SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA.- The exhibition “Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography” is currently on view at the Santa Barbara Museum Of Art, until October 6, 2002. Ruth Harriet Louise (1903-1940) was the first woman photographer active in Hollywood. She was in charge of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s portrait studio from 1925 to 1930, and produced many of the images responsible for the creation of movie stars. While Ruth photographed virtually all of the MGM stars, her images of Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford form the center of this exhibition.

Portrait photographs served many purposes for the studio. They were used by directors, cinematographers, casting directors, and even actors to study their roles. These images were an indispensable marketing tool, and therefore even more important outside the studio. As a result, the studios produced thousands of portrait photographs a month, and reproduced them in every format imaginable.
Ruth Harriet Louise was born Ruth Goldstein in New York City in 1903; she died in Los Angeles in 1940. As a young woman of 19 she followed both a brother and cousin to Hollywood and landed a job at MGM. Astoundingly, she was the only woman working for the studios in this capacity. Through her interaction with the greatest female stars of the MGM lot, Ruth created images targeted to a largely female audience. In her work we see an important interaction of women working together in the world of fashion and the world of romance to create images of other women. This exhibition explores this interaction. Ruth’s photographs are enormously sophisticated, creative, and descriptive of their milieu. The final goal of this exhibition is to present this virtually unknown photographer in this context, one whose photographs were viewed worldwide, at her very best.