HANOVER, NH.- The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, announced the completion of a multi-year acquisition process of over six thousand Hollywood photographs from the John Kobal Foundation. Set up to continue the work of its eponymous founder, who lived from 1940 to 1991, the foundation long divided its efforts between grantmaking for photographers and promoting the photography collection that Kobal had amassed, which traces the history of Hollywood from approximately 1916 to the 1970s. With this sale of Kobal’s prints to the Hood Museum, the foundation will now focus on its support of a new artist’s fellowship. With this archive, the museum will be able to aid the research of Dartmouth faculty and students interested in the many histories covered by these images. The museum will exhibit a selection of the photos in winter and spring 2022 and presently features highlights on its website as well. It also looks forward to welcoming John Kobal Foundation Chairman Emeritus Simon Crocker, independent scholar Robert Dance, Dartmouth Class of 1977, and Dartmouth Professor of Media and Film Studies Mary Desjardins for a Zoom “conversation and connections” event on May 19 titled “Shooting Stars: Hollywood Photography from the John Kobal Foundation,” a talk to be moderated by the Hood’s Curator Emeritus Katherine Hart.
“Can we even study the United States in the twentieth century,” asks the Hood Museum’s Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director John Stomberg, “without a long look at how the movie industry reflected and even promoted worldviews, ethics, morals, and historical (mis)understandings?”
Professor Desjardins emphasizes the importance of this archive and its use for teaching: “Kobal’s collection of Hollywood photography is an outstanding source for research and teaching of motion picture history, still photography, and portraiture. The collection is exciting as a pedagogical tool because it allows the historianteacher to chart the history of twentieth-century American culture through the the fantasies of and ideals created out of Hollywood films and their stars. The collection’s breadth—containing the full range of genres of Hollywood photography of film stills, portraits, and publicity shots—provides evidence for studies of the film industry as an economic system of mass cultural production that extended its reach beyond the production and circulation of motion pictures.”
Much of the acquired collection consists of “vintage” prints produced around the time the negative was created, and some of it emerged from a project Kobal initiated in the 1970s, by which time he had acquired thousands of negatives from the studios that no longer valued what they held. He located many of the photographers who worked at the studios in the golden age and arranged for them to create magnificent new prints from their negatives. There are also photographs recently printed from original negatives for the foundation that were included in a series of exhibitions circulated in the past decade; the negatives remain with the foundation.
The story of the people charged with creating and selling the image of Hollywood is relatively new. While there was a small army of photographers working behind the scenes to record stars and films, their names mostly eluded recognition before Kobal zealously wrote about them. These include George Hurrell, Laszlo Willinger, Clarence Sinclair Bull, and Ted Allan. Ruth Harriet Louise, the pioneering lone female photographer working in Hollywood in the 1920s and early 1930s, is also well represented. The role of these artists was to create glamorous portraits of the stars. They also worked on the sets documenting films in production and provided “behind-the-scenes” glimpses into the magic of Hollywood. They “sold” the studios, the stars, the movies, and the fantasy of a glamorous lifestyle—one we have learned to interrogate carefully.
The vintage 11 x 14 photographs, printed under the supervision of the photographers, were reproduced in smaller formats (often numbering in the tens of thousands) and sent out to fans, news outlets, and magazines, all anxiously awaiting the new images. Kobal started young, collecting what he could find at antique stores and flea markets, first in Canada, later in California and London. As his career in Hollywood journalism took off, he visited press offices for most of the major studios in California. By the 1960s and early 1970s, the outdated master photographs cluttering their files were no longer of interest. Kobal carted away box after box of original photographic prints, finally bringing them to London, where his collection continued to grow.
The presence of the John Kobal Foundation collection at the Hood Museum offers new inroads for research into American culture. The significance of these photographs mirrors that of Hollywood itself. There are few other non-religious cultural phenomena that come close to the depth of social and political influence of Hollywood. The complete story of the intricately interwoven strands of U.S. history and Hollywood may never be told. But with these photographs, we have the opportunity to peel back some of the layers, revealing stories that have shaped our understanding of the American film industry and its multivalent meanings and multifarious impacts on life in the United States.
