Hollywood, 1955
Gelatin silver print
Sheet size: 13 ⅞ × 11 in.
Image size: 11 × 3 ⅝ in.
June 24, 2024
It's hard to imagine an approach to photography that contrasted more with Robert Frank’s freewheeling style than Hollywood’s glamor shots of film stars in the 1950s. The movie studios ran stills departments producing these heavily choreographed promotional images, which were carefully lit and retouched in order to achieve an idealized depiction. These photos were distributed widely, from theater lobbies and billboards, to newspapers and magazines and, in this case, postcards. Frank indulges in his own artistic manipulation here, extending the image by printing two different exposures, emphasizing this vast proliferation of manufactured imagery.
A postcard also typically functions as a letter home, so this scene plays to the mythos of Hollywood as the place that young people from across America flocked to pursue their dreams of stardom. Frank seems to invite us to imagine innumerable messages to hometown friends and families, each reporting on efforts to realize the collective dream of being “discovered.”
