Allan started his career very young as an actor and worked on a number of Cecil B De Mille movies in the early 1930s. When De Mille called on someone to take some portraits, Allan stepped forward and, on seeing the results, De Mille encouraged him to follow a photography career.

24.10.2012[ read full story ]

Clarence Sinclair Bull's long association as a photographer with the studio that would become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer began when producer Samuel Goldwyn hired him in 1919. Managing to survive the commotion of the consolidation of the Hollywood studios in the early and mid 1920s, Bull fo...

24.10.2012[ read full story ]

George Hurrell started work at MGM at the beginning of 1930 and almost immediately transformed Hollywood photography. Brought to MGM at the insistence of Norma Shearer, his task was to make his subjects, especially women, sexy. Not only did he succeed but his work, in this respect, has neve...

24.10.2012[ read full story ]

John Kobal, who died twenty-one years ago this month, was a pre-eminent film historian and collector of Hollywood film photography. The author of over thirty books on film and film photography, he was known for his creative and exuberant personality, as well as his voracious ...

24.10.2012[ read full story ]

Jeanloup Sieff passed away twelve years ago. A collection of his fashion photography has just been published by La Martinière. The book is gorgeous: the images are sublime, the texts are brilliant, not to mention the layout designed by Harri Peccinotti, another great photographer and artisti...

04.10.2012[ read full story ]

For nearly twenty-five years, at Visa, there has been a king (JF Leroy) and his queen. In Perpignan, their Kingdom, there are no secrets for Sylvie Grumbach. She has walked its streets on two feet, one foot, even on crutches, and has seen people at their worst. She’...

03.09.2012[ read full story ]

“I wanted to be a doctor.” Jean-François pauses, a twinkle in his eye. “I remember, I was 11 years old. It was December 3, 1967, the South African doctor, Christiaan Barnard, had just performed the first successful heart transplant on a 55-year old man, Louis Washkansky. It was...

03.09.2012[ read full story ]

Anthony Bannon is not one to follow other people’s scripts. Dismissing the cautionary message in Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 posthumous novel, “You Can’t go Home Again,” Bannon is coming home again to Buffalo, New York, the city where he grew up, studied, and first honed his skills as filmma...

14.05.2012[ read full story ]

”Eileen Ford is the mother, the ’godmother’ of all modeling agencies. She was sometimes challenged, but never matched, and she also incidentally introduced me to my wife Sondra”. These are Daniel Filipacchi’s words on the occasion of Eileen’s 90th birthday and it is writer Ro...

27.03.2012[ read full story ]

Always inspired by things Japanese, Sonny produced fan shape photographs in color in the manner of Hokusai and Hiroshige with Haiku poetry. Duane Michals now has returned to his early passion, painting on photographs with oils, hands on, the touch of the maker, the exquisite vulnerability of i...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]