CINE.pho | Photographic Stills

The origin of the publicity still or production still, broadly known as photographic stills of film paraphernalia today, dates to early twentieth-century Hollywood when cinema was all about visual storytelling. From candids, behind the scenes to staged photographs of promotional value, stills were used to create an allure for the magic of cinema. When actors became stars, their portraits became collector's items. Newspapers and magazines started having dedicated film columns, publicity stills boomed in print. Fans clipped and collected photographs of favourite stars to feel more connected to them. Still photography, aside from cinematography, became a lucrative business. Still photographers worked on set to distil the filmic scene into a readable image. They captured key scenes, staged the perfect shots, and glamour portraits that curated a certain public view of the movie-industry. Besides publicity, stills provided working descriptions of sets, locations, details of costume and make-up for archival use. The eight by ten-inch camera provided far superior details than the 35 mm frame with coarse grain in film that suffers from motion blur. But the arrival of the talkies interrupted the affinity between cinema and the image. Sound tamed the image and in the latter half of the twentieth century, the material fate of the still changed with the coming of the Steenbeck editors, eventually leading distribution companies to dump hordes of images into the second-hand market for their reduced economic significance in the 70s. The vintage photographic still has now become coveted collector's items for its cultural worth, as an archival document on the history of cinema.