. Reminiscing with Kobal, Bull spoke of Garbo's extraordinary concentration and described her working methods as 'businesslike.' She was 'his easiest subject,' surprising given Garbo's status as the studio's biggest star. Garbo was one of Kobal's favorites, and he took care to understand her sittings with Bull to produce a limited-edition portfolio of five Garbo photographs printed under Bull's supervision from his original negatives. Bull died in 1979, just as the first portfolios were prepared.

It seems that every star who worked at MGM was photographed by Bull at least once. Paramount's biggest male attraction, Gary Cooper, was loaned to MGM in 1934 to co-star with Marion Davies in Operator 32 (1934). Bull and Cooper had a short session together on 17 of April 1934 and the results were splendid. He infused Cooper with a sleek, polished glamour that was as unusual for male subjects as was the cigarette dangling from his lips. Old timers and newcomers all had the chance to work with Bull, including vaudeville alumna Marie Dressler, who for a short time in the early 1930s was Hollywood's number one draw, and the ingenue Lana Turner, who at twenty was co-starring with Clark Gable in Honky Tonk. Bull started experimenting with color photography in the late 1930s, making color exposure of Garbo first in 1936 and again in 1941. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s he worked extensively in color recording, among others, Elizabeth Taylor at the moment she was being considered for adult roles.

Bull presided over a team of talented stills photographers, some of whom occasionally made portraits, generally on the set including the great Bert Longworth (see his own post). Longworth took stills for Garbo's first three pictures and his images of Garbo and John Gilbert in a clinch for 'Flesh and the Devil' (1926) are the quintessence of old-time movie romance. He left MGM in 1927 to work for Warner Brothers. 
 
For a more detailed telling of his wonderful friendship with Garbo and of their artistic photographs created go to this highly recommended site:

http://www.garboforever.com/Garbo_Portraits-06.htm

When you find Bull's vintage photographs for sale at auction, the auction will usually say that his photographs are silver gelatin photographs and that they are 'dodged and burned.'

For a detailed description what is meant by the terms of 'dodged and burned,' here is a link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodging_and_burning

For more on the silver gelatin process go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelatin_silver_process

His photographs are also blind stamped (embossed) with his name and there is a rubber ink stamp also showing his name on the back of the prints.  For some photos there will appear a snipe (a detailed synopsis of the star, film and date).  And some photographs even have a ink stamp of the press agency that submitted the photo for publication. 

Here are some examples and more of Bull's highly artistic photographs of the stars of yesterday...


Above an example of the rubber ink stamp for Bull's work.

Example of a blind (embossed) stamp above.

Example of a press snipe. 

Bull's photographs are highly collectible and can be worth in the thousands of dollars.  In addition, Bull's photographs are seen in retrospective photography galleries worldwide.

Here are some examples of the classic style of Bull's photographs:

Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan.

Leila Hyams

Lucille Ball

A color one of a young Elizabeth Taylor.

Katharine Hepburn.

Marlene Dietrich

Ava Gardner

Gloria Swanson

Jean Harlow

 Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh with Bull.

Ava Gardner with Bull and below one of the photos that resulted from that setting.

Bull with Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDonald.