CIRCUS OF THE STARS

BY INGRID SISCHY

If Los Angeles is, as the activist and author Carey McWilliams wrote in the ’40s, “a great circus without a tent” then Matthew Rolston is its high-wire act. For more than two decades his photographs have walked the tightrope between idealism and realism, and he always gets to the other side to the thrill of his audience.

Matthew’s tale as a photographer actually begins when he was just a preppy, dreamy 7-year-old L.A. kid, with no interest at all in techie types of things. The ’60s may have been swinging already, but in Matthew’s grandfather’s medical office in Beverly Hills, where the stars felt right at home, the décor wasn’t Pop, but rather a classy ’50s look with silk shantung wallpaper in beige. On the walls were 8 x 10 framed photos of classic Hollywood stars, Matthew’s grandfather’s patients, many of them shot by the legendary studio photographers George Hurrell and Laszlo Willinger, and all personally signed to Matthew’s grandfather; trophies from a career as a respected internist.

For Matthew, looking at these 8 x 10 publicity shots was when he first fell in love with glamour. He still describes them as “magic.” And we think people today retouch! Hurrell’s Hollywood photographs, with his brilliant use of light, highlights and shadow, made the stars look like marble goddesses, or as Matthew puts it, “waxed fruit.” His grandfather also kept an elaborately framed photo of Matthew’s mother in her twenties on his desk, in which she looked like Joan Fontaine’s double—something else that the young boy clocked for later inspiration, along with his mother’s fashion magazines which he laughs that he was more obsessed with than she was. He’d pore over them at bedtime when he wasn’t being read to from the family collection of hardbound Charles Addams cartoons. To this day, those turn-ons from his youth drive Matthew. That combo—idealized perfection, a heightened fashion consciousness, and the ability to have a good old dark chuckle—is really the key to what makes a Rolston a “Rolston.”

If you think his pictures feel very composed, you are right. Even with his crush on the images in his grandfather’s office, Matthew did not choose photography right off the bat, but arrived there after years of studying drawing and painting; this background in the other arts comes through in his pictures. His eureka moment happened when he was at art school in San Francisco. He was initially just using the camera as a strategy to understand how the light was falling on a piece of fabric that he was intending to render, and that’s when he realized he was more interested in the photo than in the drawing assignment. But Matthew does not just “take up” something. He learns before he strikes. So before he took up photography for real, he put in some years of serious study at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. (His relationship with the institution would be a lifelong romance. Growing up he had bicycled to Art Center when it was still in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles near the family home, and remembers that he couldn’t get enough of the smell of turpentine and paint and linseed oil. He studied life drawing there as a child, illustration there as a teen, and would return not just for photography in the early ’80s, but once again in the early ’90s as a film student when he decided to expand into video and film. And then in the late ’90s he established a cross-disciplined scholarship program in photography and film for the school.)

Matthew’s romance with photography has only deepened over the years. As someone who works on assignment (all the photos in this book were done for magazines), he is not precious about a division between commerce versus art, is comfortable with how the two can leak in and out of each other, and is big on crediting the contribution of the talented teams that are so often such a part of magazine photo sessions these days. He says, “Somewhere on a shoot I’m going to take pictures that I want to take that mean something to me.” And he always does.

Matthew is one of the heirs to the classic Hollywood tradition of putting out idealized images and unforgettable pictures. Recalling his early years he says, “I wanted to travel back in time and actually be there in the shadows of the MGM photo gallery.” His ambition, though, was to pull off more than simply nostalgic imitations, and he has always pushed his work so that it is a part of the present. Still, he is not trying to strip away to who his subjects really are. He wants to give you that old kind of magic. He tells an unforgettable story of what happened when he finally met the man who had so inspired his work, Hurrell. The younger photographer asked the legend the big question: “What is glamour?” Hurrell answered, “I dunno kid... I think it’s some kinda suffering look.”

When Matthew repeated this anecdote to me we both laughed, because it’s such a perfect description of the look that the old time stars so often had in their publicity shots, but also of the ends that people will go to for pictures. Matthew is a true Romantic on this score. He’ll give 110 percent. He says, “I want the viewer to gasp and then laugh.” You can have these experiences looking through the book that you hold in your hands. We laugh at the spoofy, bloodied-up image of Jack Nicholson, and at the mug shots of Jim Carrey. Our jaws drop at Anna Nicole Smith, depicted by Matthew, as dramatically shapely as a mountain range. We catch our breath at his photograph of Drew Barrymore turned into a boy, or the one of the Olsen twins done up in a nod to ’80s Madonna (a.k.a. the Material Girl), and so clearly attached to each other. We gasp at the almost satanic intensity of the eyes in his portrait of Bob Dylan. The times may be a-changin’, but in Matthew’s world, the Circus of the Stars is eternal.

New York City
July 2008