Hunting down the stars outside their Beverly Hills homes may prove one way to catch a glimpse of a famous face, but only at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art “Vanity Fair Portraits” exhibit can one really look an idol in the eye.
“It’s so compelling to look at pictures of people you’ve heard of and really scrutinize them because that’s obviously what photography allows you to do: to really scrutinize and look carefully,” said Charlotte Cotton, the organizer of the exhibit and head and curator of LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department.
“Vanity Fair Portraits,” which opened Sunday and runs through March 1, features 130 vintage and contemporary portraits from 1913 to 2008.
David Friend, editor of creative development at Vanity Fair magazine, and Terence Pepper, curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in London, curate the exhibit. Friend and Pepper coursed through thousands of photos from the publication’s archives.
“In the exhibit, you see the definitive Greta Garbo and Jesse Owens (photos), but here we also picked photographs that uniquely define the photographer, sitter or the period,” Friend said. “We chose pictures that seemed really fresh now that may not have been at the time and have a certain resonance about them.”
With successful stops at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the National Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland, LACMA is the only U.S. stop for the “Vanity Fair Portraits” show.
“Los Angeles is really important for this because obviously in the post-1983 version of Vanity Fair, Hollywood is really its major subject,” Cotton said. “Celebrity has shifted from being something that was very strongly about Europe and avant-garde traditions and moved to moviemaking in the 20th century, so Los Angeles really was the most appropriate city if it was going to be one U.S. city for this show.”
The exhibit divides the portraits on display into two different periods: vintage Vanity Fair portraits from 1913 to 1936, and contemporary Vanity Fair portraits from 1983 to the present. Because Vanity Fair suspended publication between 1936 and 1983, there is a visible, dramatic change in the types of celebrities and personalities presented.
While the vintage and contemporary portraits are not presented together, Cotton bridges the gap between the older and newer photographs through a display of covers, open magazine spreads and video installations showing the photo-shoot process.
“Once you’ve matted and framed a work for a gallery wall, you often kind of lose the sense of how these images were actually made and what they were made for,” Cotton said. “The elements that we added are very much to reinforce in the viewing of the exhibition a sense that what you’re dealing with is amazing images and amazing photographic prints, but you’re dealing with it in the context of the construction of a magazine and the dissemination of the images through mass media.”
What truly connects the two eras of photographs, after all, is their inclusion in Vanity Fair, a magazine notorious for setting trends, causing controversy and creating greater public personas for celebrities.
“If the magazine’s mission is to take the pulse of the age in bold words and images, I think the exhibit is certainly holding up that part of the magazine’s mission,” Friend said.
Cotton agrees that this exhibit emphasizes Vanity Fair’s power in influencing popular culture.
“The construction of a cultural elite in Western society is something that Vanity Fair two times in the 20th century has really defined,” Cotton said. “No other magazine had that kind of pulling power both in terms of image-makers and subjects.”
Cotton and Friend assert, too, that the display of celebrity images does not merely feed into a culture addicted to processing and viewing fast-paced information and images.
“With our YouTube consciousness … we are just obsessively voyeuristic, and this is getting more and more so,” Friend said. “This is a very visual age where appearances do count, and we are shaping our perspectives based on these visual cues that we get. Hopefully this exhibition shows that these portraits can go deeper than the surface.”
While a mere Web search provides dozens of opportunities to look at a celebrity’s face, the Vanity Fair photographs capture a glamorous, artful side to the creation of celebrity and popular culture in a city characterized by glitz and stardom.
Cotton said, “These are really important things not just because they’re on a gallery wall, but because they represent the works of really important image-makers of the 20th century.”