Joan Bennett photographed by Fred Archer, Modern Screen Magazine.
Note: This is an encore post from 2015
As stillsmen Elmer Fryer and Fred Archer wrote in the 1928 article for “Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers,” “In the advertising field, the still picture is used to illustrate and help plant the articles broadcast by the publicity department throughout the periodical world and it is used for lobby displays…A good “still” will attract and hold attention where many poor ones will receive but a passing glance.”
Photographic stills sold films both to exhibitors and to the public long before the advent of television and broadcast media. Movie studios sent out publicity stills en masse to magazines and newspapers looking for free copy in which to sell their product. Photographers in the 1920s-1940s devised glamorous, artistic images deifying motion picture stars, defining the glamorous iconography idolized and worshipped by decades of movie lovers.
Mary Mallory’s “Hollywood land: Tales Lost and Found” is available for the Kindle.
ladailymirror.com 