Women Out West: Art on the Left Coast: Ruth Harriet Louise: The First Female Photographer in Hollywood

Ruth Harriet Louise
Self-portrait

Ruth Harriet Louise was an American professional photographer and the first female photographer active in Hollywood. When Ms. Louise joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, dubbed the studio with "more stars than there are in heaven," she was twenty-two years old and the only woman working as a portrait photographer for the Hollywood studios.

Ruth Harriet Louise was born in New York City and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was the daughter of a rabbi. Louise began to take photographs while still living at home. She gravitated to the studio of society photographer Nickolas Muray who had emigrated to New York from Europe before the outbreak of World War I. Muray was working as a color printer and photo engraver in Brooklyn when he opened his portrait studio, working from his apartment in Greenwich Village. He was getting regular work from Harper’s Bazaar when Ruth began to apprentice for him. Muray was a well-known photographer of Babe Ruth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Langston Hughes, among other celebrities in New York.

Louise had family who had already moved to Southern California and worked in the entertainment business, when they encouraged her to join them in Los Angeles. Her brother was director Mark Sandrich, who directed some of the great Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers musicals including Flying Down to Rio and The Gay Divorcee, and she was cousin to silent-film actress Carmel Myers, notably in Ben-Hur. Ruth opened a small portrait studio near Hollywood and Vine, but her work was seen by Louis Mayer who hired her to set up her portrait studio at his new film company, MGM.

Ruth Harriet Louise
Greta Garbo
ca 1920s

Film studios in the early days relied heavily on still photography. Actors were not initially sent for screen tests; they went first to the portrait studio so directors might see what image they would project in the glamour photos that would be used for promotion. This was long before quick and candid shots and the studios could tightly control the images they sent out to promote a star or a film. Fan clubs emerged, and they relied on the still photographs that could be sent to their members.

In a career that lasted just five years, from 1925 until 1930, Ms. Louise photographed all the stars, contract players, and many hopefuls who passed through the studio's front gates. It is estimated that she shot more than 100,000 photographs during her tenure at MGM. Her original photographs were circulated via newspapers and magazines to millions of moviegoers and fans while the publicity department tapped into the audience's need for sophistication and fashion during the 1920s. Ms. Louise's photographs helped set the tone for glamour photography.

Ruth Harriet Louise
Joan Crawford
ca 1929

Ruth Harriet Louise
Buster Keaton
ca 1929

Ruth photographed the likes of Greta Garbo, Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, and Marion Davies. Ruth became Greta Garbo's personal photographer. At twenty-four years old, she was already a two-year veteran of Hollywood who had joined the community just a few months before Garbo. However, by 1930 tastes were changing. Norma Shearer selected George Hurrell to be her personal photographer as she liked the sexy glamour shots he produced. Louise’s elegant photos were not as desirable as they once were, and her contract was not renewed.

She retired from working as a photographer at MGM in 1927 to marry director Leigh Jason and had a son who died of leukemia in 1932. Tragically, Louise and her baby died in 1940 of complications from her second childbirth.