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For the archive,
I'm looking at the papers of Jack Harris who's a behind the scenes photographer
from the Hollywood studio era.
I've got to suss out what his role was in production.
Still photographers are generally invisible labor and so that's what I'm looking
at, figuring out what exactly their role was and
how they operated within the machinery of cinema.
His role is rather to be invisible
and one writer said that generally no one on the set knows the still man's last name.
And some people consider the still man to be a nuisance
because what they do is that they take production photos,
usually in between scenes or when a scene is finished,
and the rest of the crew wants to shut down and so they are the people saying,
"Hold on, hold on. Let me take a few pictures."
And so a lot of times they have that sort of frustrating relationship with
the actors or the crew who wants to break down the sets.
They are part documenters; a lot of the portraits they take
on set become some of the most famous images of stars that we know.
We have this idea that to reveal something like that would be
to de-mystify Hollywood, but I think it actually
makes it more overwhelming for the audience.
It makes it more enticing to go see the production.
They're there to document the production, but also things like training.
There's a really great collection of photos from "Kid Galahad"
which is an Elvis boxing movie.
And just page after page of him training to be a boxer,
which I think is interesting.
It tells you that the studio wants the public to
know that he underwent this rigorous training.
What's interesting about the still men, or at least Jack Harris,
is that he never marked his script.
Which is telling, even of itself, what exactly his function was within the system.
It looks like it was more simply to document and not to take part in
the writing process.
And then other collections: The Great Escape,
another big film for him, has three boxes and that
took me an entire week to get through.
Initially, just because I wasn't sure how much I could cover,
I thought let me just do the collaboration with Billy Wilder.
And it only took me a couple of weeks to get through that
and I've been expanding out since then.