Face Value exhibit at MoMA: Celebrity press pictures revealed

Among the issues that in its early days made MoMA so trendy was together with movie in its transient. That was radical within the Nineteen Thirties. Even extra so was its accumulating movie ephemera. There at the moment are greater than 4 million pictures in its movie stills assortment, the world’s largest. One thinks of MoMA by way of Picasso and the International Style and your fundamental heroic High Modernism. But its holdings additionally embrace the archives of the film magazines Photoplay and Dell. It’s from these holdings that “Face Value” is drawn. Hence the subtitle, “Celebrity Press Photography.”

Celebrity press pictures have been working pictures — they have been meant to be revealed and so they have been, a number of occasions. Many of these on show put on literal indicators of that use. In a pre-digital age, photographic manipulation concerned bodily alteration of the picture. Techniques, all evident right here, included silhouetting, in-painting, masking, sectioning, and marking with grease pencils. Seeing pictures that retain proof of such use — as a goodly portion of these right here do — is alternately comical, disconcerting, and form of charming.

These photos are each idealizations, making an attempt to make their sitters as glamorous or interesting or memorable as attainable — generally all three — and, as these varied strategies remind us, they’re completely workaday. In idea, these pictures have been meant to fill the goals of followers. In apply, they lay in file cupboards or desk drawers or manila folders, ready for use many times and once more.

There are a number of well-known names among the many photographers — George Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull — however most have been uncredited then and uncredited now. Anonymity was, and is, the purpose. The anonymity of the photographer mirrors the anonymity of the film journal reader (or, if you’ll, dreamer).

The sitters weren’t nameless, or not less than they weren’t then. Part of the humor of “Face Value,” and in addition its pathos, is what number of once-famous faces and names now induce a response of “Who?” For each Marilyn Monroe or Bette Davis, there’s a Cleo Madison or Frances Drake. “Ars longa, vita brevis,” nevertheless it ain’t as brevis as celebritas is.

A nonetheless from the 1957 film “Island in the Sun” epitomizes this waywardness of fame, with an simply recognized Harry Belafonte on the left, however Joan Fontaine, on the correct, partly obscured by a chunk of tape. And actually, how many individuals at this time acknowledge even a star as marvelous as Carole Lombard (“Twentieth Century”! “Nothing Sacred”! “To Be or Not to Be”!). The well-known, the forgotten, the silly: They populate “Face Value,” however by no means predictably.

As a form of coda, the present consists of two snippets of footage from Andy Warhol’s Factory and a trio of Warhol “Screen Tests,” these three-minute close-ups of somebody, usually well-known (Dennis Hopper), or not less than well-known in Factory phrases (Jane Holzer). The digicam stares on the sitter. The sitter stares again. The outcomes are each fascinating and mildly alarming, a really Andy mixture.

The existence of a celeb press requires the existence of mass media. The components that went towards making the latter are the topic of “The Second Printing Revolution: Invention of Mass Media” on the Grolier Club, that the majority cherishable of New York museums — which might be true even when admission weren’t, ahem, free. The present runs via April 11.

The first printing revolution began within the 15^th century, with Johannes Gutenberg’s improvement of movable kind. The second began within the 18^th century, as an offshoot of the Industrial Revolution, with mechanized typesetting, advances in bookbinding, coloration replica, even modifications within the studying public (beginning with higher literacy).

Steam energy remodeled printing of books and periodicals each. When it was based in 1785, The Times (of London) had a most press run of 4000 copies a day. The introduction of a double-cylinder steam-powered press in 1814 elevated output by 20 p.c.

A web page from the primary Times version produced on that press is among the many 150 objects within the present. They’re from England, France, Germany, and the United States and vary in date from 1684-1904. Along with quite a few books and prints, there are such curios as a paper mannequin of a German paper mill and an 1839 English railway timetable. The arrival of railroads modified the distribution of printed matter and inspired a brand new viewers of readers: passengers. An 1847 letter by Charles Dickens speculated that gross sales of a “Cheap Edition” of his works might promote as many as 100,000 copies. Leave it to an creator to note that the second print revolution was as a lot about commerce as know-how.

FACE VALUE: Celebrity Press Photography

At: Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53d St., New York, via June 21. www.moma.org, 212-708-9400

THE SECOND PRINTING REVOLUTION: Invention of Mass Media

At: Grolier Club, 47 E. 60^th St., New York, via April 11. 212-838-6690, www.grolierclub.org

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Mark Feeney may be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.