Friday, November 16, 2012

What Becomes...


For no particular reason except that it's a lovely thing, Miss Swanson in Blackglama.  The artists who worked on this campaign were both extraordinarily sensitive to the personalities of their remarkable sitters - initially, at least, legends indeed - and as heavy-handed with the retouching as anyone this side of MGM at its most shameless.

The genius of the Blackglama ads (as demonstrated in this gallery, which does the brand the disservice of including the more recent, distinctly less legendary, sitters) is that they simultaneously play on the image of each sitter (Swanson with her carnation, Ann Miller dancing, Hellman and her cigarette) and universalize them - not just by draping them in mink, but by reducing their faces to their most essential elements.  It's a different kind of retouching than was usually seen until then (the first ads ran in 1968), which frequently relied on soft-focus and a glow so intense the sitter could seem to be lit from within (the kinds of stills beloved of fallen stars now appearing in your local dinner theatre's production of I Do! I Do! or Forty Carats).  Instead, these smoothed-out faces are masklike, in a way that emphasizes why each legend matters.

Swanson looks softer and more reflective than was her wont.  Famously un-nostalgic, she survived the ultimate anti-nostalgia trip that was Sunset Boulevard by refusing to be trapped by Norma Desmond, even if she never did find another role as challenging. To look at an assortment of Swanson images over the decades is to be astonished at the strength and variety of her expressions.  In this picture, though, she ponders; it is uncharacteristic, yet arresting.  She may just be thinking about her lunch, or what she'll do that evening, or the oddness of wearing a fur coat and black leather gloves in what may well have been August, but she seems lost in a revery - as well she deserved to be - of her own fabulosity.  Perhaps that's what becomes a legend most...

7 comments:

  1. i believe i own two blackglama books (because one is never enough). i adore all of them, but i hold a special place for merman. they must've used every eraser in the tri-state area and still wanted more of ethel's fache softened.

    upon re-examination, she kinda resembles bill maher.

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  2. The majority of the images in that gallery - airbrushed or not - are utterly stunning. The one of Dame Maggie Smith literally made me gasp. Aand anything that riles the annoying crypto-vegans of PETA has my vote! Jx

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  3. I love these- Bacall and Minelli are favorites. A few years ago I had to give a medical talk to a police organization that met in the conference room of a fur warehouse (how random is that), and behind the podium were five or six of these ads blown up life-size. Surprise fabulosity!

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  4. Actually, I was amazed to read that it was Swanson; when I first opened the post I recognized the Blackgama schtick, but thought "Who on earth is that?" For a quick moment, I even considered it might be Garbo.

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  5. Did you SEE the smirking fabulosity of Myrna Loy? But yes, lots of the newer ads look like semi-successful drag queens.

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  6. Ah, for this as for so much else, Garbo is the one that got away. Also, I wonder if Olivia minds that Joan got in and she hasn't. Now that would be a legend they should go after, instead of those inispid models or Miss Jackson...

    I love Garland (they got her just in time), Loy (you're so right), the ones who don't usually glam it up so much - Gish, Hayes, and Tandy, especially.

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  7. There's a great book written by Peter Rogers, who devised the campaign. It has copies of all of the pictures up to 1979, and he tells the stories of the various shoots. Brilliant.

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