George Hurrell's Hollywood: Glamour Portraits 1925-1992 Hardcover – Illustrated, November 12, 2013

This is a MASSIVE book. It is both a catalog and a study of Hurrell's body of work in Hollywood.The quality of the images is outstanding, and the coverage is thorough. Anyone interested inclassic pictorials of movie stars by a master photographer will find this book to be both interestingand useful.

Absolutely beautiful book! With some of the most gorgeous photos you’ve ever seen! With an excellent text to tell the life of George Hurrell. Throughly enjoyed this fascinating book!

Purchased this as a birthday gift for my husband and it was a huge hit. My honey loves old time Hollywood and knew about this photographer. It's a beautiful coffee table book, large and very impressive with amazing photos. Worth the money and highly recommend.

Wonderful book about Holllywood, great photography.

This coffee-table size book contains some of the most beautiful photographs of Hollywood stars I have ever seen. The photos were taken by famed Hollywood photographer George Hurrell. The book is also a biography of Hurrell. The photos are beautifully reproduced and the story of Hurrell is quite interesting. He went back and forth from being an independent photographer to the various studios including MGM, Fox, Warners, and Columbia. However, all he really wanted to be was a painter. The book contains photos from silent star Ramon Novarro through Paul McCartney and Sharon Stone. There are a great number of photos of Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer (Hurrell’s most frequent clients) and a few of the great male stars including Gable, Flynn, Stewart, Cagney, and Bogart. Highly recommended for anyone who values the artistry of portrait photography and loves the age of classic films and the era when stars were really stars.

The reproductions in this book surely come as close as possible to doing justice to Hurrell's artistry. The photos are easily the best looking I've found in any Hurrell compendium so far. Mr Vieira's earler bio of Hurrell comes a close second if one has to chose between them. All other attempts I've seen at publishing Hurrell's work fail to varying degrees, apparently, I assume, involving the printers' attempts at holding the large black areas. What most of them produce are undifferentiated blacks and an overall flatness that robs the images of any three-dimensionality, leaving them lying muddily on the page.The text is excellent, especially in that it chronicles the author's acquaintance with Hurrell to the end of Hurrell's life, specifically by getting into the politics, jealousies, and double-dealing among those involved in collecting, exhibiting, and publishing Hurrell's work. Nobody emerges with a spotless record for integrity.

Good photos GREAT WORK.

Chock-full of everything a Hurrell career review should have, by someone who understands photography, who casually knew Hurrell in his lifetime, selects just the right photographs and makes sure they look great, and who writes a warts and all biography that tries to get underneath what made Hurrell tick. The book succeeds in bringing Norma Shearer to the fore, shows how just the right photos could fuel the making of a star with Ann Sheridan, and shows Hurrell had not lost it in his later years, with some amazing portraits of Bianca Jagger and Diana Ross. What was most fascinating was the description of Hurrell's rediscovery and arrival of movie-crazed collectors in the Sixties who would do anything to obtain Hurrell work.A great coffee table book - informative, opinionated, thorough.

O livro em si é perfeito, bem ilustrado, fotografias incríveis, bem completo. O vendedor porém não teve nenhuma preocupação com o produto, que veio numa caixa grande sem qualquer proteção, o que acarretou danos a capa. Pra quem vai comprar como entrega internacional saiba que a alfândega de lá (não é a brasileira) cobra imposto também, então o preço final vai aumentar.

Libro con testo inglese, di grande formato e con fotografie sorprendenti delle più grandi stelle Hollywoodiane del passato, realizzate dal maestro della fotografia George Hurrell. Assolutamente da avere per tutti gli appassionati.

La carrera de uno de los fotógrafos más famosos del período dorado de Hollywood es narrada con gran lujo de detalles en este tomo en inglés de gran tamaño, muy buen papel y calidad de impresión, y tapa dura con sobrecubierta. El texto es abundante (y apasionante), pero la cantidad de fotos que aparecen en él es tan grande (mayoritariamente en blanco y negro, muchas a toda página o incluso doble página, y otras a razón de dos por página) que hasta los que no dominen el idioma pueden encontrar atractiva la enorme galería de estrellas, muchas famosas y algunas ya olvidadas, que aparecen en el volumen. Evidentemente las reinas son las dos actrices que se convirtieron en las favoritas de Hurrell : Norma Shearer y Joan Crawford, ambas presentes en gran cantidad de páginas. Pero también hay espacio para Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Errol Flynn, Kate Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Mae West, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Ann Sheridan y un largo etcétera. Todos ellos fotografiados con gran creatividad y estilo que hacen del libro una auténtica exhibición del glamour del Hollywood de los años 30 y 40.

What a book this is. Huge in scope and size and full of truly great images beautifully reproduced it takes a prominent place in my reference library. Even if you don't know his name you most definitely know his work, maybe only a few images, but when you go through this book you will find them, they're all here, along with a wealth of other images that define Hollywood glamour. It's a biography and a retrospective and a treasure trove all at once and I can thoroughly recommend it to anybody who wants to know how to create the ultimate Hollywood glamour look in their work.

First, let me say this off the bat: I always look forward to Mark A. Vieira's books. They're compelling, they're beautiful and they're wonderfully written. I don't own all his works, but I do own quite a few. One of the last of his coffee table books that I purchased was Harlow In Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell In the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937 and it's made me cry each time I've sat down to read it.This time there was nary a tear in sight - unless, of course I came across a portrait of Garbo and stared for hours at her perfectly arched brows without blinking. Believe me, that actually happens 'round here.In terms of size George Hurrell's Hollywood: Galmour Portraits is a whopper. It weighs in at just over seven pounds and has 416 pages. When I first took the book out of its Amazon box, I literally gasped at how thick it was - the other Hurrell book I own is nowhere near as large (Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits by Mark A. Vieira, 1997). At first I wasn't even completely sold on the idea of purchasing another Hurrell tome because I thought the 1997 edition that I already had sitting on my shelf would suffice. How wrong I was. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two is that this newer book includes a large portion of Hurrell's later work and not just his popular studio-era work from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. This time Vieira goes beyond Hollywood's golden years and really delves into modern-day Hollywood portraiture. So, long story short, if (like me) you own Vieira's original Hurrell book and are debating whether or not you should also go ahead and add this one to your book collection, I'd say it all depends on whether or not you're interested in learning more about Hurrell's later photographic work.There are a lot of repeats in George Hurrell's Hollywood in terms of portraits we've seen before. Many of the ones that appear in this book also appear in Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits (and Harlow In Hollywood for that matter). I'd say that about 50% of the portraits in Vieira's newest book are repeats, leaving the other 50% as never-before-seen (or, scarcely seen). The most obvious photographic tributes in this book are paid to the likes of Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard and Norma Sherear. There are literally pages and pages dedicated to each of these women (but I'm not complaining) when I sort of wish there would have been more attention paid to the famous Hollywood actors of the era (think Gable, Keaton, Powell, and Cagney). A nice addition, though, are the colour images that (personally) I've never seen before!One of my favourite shots of Jean Harlow.In terms of the text, there is a very nice foreword written by the sultry Sharon Stone and a nice balance of text and pictorial work on each page. Usually what tends to happen with coffee table books like these is that they're full of glorious images but lack interesting, engaging text - not so with this one! I really enjoyed pouring over Vieira's insightful prose concerning all-things Hurrell: from his humble beginnings as a painter to his storied career as Hollywood's foremost glamour photographer.If you're even just a casual fan of classic Hollywood or an avid one like me I think you'll really enjoy flipping through this book. There is so much to look at and discover within these pages that you could literally be sitting on your sofa for hours without even realizing it. Do me a favour though, start from the back of the book and work your way to the front from there because there are some really charming portraits that you've probably never seen before - more modern ones - of David Bowie, Paul McCartney and Hurrell himself.Mark A. Vieira has one other classic film book that's slated for release this year and that's Majestic Hollywood: The Greatest Films of 1939 (published by Running Press on December 10, 2013). That book is already on its way to me (through Amazon) and I plan on reviewing that one next! Like I said at the beginning of this post, Vieira is one of my very favourite authors; I have never been disappointed by him and I'm pretty sure I never shall be. I'm looking forward to delving into that one as soon as it arrives on my doorstep!