Lee Gross – Scene stealer

We turn the spotlight on Lee Gross, pioneer of film set photography and agent extraordinaire, and her showstopping Manhattan loft

- By Tilly Macalister-Smith

Tree-lined Perry Street in the West Village is one of Manhattan’s most prized neighbourhoods. Despite gentrification, some things – including certain residents – have remained as they always have been over the decades. Lee Gross, a feisty and sharp nonagenarian trailblazer, who was pivotal in shaping the cinematic documentation of Hollywood, has lived on the street for more than three decades.

A new kind of photographers’ agent, Gross pioneered the practice of assigning prominent photographers to capture ‘behind-the-scenes (BTS) images on film sets between the 1960s and 1980s, to document the making of epics such as Apocalypse Now, Cabaret, Rosemary’s Baby, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?. Lee Gross Associates, founded in 1967, worked with photographers like Eve Arnold, Bob Willoughby, and Mary Ellen Mark on ‘back of house’ imagery, which appeared on the pages of Rolling Stone, Life, Newsweek, Time and more. Gross was one of the first to understand the power of BTS photography and its ability to reel in the viewer. Before her, studios had nothing but big glossy posters to sell their films. She saw the value in capturing the action as it happened.