Pictures of Hollywood

As far as misleading titles go, “Theatrical Photographs,” by Alix Jeffry, at the Lammot du Pont Copeland Gallery has succeeded in a misnomer. Many of the photographs, while delightful, have naught to do with the theatre; Jeffry’s real name was Evelyn Fish and the Lammot du Pont Copeland Gallery is little more than the entrance to Pusey Library. That said, it is worth the trip to Harvard’s underground library to see these 70-odd black and white portraits on display.

The exhibition is by the Harvard Theatre Collection, administratively a part of Houghton Library. The Theatre Collection has a comparatively short history, as it was established in 1901. Unfortunately, that history intrudes into the exhibition in a rather jarring way. One of the two rooms that, in addition to the hallway, constitute the Lammot du Pont Copeland Gallery is dominated by two large oil portraits, one of Robert Gould Shaw by Edmund Charles Jarbell and one of Edward Brewster Sheldon by Paul Trabilcock. With two bare walls and the doorway flanked by commemorative oil colors, it is difficult to pay attention to Jeffry’s pictures, which with their near-uniform size and frank style, do not, for the most part, call out for attention.

Jeffry was born in DuQuoin, Ill. in 1929. In 1950, she opened a studio for theatrical photography in Chicago, where she had since moved and joined a celebrity-hunting club. Having donned the name Alix Jeffry when she opened the studio, she moved next to New York in 1952 and began documenting the theater. Though some of her early work made it into this show, the exhibit is dominated by images from the late sixties and early seventies. Jeffry lived in New York throughout this time, until 1988 when she moved to Albuquerque, N.M. with her partner, Mary Alice Morris, who donated the photographs featured in this exhibition to Harvard after Jeffry’s death in 1993.

Say what you will about the cult of celebrity, but it is interesting to see young Al Pacino reclining in his apartment on Fourteenth Street (1969) or to see Norman Mailer sandwiched between two reels of film as he worked on the film Law and Order, his second documentary (1968). It is the photos of these people with famous faces that grip the most; Cary Grant, unsurprisingly, fills the frame, as Jeffry herself said: “It doesn’t usually take more than 10 minutes to get a good picture— especially if you look like Cary Grant.” The same can be said of Anthony Perkins, perched charmingly above his dog, or of Dennis Hopper, who looks out of the picture, taken on location in Peru, with a penetrating gaze. It is when the show strays from these easy shots that it falters. Jeffry had taken thousands of photographs of Edward Albee, many of which the Theatre Collection purchased along with other of Jeffry’s photographs in 1981—but only one from the more recent acquisition made it into the exhibition.

It is not that this picture of Albee, or another picture from the first production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf are uninteresting—far from it. But the show doesn’t have the depth that its title, “Theatrical Photographs,” suggests, and as long as we are skimming at the surface of things, who wouldn’t prefer to look at Lana Turner? This is not to say that Jeffry photographed only actors and the theater—the show is a nice snapshot of other aspects of culture. Harry Belafonte, John Cage, Johnny Cash, Placido Domingo, Benny Goodman and Aaron Copland (photographed together), Anne Sexton—the list goes on, and the portraits are all agreeable to look upon. Cash, with his guitar jutting out of the page, is an interesting contrast to the placid Belafonte. But it is a juxtaposition that you will have to come to yourself—there is not a discernible pattern to the exhibit. The show’s lack of an overall theme reaches a low point with the four self-portraits of Jeffry one happens upon in the midst of things.

The sad part about this is that in the cases where Jeffry stretches the medium, she achieves absorbing results. One of her most famous photographs, a hyperbolically grainy picture of Orson Welles as King Lear, stands out. A double exposure of the guitarist Sharon Isbin superimposes the guitar on her hair in a manner that, if not entirely original, is pleasing. Perhaps the most enigmatic image of the show is a distorted portrait of Attilio Pierelli, an Italian sculptor, poet, playwright and dentist, shot at an exhibition of his at the Zabriskie Gallery in New York. But these are scattered without effect amid the straightforward portraits of, say, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Nonetheless, though a misnomer, this is not a show to be missed.

THEATRICAL PHOTOGRAPHS

by Alix Jeffry

at Lammot du Pont Copeland Gallery, Pusey Library

Through December 28