MoMA’s “Celebrity Press Photography” Show Makes You Think Jonathan Dorado
There is a familiar feeling many of us get when we watch an old black-and-white film. We are presented with glamour, old-school manners, not to mention that inexplicably posh Mid-Atlantic accent that’s no longer in fashion. Enamored with that romanticized, high-contrast version of everyday life, it’s easy to get nostalgic for an era that ended long before we were born, and it’s natural to assume that those times were infinitely superior to those we are living in. All these thoughts came to me when I visited the Museum of Modern Art’s “Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography” exhibition, which opened last summer and closes this June.
Inside a quiet, dimly-lit basement room in the museum exist 200 working photographs from the MoMA’s film stills archive. With the images packed together and lit by only a few bright spotlights, the ambience is theatrical, and made even more so by the theater next door, which plays classic, grainy, black-and-white films.
Jonathan Dorado
Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, Anna Mae Wong, Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, and Jean Harlow are some of the movie stars photographed in a larger-than-life manner. But the exhibition displays their portraits covered in painted silhouettes, marker outlines, tape, and cutouts that work as edit marks, proving that celebrity photos have been manipulated for as long as we’ve had photography, and Hollywood has, in fact, always been an illusion. The show, curated by Ron Magliozzi, not only offers a look at how celebrity portraits were constructed, directed, and deeply edited, long before the digital age—it challenges the way we think about celebrity culture.
Jonathan Dorado
“These images that were marked out, they were looked upon as images that were spoiled, but to me, they’re intriguing,” Magliozzi tells Harper’s Bazaar. “The photographs were created with a job to do. They were to promote glamour and sexuality and the celebrity of the stars, which they did very effectively,” he adds, explaining that the idea of showing the raw, real people behind the celebrity masks came many years later, with the rise of social media.
Well into their careers, some actors, like Davis and Katherine Hepburn, would turn vocal about how they were misrepresented in the magazines and newspapers, but when you were a Hollywood darling in those days, everything you did in public was an act. The idea of being yourself is a surprisingly new one.
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“Back then, celebrities were studio products; the studios were determining how individual stars should be perceived. And then in the fan magazines, the celebrities were then processed a second time. They were represented in a way that we know is glamorized; they were playing a part,” Magliozzi says.
Images then, were also more impactful because of originality and scarcity. Even editing, during the Hollywood Golden Age, pre-AI and social media, was a type of art. “It was so difficult and because there was just so much involved in creating one of these photographs, it meant so much more. And also there was less going on in the world of film, and so these celebrities were just icons. Now, there are just so many people, there are so many photographs, there’s so much to see,” Magliozzi says.
Jonathan Dorado
We are bombarded with videos and images and words, but few things are rare, and so everything means a little less. Celebrity culture, then, has also been diluted. “You talked about the glamour, sensuality, and the nostalgia being inspiring, and it is,” the curator tells me. “It’s kind of an escape from the world of the celebrity that we know now, outside. Hollywood manufactured celebrities in the ’60s and ’70s. But now, because everyone has access to all the tools, they can make themselves superstars, make themselves influential. I mean, we have a president who was a television celebrity, right?”
“Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography” at MoMA runs until June 21, 2026.
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