Clarence Bull

Clarence Bull was a portrait photographer who worked for film studios during the "Golden Age of Hollywood". His work was massively influential in the creation of portrait photography at the time, and has continued to inspire.

His photos are often perfectly poised, professional, sincere, but they can also be more playful and experimental, for example, 'Greta Garbo as the Sphinx'. Greta Garbo was his favoured model, especially after she decided that he would be the only one to take her portrait, so her face appears in the majority of his work. The lighting is often striking and dramatic, which is appropriate considering that he typically shot during breaks on movie sets. The lighting is used to sculpt facial features and in turn create a certain atmosphere to fit the person being photographed.

I chose to research Clarence Bull because some of his portraits have a very similar atmosphere to the portraits of my grandfather that I'm going to recreate. I noticed this in the image on the right, which is of Leslie Howard, as he looks quite similar to my grandfather and the pose is pretty close too.