Marlene Dietrich

Signed and numbered 40/250

“Marlene Dietrich had stubby fingers, but here they have been retouched to their advantage. Hurrell’s tendency in the 1930s was to use dramatic lighting from a single source in order to dramatize his Hollywood celebrities, and to make them expressionist and modern in the style of the German 1920s. The alternative style-as demonstrated by Clarence Sinclair Bull, in particular-was atmosphere and dreamy. Hurrell trained in Chicago, and moved to Laguna Beach in 1925. He worked for MGM in the late 1930s, and set up his own studio in 1932 in Sunset Strip. In the mid-1930s he accepted assignments from Twentieth-Century Fox, and between 1935 and 1938 was on contract to Warner Brothers. After serving as Staff Photographer at the Pentagon during the war he returned to Hollywood, where he was hired by Columbia Pictures. In the 1960s he entered television and shot Gunsmoke, Star Trek and M.A.S.H. As a portraitist he photographed everyone who was anyone in the major studios.” – The Photography Book, Phaidon Press