MASTER of the MOVIE STILL

Bob Willoughy, the lensman who invented the movie still, finally gets his due in art book form

- JARED PAUL STERN

“To capture Bob Willoughby’s work in a book is to capture exciting moments of motion picture history that a viewer can look at and study and enjoy over and over again.” The great Tony Curtis was speaking about the American camera-wielder who was the first “outside” photographer ever hired by the major movie studios to create images for mainstream magazines such as Life and Look, inventing a new genre of photography in the process. The quote comes from Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life, a long overdue, coffee table-worthy tribute to the pioneering lensman from Chronicle Chroma books. 

As his son Christopher Willoughby writes in the book, Willoughby basically invented the movie “still”, coming up with “an ingenious method of shooting on movie sets without making any noise.” And when nothing else was possible, he would duplicate whole film sets on adjacent lots. “As Dad would say, ‘What are you going to do, come back without the shot?’”

Willoughby shot his first cover for Life magazine in 1954 with Judy Garland, and the rest was celluloid history. He went on to capture jazz legends like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, the entirety of Hollywood royalty from Marilyn Monroe to Steve McQueen, plus the Rat Pack and everyone notable in between.