L.A. Faces
"Movies taught one big lesson: individual lives have scope and grandeur. Of course L.A. is shallow. Lips that are ten feet long and faces that are forty feet high! But such faces magnify our lives, reassure us that single lives matter. The attention L.A. lavishes on a single face is as generous a metaphor as I can find for the love of God."
That's Richard Rodriguez in Days of Obligation, a beautifully written book of linked essays that I reviewed when it was published in 1993. I use the quote to open the catalog essay for an amazing retrospective exhibit of Hollywood photographs by George Hurrell, the quintessential Hollywood glamour photographer. I met Lou D'Elia, the collector and curator who commissioned the essay, when I wrote a Slate slide show on an earlier Hurrell exhibit.
The new exhibit, which includes more than 100 photos, opens Thursday at the Queen Mary in Long Beach. It's an unusual setting for an art display but an appropriately Art Deco setting for Hurrell's 1930s glamour.