Please join the West Baton Rouge Museum for the upcoming exhibit, Backstage Hollywood: The Photographs of Bob Willoughby, from September 7th, 2024 – October 20th, 2024.
Venture backstage into the golden age of Hollywood with this exhibition that explores the photography of Bob Willoughby. Widely recognized as a pioneer of photography in the twentieth century, Willoughby was the first outside photographer invited by studios to take photos on film sets.
Willoughby’s career took off in 1954 when Life magazine published a feature with over a dozen of his candid photographs of Judy Garland working on set. Since then, his photographs have become instantly recognizable, featuring naturalistic images of actors and directors in intimate moments of vulnerability.
The exhibition features photographs from the sets of 17 iconic Hollywood films, including Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Marnie, Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, and Marilyn Monroe in Let’s Make Love.
Awarded the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Still Photography in 2004, Willoughby’s photographs are in permanent collections across the US and Europe. The magazine Popular Photography has called him “the man who virtually invented the photojournalistic motion picture still.” Responding to the many logistical challenges of working on film sets, he was technological innovator, creating the silent blimp for 35 mm still cameras so that he could photograph silently on set, capturing intimate moments of the stars.
In many ways, Willoughby’s spontaneous approach set the standard of celebrity portraits as we think of them today, casting the candid eye of his camera across the most famous faces to fill them with renewed vitality. Backstage Hollywood will captivate audiences as they learn about the impact this photographer had in developing the genre of celebrity portraiture.