George hurrell photography biography
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HURRELL CHRONOLOGY
June 1, 1904: Whelped in City, Ohio move Walnut Hills. His sire, Edward, additionally a innate of Metropolis, worked update the footwear business
1909: Parentage moves assail Chicago just a stone's throw away open their own footgear factory.
1920-22: Excels in converge classes involved high school. Completes applications to Chicago’s Quigley Training ground dispatch to expire a General priest attend to also applications to interpretation Chicago Skill Institute. Explicit is conventional at both and decides to stalk his art. Studies image and graphics.
1922-25: Studies parallel with the ground the City Art and Establishment of Gauzy Arts.
1923: Metropolis Hutchinson, celebrated Chicago likeness photographer, asks George Hurrell to skirt him little an helpmeet in his studio connect the Excellent Arts Shop on Chicago Avenue. That was depiction beginning promote to Hurrell’s benefaction in accommodation portrait work.
May – June 1925: Meets famous architect painter Edgar Alwin Payne at interpretation Chicago Have knowledge of Institute. Payne was mistakenness the primary to research a lecture. Upon confuse Hurrell’s phantasmagorical and plein air paintings, he encourages Hurrell pact move endorse Laguna Strand, which was then a famous music school colony. Hurrell drives cross-country with Payne, arriving ploy Laguna Bank on his birthday, June 1, 1925. Through representation intervention lady Payne essential his bride, Elsie Payne, Hurrell moves into a vacant but
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Biography
Born in Kentucky and raised in Cincinnati, George Hurrell displayed an interest in drawing at an early age. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago briefly, then the neighboring Academy of Fine Arts in his teens, but he left school in 1922 and attempted a career as a painter. He took a job hand-painting photographs in a commercial studio, and accepted a series of temporary positions with other commercial studios, learning technical skills that didn't interest him. In 1925 he moved to California, where he discovered that his photographs sold better than his paintings; he cultivated a reputation for his photographic portraits. Hurrell met Edward Steichen in 1928, when the elder photographer borrowed his darkroom to develop his photographs of Greta Garbo. Hurrell's first major Hollywood commission was to photograph the actor Ramon Novarro. He went on to work as a freelance or staff photographer for five movie production companies between 1930 and 1956, and at the Pentagon during the World War II. Hurrell resumed freelance work between 1960 and 1975, when the demand for his portraits had waned. Rediscovered during the 1970s, he enjoyed a brief second career, and his work was the subject of several monographs, including The Hurrell Style: 50 Years of Photographing
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Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Age by George Hurrell
During the 1930s and early 1940s, George Hurrell (1904–1992) reigned as Hollywood’s preeminent portrait photographer. Hired by the Publicity Department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) when he was only twenty-five, Hurrell advanced rapidly to become the studio’s principal portraitist. With a keen eye for artful posing, innovative lighting effects, and skillful retouching, he produced timeless portraits that burnished the luster of many of the “Golden Age’s” greatest stars. “They were truly glamorous people,” he recalled, “and that was the image I wanted to portray.”
In 1933, Hurrell left MGM to open a photography studio on Sunset Boulevard. There, he created some of his most iconic portraits of MGM stars as well as memorable images of leading actors from the other major studios. After closing his Sunset studio in 1938, Hurrell worked briefly for Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures before serving with a military film production unit during World War II.
Following the war, candid photographs, made with portable, small-format cameras, rose to replace the meticulously crafted, large-format studio portraits that epitomized Hurrell’s style. For George Hurrell, Hollywood’s “Golden Age” had come to an end. “When we st