Hollywood: John Divola and Robert Cumming

Movie studios have long employed professional photographers to document film sets for continuity. In the 1930s and 40s, these photographers used eight-by-ten cameras and contact printed each photo directly from the negative. The resultant photos were sharp and unusually striking for such pragmatic pictures, with every detail rendered visible. But with no practical value after production wrapped, these utilitarian images were discarded, ending up in second-hand stores, flea markets, memorabilia shops, and dumpsters. That’s how they got into the hands of Robert Cumming and John Divola, who discovered them separately in the 1970s and 80s and found in them a deep connection to their own bodies of work.

Curated by California photographer John Divola, Hollywood: Robert Cumming and John Divola showcases the work of two artists who reference or use studio continuity photography as art material. In an extension of his Continuity (1995-) series, Divola presents four new arrangements of found stills, organized and grouped thematically. In a selection from his 1977 Studio Still Lifes, Robert Cumming’s photos of the backlot of Universal Studios capture film production materials and locales as surreal scenes and sculptural tableaux.

Divola (b. 1949) began collecting continuity stills in the 1970s, amassing thousands, primarily from the pre-war golden age of the studio system. He was drawn to the enigmatic aura of these images, their strange stillness, pristine legibility, and their uncanny resemblance to real life. “Even the most mundane and generic rooms were previsualized, constructed, and completely artificial,” writes Divola. “I am interested in how these stills collectively construct a fictive sense of the normal.” Though innocuous at first, the presence of a clapper board across many of the stills becomes destabilizing, reminding us that the images are simulacra. To the artist, they function almost like crime scene photographs: haunting and filled with clues to decipher.

Thematically and aesthetically, Divola’s Continuity groupings align with his own photo works: abandoned spaces left with remnants of actions past (Zuma series, 1977/78), film sets shot to expose their artificiality (MGM Backlot, 1979/80), and anonymous figures immersed in the scenery (As Far as I Can Get, 1996/97). In the early 2000s, partially inspired by his stills collection, Divola photographed abandoned sets of the television series The X-Files (X-Files, 2003), embodying the role of a continuity still photographer himself.

Painter, sculptor, and conceptual artist Robert Cumming (1943-2021) was equally drawn to the strange and staged artificiality of old Hollywood continuity stills. To Cumming, the mundane subjects of these found stills were made absurd by their obviously fabricated qualities: optical tricks, backdrops, and forced perspective architecture, all constructed for the movie camera’s lens. He drew inspiration from what he called their “language of rebuilt reality,”creating staged, surreal, and often humorous tableaux that played with scale, materiality, and the illusion of motion.

In 1977, Cumming was invited by the studio executive and photo collector Al Dorskind to photograph Universal Studios. For six months, Cumming freely traversed the backlot with his eight-by-ten camera. He found scenes similar to his sculptures but on a much grander scale–readymade rather than fabricated by the artist: an elevated boat and dummy fisherman created for the Universal Studios Tour attraction, a cross-section of a submarine for the naval drama Grey Lady Down (1978). These studio elements became sculptural once photographed. To Cumming, they were akin to “involutions,” puzzles inviting a viewer to untangle, and “documents of the hardware employed in the ultimate illusion.”

In both artists’ series, there is a playful tension between artifice and reality. In movies, illusions encourage viewers to suspend their disbelief. But in these works by Divola and Cumming, artificiality is the central subject, and the viewer becomes complicit in the ruse.