Famous historical and contemporary figures captured through
photography can be seen in a new Getty exhibition. Portraits of
Renown: Photography and the Cult of Celebrity, on view at the J.
Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, April 3–August 26, 2012,
surveys some of the visual strategies used by photographers to
picture famous individuals from the 1840s to the year 2000.
“This exhibition offers a brief visual history of famous people
in photographs, drawn entirely from the Museum’s rich holdings
in this genre,” says Paul Martineau, curator of the exhibition
and associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty
Museum. “It also provides a broad historical context for the
work in the concurrent exhibition Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, which
includes a selection of Ritts’ best celebrity portraits.”
Photography’s remarkable propensity to shape identities has made
it the leading vehicle for representing the famous. Soon after
photography was invented in the 1830s, it was used to capture
the likenesses and accompli