Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks at Walpi First Mesa Hopi Village 1920 Photograph
Original Sepia toned Silver gelatin photographic print by Charles Roshe (British, 1885-1974).
Provenance: Mary Pickford, Elizabeth (Bess) Huggins.
Image 10.75"H x 13.75"W
He was Mary Pickford's favorite cinematographer and a personal friend, shooting all of the films in which she starred from 1918 to 1927, before they had a falling out during production of Coquette (1929). He was the first cinematographer to receive an Academy Award, along with Karl Struss, for Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), and won again for The Yearling (1946), with Leonard Smith and Arthur Arling. He was also nominated four times.
Walpi, pueblo (village), Navajo county, northeastern Arizona, U.S., on the edge of a high mesa in the Hopi Indian Reservation. It comprises a group of angular stone houses of two to three stories crowded on a narrow tip of the steep-walled mesa at an elevation of 6,225 feet (1,897 metres). The original pueblo (founded c. 1700) was on a lower part of the mesa, but following the Pueblo Rebellion, the inhabitants moved to the top as a defensive measure against Spanish retaliation. Walpi is known for an antelope ceremony and for snake dances, held during odd years in August and generally closed to non-Hopi spectators. Shitchumovi (Sichomivi) pueblo is adjacent and Hano is nearby.
Pickford was the first Canadian to win an Oscar. She was also the second to win best actress and the first for a role in a film with sound. She was one of the founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 1919 Pickford took the lead in organizing the United Artists Corporation with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks. In 1920, after the dissolution of her first marriage (1911–19) to actor Owen Moore, she married Fairbanks (divorced 1936). Pickford’s popularity continued unabated in Pollyanna (1920), Little Lord...
Category
1920s Realist George Zimbel Art
MaterialsPhotographic Paper, Silver Gelatin