John Swope Exhibit Shows the True Face of Hollywood - Brief Article

LOS ANGELES--When photographer John Swope came to Hollywood in 1936, he broke the mold.

At the time, Hollywood's Golden Era, the film industry fed the public a constant stream of glamorous photographs and tidbits about the lives of stars like Greta Garbo, Clark Gable and Cary Grant. And movie studios encouraged photographers like George Hurrell to create an idealized landscape of their industry by shooting carefully-lit, stylized pictures of Hollywood at its most alluring and, indeed, sexiest.

But Swope was different. He used his Leica to document Hollywood as a working town full of struggle, hope and success. And now, his photographs are part of a traveling exhibit that has already been presented in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Vancouver, British Columbia. It is currently at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum in California through Nov. 18, and is slated to travel next year to the Marietta College Museum in Georgia and the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington.

Producer Leland Hayward, who initially hired Swope as an assistant producer and publicity photographer for his stable of stars, later recalled that "John Swope's single idea, from the moment he began, was to show Hollywood as it is." Swope saw Hollywood as a culture, but the men and women who made the movies as regular working folk, whether they were pals Fonda and Stewart, or the thousands upon thousands of would-be actors, extras and grips waiting for their next jobs or unemployment checks.

While Hurrell and his contemporaries dressed their film stars in luxurious garb and bathed them in studio lights, Swope's approach was more "naturalistic," according to his son, Mark Swope. "He shot in available light, with available timing, on `found' sets," explained the younger Swope. An extra sleeping on the grass between takes, whisky bottle at his side. Other extras knitting. An actress washing her laundry in the sink. Swope also shot the "backside" of movie sets--stage lighting above a scene, a prop in a warehouse, workers building a "city" on a studio lot.

Swope also captured the stars, but on his own terms. Rosalind Russell asleep, holding a script. Charles Boyer grabbing a smoke and combing his hair in his dressing room. Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland napping on the grass.

In 1939, Swope collected these pictures and published his first book, Camera Over Hollywood. His editor, Bennet Cerf, asked him to include more stars, but Swope insisted on depicting Hollywood as the labor town it was--a place where real people worked together to create an imagined world.

Swope went on to become a celebrated photographer for Life Magazine and, until his death in 1979, traveled the world photographing people and places--most famously, the domains of the maharajahs of India for James Ivory's 1975 book, Autobiography of a Princess. Now, six decades after the publication of Swope's first book, a new version of Swope's Camera Over Hollywood has been released in conjunction with the traveling exhibit of these photographs, and a resurgence of interest in his work has peaked among dealers and collectors.

Mark Swope is now working through his father's collection, archiving the images and preparing some of them for the art marketplace. Nash Editions is publishing a set of five posthumous estate images as IRIS print editions, timed to another exhibit--this one commercial--that will be shown at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., in January 2001. Along with the Nash giclees, Krull will be marketing Swope's unique period with 8 by 10 prints, priced between $2,500 and $4,000.

"It's really an archive that hasn't been touched, and the material hasn't been sold, yet," observed Krull, a veteran photography dealer. "Swope took many photos of Hollywood," Krull continued. "I don't know how you can have a truly realistic view of Hollywood--but Swope came close."

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