MoMA - Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography
Sat, Jun 28
|MoMA
Discover the artifice behind the allure. Face Value at MoMA unveils how celebrity images were crafted, altered, and mythologized in the golden age of Hollywood—long before filters and Photoshop.
Time & Location
Jun 28, 2025, 7:00 AM – Jun 21, 2026, 11:00 PM
MoMA, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA
About the event
June 28, 2025 – June 21, 2026
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Visit MoMA.org
Before digital edits and viral fame, there was the studio touch-up.Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography peels back the glossy surface of 20th-century celebrity culture to reveal the labor-intensive processes behind Hollywood’s carefully manufactured images. Drawing from MoMA’s rich film archive, this exhibition explores the tactile techniques used to sculpt fame—from silhouetting and masking to in-painting and collage.
Central to the show are press portraits from Photoplay and Dell magazines, part of an extraordinary archive assembled under the vision of MoMA’s founding film curator, Iris Barry. These hand-altered photographs served as the primary medium through which actors, athletes, socialites, and politicians were idealized—and commodified—decades before the advent of AI and social media.
More than 60 photographers and filmmakers, including studio insiders and icons like Andy Warhol, are represented. The exhibition contrasts untouched originals with their retouched counterparts,…