Unveiled: Celebrity Photos of a Lifetime
L O N D O N, May 23 -- The photographs are similar to what you would find in a well-worn shoebox at the bottom of your mother's closet — worn, simple, straightforward.
But they're photographs with a difference. American Gary Lee Boas, widely described in the press as a geek, dedicated the better part of 15 years of his life to taking them.
He amassed a collection of more than 50,000 celebrity pictures and is now being given attention in the art world. His work can currently be seen in an exhibit, "Gary Lee Boas: Starstruck" at London's Photographers' Gallery.
His work has also been published in a book, also called Starstruck.The group of celebrities is a democratic and diverse one — Katherine Hepburn, Mohammed Ali, Lucille Ball, Henry Kissinger, Bianca Jagger, and several Miss Americas can be found among the images he has amassed.
Just Like Ordinary People
The pictures are impromptu and often catch celebrities at their most genuine. Without the time to pose and primp, celebrities greet the camera in a brief, untouched moment where they often look anything but famous.
In fact, they often look just like "ordinary people" — their poses, expressions, and what they are doing in these pictures are not at all different from what you would see if they had indeed been found in a family shoebox of pictures.
Shirley MacLaine laughs to herself; a side profile of Sophia Loren shows her gazing fondly at someone off-camera; Louis Armstrong enjoys a quiet cigarette; Elizabeth Taylor calmly watches the outside world from the window of her limousine.
These photos do not evoke or imitate Herb Ritts, Annie Leibowitz or other well-known and critically acclaimed celebrity chroniclers.
However, many have noticed that his pictures do have a certain charm to them."Technical finesse isn't really a consideration: he took most of the shots on his Box Brownie," noted Britain's The Independent. "There is an unquestionable magic about the pictures, founded not only on the days, weeks and hours they took to amass, but the era that they map out."
