Richard Lawton Bücher

GRAND ILLUSIONS represents a selection of the most beautiful photographs ever to come out of Hollywood's Golden Years. The motion pictures of that era, stumbling perhaps across a new poetics, projected gorgeous fantasies which soared beyond the plots and elaborate sets, even beyond the luminous glamour of the stars. Once on film, subjects have a beguiling sense of drifting through space as through painted by a casual barely visible presence. And in truth, the visual intelligence behind these films was often one of genius; genius which could dream and still control a new technology.

Photographs of Hollywood's most popular idols reveal the skills of the industry's portrait photographers as well as changing trends in glamour

Movie stills and publicity shots depict the great stars and films of the silent era and of talkies