GarboForever - Garbo Portraits - by Edward Steichen

Garbo Portraits - by Edward Steichen

Introduction

Photographer Steichen was one of the very few allowed to come on the set during the filming of A Woman of Affairs to shot Garbo. It was a sort of privilege, since Garbo usually worked on closed sets and refused to be seen while working by "strangers", even if those strangers were famous strangers. Garbo had just finished to shot the scene in which her husband committed suicide and she already wore the black long dress we can see in the Steichen pictures.

Steichen photographs of Garbo are really amazing just because she is seen in her natural mood - without the sometimes heavy costumes and make up of the MGM productions. Garbo had previously posed dramatically with her hands in the forehead with hair back in another beautiful shot for Ruth Harriet Louise. It was Louise and not Steichen who "invented" the famous pose one year earlier.

New York/USA, 1928

Steichen recalled their session

"I made five or six exposures, all more or less like her typical movie stills. She moved her hair this way and that way, chin up and down, but what bothered me most was her hair. I said: It's too bad we're doing this with that movie hairdo. At that, she put her hands up to her forehead and pushed every strand of hair back away from her face, saying 'oh, this terrible hair'.

At that moment, the woman came out, like the sun coming out from behind dark clouds. The full beauty of her magnificent face was revealed".

The famous Garbo/Dietrich Photomontage

Steichen made this photomontage in 1934.

	Garbo Portraits
	by Arnold Genthe
	by Ruth Harriet Louise
	by Edward Steichen
	by George Hurrell
	by Nickolas Murray
	by J. E. Jonsson
	by Clarence Sinclair Bull
	by Cecil Beaton
	by George Hoyningen-Huene
	by Anthony Beauchamp