HOLLYWOOD, USA

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to announce:"Hollywood, USA", an exhibition exploring the fascination and impact of the enigma that is "Hollywood". The exhibition opens with a public reception on February 4, 2005. The exhibition will continue through April 3.

In 1911, Hollywood's first film studio opened. Three years later, Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn took a giant cinematic step with the release of the first feature-length film, and the American dream burst out bigger than life, ultimately touching everyone, everywhere. The industry that transformed this relatively barren place into a land as mystical and intoxicating as Xanadu was the motion picture business. What we think of as Hollywood quickly became much too colossal to be contained within a section of the City of Angels. It spread across the nation and around the world. Hollywood taught girls and boys, gangsters and everyday people, how to walk and talk and dress. It rescued us from the rigors of the Depression and assured us that we could topple our savage foes in battle. It gave us music and dancing, violence and sex. Movies would always be about laughing and crying, about learning how to live and how to die. Nowhere and nothing else frees our fantasies and stirs our hopes and fears, our tears and our eternal romances, like that single incomparable word - Hollywood.

Through more than 50 photographs, the exhibition explores our notions of Hollywood. The photographs in the exhibition depict images of movie stars, gala premieres, theater marquees and interiors, and backstage and studio lot scenes that are certain to evoke memories in the viewer: some are personal, tied to experiences in our own lives, others are collective, shared memories of key events in our time.

Included in the exhibition will be photographs by: Bernie Abramson, Ted Allen, Eve Arnold, Sid Avery, Loomis Dean, John Dominis, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Andreas Feininger, Bud Fraker, Alan Grant, Ernst Haas, Mark Shaw, Peter Stackpole, Gene Trindl, Bob Willoughby, Ida Wyman, and many others