The Look of Love: The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970

That 60s Girl!--An informal survey of Cool School Illustration And Glamour Photography 

Where Have You Gone, Steve McQueen?

The design-focused Cooper style had always featured a strong outline or silhouette. Now through the work of Austin Briggs, the ever-inventive Al Parker and the artists associated with the Fredman-Chaite studio in New York City (Bob McGuiness, Bob Peak, Mitch Hooks, Bernie Fuchs, Frank McCarthy and Joe Bowler), mainstream realistic illustration in the 60s devolved to a distillation of line, color, and white space.  The rendering was meant to look like a jazzy, improvised sketch or high contrast photograph with broad side pencil slashes, loose, gesture-like contours and flat translucent or granular color. In many ways it was thought to be a repudiation of what the Cooper era had brought to picture making, but it  wasn't entirely new, as many of the conventions remained in place and many longtime illustrators successfully made the transition. Commercial artists still relied heavily on photographs although now they took pains to not look like they did. The scene could have no direct narrative content, making its point by suggestion or association. The women in these images for the most part retained the same All-American features and improvised, candid, ecstatic expressions the Cool School had popularized, but now the reference was abstracted to the essence of volume and the point of view, often from the rear, was pulled back to show the whole figure.

So instead of  thinking of these pictures as its own style, think of it as the last, fresh twist on what had been popular for 20 years but now was showcased in new venues like album art and paperbacks. This distilled figuration for females, very tall, very thin, tautly muscled and full height to contrast with the outsized buxom, baby fat figures and tight close ups and cleavage of the bombshell 50s, coupled with the spare, modernist "bachelor," or so-called "skinny tie" graphic design aesthetic which informed all aspects of the American male lifestyle--the cars, the furniture, the architecture--became the characteristic look for illustration and photography for the first part of the decade.

But there was a gradual change as the 60s wore on and as other influences seeped into the national consciousness. Adult American men were moving into cranky middle age, being mostly ex-servicemen who had grown up in the Great Depression, had fought the War on two fronts and soon after were unceremoniously yanked away to the police action in Korea. They had eagerly and gratefully obtained a GI Bill college education and were then issued a clean and ordered suburban ranch house utopia, a stainless steel future of high tech gadgets, early marriage to the hometown sweetheart and guilty fantasies about the neighbor's wife. Something Happened, as novelist Joseph Heller once observed, and American men now endured Atomic Age convenience and Jet Age stress, had too many highballs and too little exercise, new found leisure time mixed with the real anxiety of the Cold War. 

The cracks had appeared in the 50s. Another writer, Dan Wakefield, in his 1970 novel called Going All the Way, expressed the growing malaise this way through his fictional counterpart, twenty three year old Sonny Burns, a self-imagined intellectual, ex-Army man, aspiring photojournalist, returning to his Indianapolis hometown after Korean war service thankfully stuck in an office in St. Louis. Sonny, sweltering in the early summer heat of 1954, recalls what it felt like around the collar for men of his gradually bewildered generation, peering into the uncertain future:

He often had this feeling that maybe if he ever got settled down, married to this great sexy-looking babe who was also very tender and motherly--sort of a cross between Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and old Jane Gallagher of The Catcher in the Rye--and he had a great job that paid a lot of money and a couple of beautiful kids and had moved into a cozy house with a lot of fireplaces and a white picket fence, he would go out to pick up the mail and look up in the sky and see a monstrous mushroom-shaped cloud, and that would be the end.  He regarded the H-bomb too as a personal menace, a weapon uniquely and insidiously designed to scare the shit out of him, until it finally blew him to smithereens.

Less than 200 hundred miles away from St. Louis in Chicago, a very real young man of twenty seven marched one early June day in 1953 into the John Baumgarth Calendar company.  In a trade magazine note he had read that morning at breakfast, amid the noise and clatter of his cramped life, uneasily married, a father of a two year old daughter, only recently moved away from his parents and still borrowing money heavily from them and working without enthusiasm in a $120 dollar a week desk job for a children's magazine, the one semester grad school dropout noticed that the company who owned Tom Kelley's nude pin ups of Marilyn Monroe had its offices in the same college area neighborhood. He imagined one of the Monroe photographs as just the thing for the sexy new periodical he had long fantasized about creating, something he later wrote in the first issue's editorial statement that would "give a few extra laughs, and a little diversion" to men exactly like him. The young man's name, of course, was Hugh Marston Hefner.

Hefner (born 1926) was about to take legendary advantage of a ever-widening generation and gender gap, glaringly noticeable in male-focused entertainment which had become part of the social fabric of the country and was entertainment made by and for The Greatest Generation, ranging from trash paperbacks to men's magazines, the Doris Day-Rock Hudson sex comedies, mass media print and editorial layouts, to the Green Bay Packers and Baltimore Colts. Both his Playboy  magazine and the older Esquire, among  countless other male periodicals and media, offered readers reassuring guidance about rapidly changing male-female roles, asserting that young desirable women really did care about  things urban thirty & forty-something men took as a matter of course, like "The Girl From Ipanema," the right way to mix a cocktail, hook up a killer Hi-Fi rig, or double clutch a Shelby Ford Cobra.  In the span of a decade, exploitation films' preoccupation--always a good barometer for cultural shifts no matter the era--went from High School Cesar  to I Am A Groupie.  Grown men were having difficulty understanding the young women of the baby boom generation--essentially their daughters coming of age--emerging in the 60s from overseas, sporting the music and fashion from the art schools and middle class of Great Britain.

Products for females young and old showed the generation gap too, although the pictures may never have been better. 

By mid decade, 1965, the real revolution had begun.

The Girl With The Sun in Her Hair: A Look at Glamour Photography of the Postwar Era

The Girl Next Door was born and raised in Chicago, a concept that first appeared in Midwest advertising, often outdoor campaigns like billboards and posters, in the late 20s.  The Girl finally gained nationwide attention when Sundblom Circle namesake Haddon Sundblom began his decades long association with Coca-Cola in 1938 and protégé Gil Elvgren began work with the Dow calendar company a year later.

Sundblom and his Chicago colleagues and competitors--most famously Andrew Loomis but many others like Frederick Mizen--presented a different type of beauty than what the country had seen so far in various forms of mass media.  As I wrote several years ago on my webpage about Sundblom called "The Girl in Her Summer Dress," Sundblom's Girl represented fresh, milk fed All-American appeal in contrast to the stylized, cosmopolitan, heavily made up and expensively dressed sophisticate popular throughout the Flapper 20s and most of the Art Deco 30s and happily endorsed by Hollywood and New York. She instead embodied "a different type, as Chicago pin up artist Bill Medcalf later observed, 'someone's sweet sister,' the neighborhood girl who went largely unnoticed until one day, seemingly overnight, she blossomed into an unattainable Varsity cheerleader and Homecoming Queen." Over time and distance, especially during the war years when movies and the rest of Pop Culture hopped onboard the Girl Next Door bandwagon, she came to be a heartbreaking memory of youth and first true romance for men of all ages and backgrounds.

In short, Midwestern calendar companies like Brown and Bigelow, Dow, and Shaw-Burton made the Girl Next Door a staple of their lines, with the Cool School, Whitcomb, Whitmore, and Parker, all expatriates from the US heartland, took her to New York City and the pages of the mainstream women's magazines. Glamour photography got its kicks on Route 66, Chicago southwest to Santa Monica, where passionate European émigrés Andre De Dienes, Peter Basch, and Bruno Bernard set the standard for demobilized ex-G.I. photographers like Peter Gowland and Russ Meyer, a group soon to showcase The Girl before possible Hollywood fanfare beside the sand and sun of Southern California.  There she remained until Hefner, a spectacularly untalented would be cartoonist with grand but vague dreams, guided Playboy magazine to immortalize his own Esquire pin up and Yank derived Girl in its centerfold, a vision it would take him the rest of the 50s to realize and his own line up of freelance West Coast photographers (and his own European émigré Pompeo Posar) to lead the way.

The Girl Next Door had many characteristics, hard to describe but immediately recognizable in both illustration and photography.  She was young, on the cusp between child and adult, and had the still developing features of the young, the full, heart-shaped face and thin-thick lips, with a clean mass of hair and unmarked  skin. (Elvgren said the right combination for a pin up was a 15 year old face on an 18 year old body.)  She wore no make up and had naturally shaped dark eyebrows, had pretty rather than beautiful looks and possessed an unaffected full-of-life personality that bespoke both humor and intelligence.  Gowland and his wife-partner Alice, writing as glamour veterans in 1953, said whatever real age was unimportant as long  as The Girl looked 18, adding it's "the American Girl look and that's pretty  indefinable. But if a girl has it, you know immediately.  I suppose it could be described as a freshness: healthy, sweet with an underlying sex appeal."  

Timing is everything. For a variety of reasons, some technical, some legal, some aesthetic, photography had taken a different approach from pin up and story illustration in idealizing females until the Second World War. Fashion and Hollywood photography had been in their formalist phase and pictures in motion picture and fashion magazines in the 20s and 30s were elaborate studio constructions, the 8X10 camera stabilized not on a tripod but a massive scaffold that could stretch from floor to ceiling.  As the 30s progressed, rapidly changing technology gave photographers the ability to shoot in ambient light, especially news photographers, who took advantage of the faster, lighter units, the medium format "Press" and twin lens or 35mm single lens cameras which allowed greater handheld flexibility, quick movement and close proximity to the subjects, faster shutter speeds, a wider choice of lenses with larger apertures, faster film, particularly black and white, and electronic strobe flash to overcome low or non existent light.  With the advent of the photo magazine concept from Europe with Life in 1936, American editors discovered readers would readily accept noticeable grain for immediacy and large size.  

It was the candid moment that counted most, writ large.  

Escape to the Sun

Timing is everything.  Hungarian Martin Munkacsi was a hugely influential one time sports and leisure photographer who had shot models in bathing suits running on the beach in late 1933 for Harper's Bazaar, which "effected a shocking and revolutionary change" in fashion photography (and photojournalism through the admiration of Henri Cartier-Bresson), not just because the shots were taken outdoors but Munkacsi's photographs had also "conveyed the blur of motion, an exuberant  vitality and a natural informality which made them seem like mere snapshots."  Later, when a  still-in-uniform, rail thin, 20  year old photographer showed Harper's legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch and equally well known editor Carmel Snow his portfolio ten years later in 1944, Snow later recalled thinking, "I knew that in Richard Avedon we had a new, contemporary Munkacsi."  

In glamour photography, the new Munkacsi was another Hungarian now living in the U.S., Andre De Dienes.

De Dienes had moved to America in 1938 with the help of Esquire's Arnold Gringrich and by 1940 was photographing for picture monthlies, women's fashion magazines, catalogs, and war-time pin up magazines. His pictures looked immediately different from previous studio fare or fashion shots, recognizable even without a credit. De  Dienes was by temperament unable to shoot in a sterile commercial studio with an army of assistants or stylists, preferring instead to photograph a pretty young woman somewhere outdoors by himself, 12 intense hours a session, at favorite remote locations he would return to year after year, the beach, the desert, high in the mountains, at his home, mostly in direct light or indirectly from a nearby window, a preference for suffused light candid beauty and relaxed posing he would show for the rest of his life.  Producer David O. Selznick brought De Dienes to Hollywood from New York in 1944 to bring the "Girl Next Door" look to Ingrid Bergman (the first time I am aware of the term being used in that context, although clearly a nod to Meet Me in St. Louis and  Judy Garland's rendition  of Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin's very popular ballad "The Boy Next Door" released in the summer of '44), about to star in Selznick and Hitchcock's Spellbound, and De Dienes' effort, Bergman in peasant dress and tousled hair among the stalks in a sunlit wheat field, certainly did the trick.  Thereafter, De Dienes, a naturalized American citizen barred from active duty because of an hearing deficiency, shuttled back and forth between New York City and Los Angeles as he pursued his obsession, finally settling in Hollywood in 1950.  

His pictures were always of a single girl and her youth, personality, loveliness his sole theme.  He later met and photographed nineteen year old Norma Jeane Daughterty beginning in 1945, soon to transform herself into Marilyn Monroe, and his photographs of her and their largely unknown-at-the-time-love affair have since become famous. (Taschen has a whole line of products based on his photographs.)  The 1949 session on Tobey Beach Long Island with the newly christened Marilyn is generally regarded as one of Marilyn's best or the best (consider that for a moment) but was not out of the ordinary in either treatment or intent for the photographer.  

De Dienes photographed every woman who attracted him as if he was in love, enraptured.  

For him it wasn't the girl next door, but the girl working downstairs. At twelve, De Dienes had lost his mother to a long illness.  The lonely quiet boy was mostly left in the care of a young kitchen servant named Krisztina.  Often the two had gone on innocent walks and prophetic adventures around the countryside and the nearby village of Turia.  

Like the young boy in James Joyce's short story Araby, I imagine his intense experience with that young woman forever haunted him: "her image accompanied me in places the most hostile to romance.. . noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out. . . ."  He had once inadvertently come upon Krisztina nude bathing in a wooden tub by a barn. De Dienes remembered vividly that she had not been embarrassed at all and had looked him straight in the eye.

Several times he returned to Europe as an adult searching for her.  But she was in America or that's where he found her. 

In the typescript facsimile of his Norma Jeane photo album/memoirs included in the 2002 Taschen box set (begun close to and unfinished at his death and later edited when published to emphasize his connection with the young Marilyn), the similarity between the aspiring American model and actress and her Slavic precursor was explicit and immediate, saying "from the instant I looked at [Norma Jeane] and we began to talk, her voice, her smile, her beautiful blue eyes, revived in my mind Krisztina, the maid . . .whom I loved so much. Norma Jeane was like the [spitting] image of Krisztina (except that she was only 19). Her movements, her vitality, her enthusiasm, her entire countenance, reflecting purity of soul and honesty, was exactly like Krisztina's. Even her laughter seemed the same! . . . The impact Norma Jeane had on me was tremendous. A new 'Krisztina' had entered into my life."

After the war, De Dienes (1913-1985) found himself working one side of the beach while others, most notably Southern California native Peter Gowland (1916- ), worked the other.  So there developed by 1947-48 a "West Coast" school of glamour photography.  These were mostly World War II and soon to be Korean War ex-serviceman who worked just inside or outside Hollywood and movies proper, photographing minor actresses and would-be starlets for worldwide consumption.  By the mid and late 50s, the era's high point, these photographers included De Dienes, moving back and forth between both coasts, Gowland and wife Alice in Santa Monica, Russ Meyer hailing from the Bay Area and relocated to the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood, and many, many others based throughout Southern California: Tom Kelley, Bruno Bernard (later in Palm Springs and Las Vegas), Frank Bez, Keith Bernard, Hal Adams, Ed Delong, Dave Sutton, Bill Graham, Earl Leaf, Danny Rouzer, Ron Vogel, Don Ornitz, Sam Wu, Art Messick, Edmund Leja, David Mills, Mario Casilli, Ken Parker, and another husband and wife team like the Gowlands but instead based in Glendale (later Newport Beach), Bill and Melba Figge.   

A labor development in 1948 had effectively begun the dismantling of the in-house movie studio photography operations, so glamour photography became even more of a fiercely competitive freelance occupation and photographers became the minor league scouts, so to speak, for the entire entertainment business. The large photo magazines and agencies, Life and Magnum in particular, had their own staff covering Hollywood. Such things as  the fledging model agencies like John Powers and Conover had not yet made a mark on the film industry (nor never really did). Thus the Southern California glamour photographer by necessity operated a full service shop.  He had to find a fresh face, set up the session, pay the model and all costs associated with the shoot, including wardrobe, film and  processing, and then  placed the photographs with a Los Angeles or New York based agency which specialized in glamour like Globe, Galaxy, Topix, Vista, P.I.P., Prange  and Graphic House, where magazines, the flood of picture-based digests and tabloids that arose post war,  bought their images.  And the busy craftsman had to do this before another ambitious Southern  California  photographer beat him to it.

This was the very high end of the market, the men and women behind the lens almost as well known as the professional figure models, actresses, and would-be actresses they photographed.  There were other popular glamour photographers, of course, Jerry Yulsman and Phil Stern in New York come to mind, but they too had some connection with the natural light, candid personality posing, beach or desert outdoor aesthetic De Dienes had brought to the newsstands. 

Each had some particular specialty.  Peter Basch (1921-2004), for example, was noted for young discoveries who already had a solid mainstream acting credit or two by the time the pictures saw print and peddled established European stars like Bardot, Sophia Loren, and Claudia Cardinale to European periodicals eager for an American style approach to their home grown sirens.  He exemplified the split between the studio portrait and on-location candid shots that was affecting the entire profession. Even though he had collected Hurrell as a teen and was a one time apprentice to another well known Hollywood portrait photographer--Lazlo Willinger-- he had also taken graphic design classes  from Brodovitch as well. And at times, Basch shared an NYC studio with Life photojournalist and new guard glamour specialist Phillipe Halsman.

Besides the busy photographers in Southern California and New York, there was Bill Hamilton in Miami, covering the Miss America contest each year and later, like Basch, scouring Europe for fresh faces. Back in Miami, Bunny Yeager and Jan Caldwell relied on the brisk business fan favorite models like vacationing Bettie Page and Florida resident Maria Stinger ignited all over the country.  In Great Britain there were photographers Russell Gay, Zoltan Glass, Ed Alexander, Eva Grant and Ken Williams. (The very popular and entrepreneurial Harrison Marks was more of a fetish photographer, like Americans Elmer Batters and John Willie). France boasted "The Man of 10,000 Nudes, " Serge Jacques, who sprinkled his too-explicit for the American market stuff for Paris-Hollywood with the much more sedate glamour in the sunshine by the Seine.

Everybody wanted a piece of the action.