School of Los Angeles : Matthew Rolston

L'Oeil de la Photographie

10/1/2026

Carole Schmitz

School of Los Angeles : Matthew Rolston

MATTHEW ROLSTON : IDENTITY AS PERFORMANCE

For photographer Matthew Rolston, portraiture is never a capture. It is a staging. The face does not appear as a truth to be revealed, but as a surface to be shifted, charged with signs, references, and fiction.

He does not simply photograph celebrities. He photographs what happens when a person becomes an image. That distinction is essential to understanding his place within what Charles Churchward has called The School of Los Angeles. As design director of both American Vogue and Vanity Fair, Churchward commissioned and closely followed the work of Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman, Rolston and others who reshaped the visual language of 1980s Los Angeles. His perspective is that of both an insider and a historian: he is the author of Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour and contributed the defining essay, “Glamour Reborn: Out of the School of Los Angeles,” to Rolston’s Hollywood Royale retrospective. The connection between Ritts, Gorman and Rolston were not merely retrospective. In 1985, David Fahey –then gallery director for G. Ray Hawkins– brought the three photographers together on a gallery wall for Working in L.A. It was a formative moment, giving visual shape to a generation that was already redefining the relationship between photography, celebrity and popular culture. Alongside Ritts and Gorman, Rolston helped transform Hollywood glamour into a new economy of the image. The question was no longer simply how to photograph a star, but how a star is constructed: how a person becomes a character, how that character becomes an image, and how the image can ultimately eclipse the individual. Rolston grew up inside this mythology and learned how to make its machinery visible.

As a child, in his grandfather’s private medical office in Beverly Hills, Rolston was surrounded by images of Hollywood stars. His grandfather was a physician to the stars, particularly MGM figures such as Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, and the portraits that filled his office had been given to him as personal gifts signed affectionately by the stars themselves, displayed in elaborate frames and scattered across tables and desks. Among them were portraits by George Hurrell, the celebrated master of Hollywood glamour, and László Willinger, another leading studio-era portraitist. Long before he considered photography as a profession, Rolston was therefore absorbing its visual grammar almost by osmosis: glamour, sophistication, artifice, theatricality and, above all, Hollywood’s peculiar promise that a camera could transform identity. Later, he immersed himself in his mother’s old issues of Harper’s Bazaar, extending that education from the intimate mythology of Hollywood into the more constructed world of fashion imagery.

His arrival at Andy Warhol’s Interview in 1977 gave this instinct a place to develop. The young photographer had not yet formulated a theory of the image, but he already understood its narrative potential. For his portrait of Steven Spielberg, he did not simply photograph the director; he constructed a science-fiction atmosphere inspired by Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A light hovers above Spielberg’s head as though a spacecraft were suspended just beyond the frame. The portrait ceases to be descriptive. It becomes a proposition. This is where Rolston truly begins: now when the portrait stops asking, “Who is this person?” and starts asking, “Who could this person become?”

CELEBRITY AS RAW MATERIAL

His work is built on a subtle shift: celebrity is no longer the subject of the photograph, but its raw material. Matthew Rolston encounters personalities whose images are already saturated with signs. Madonna is Madonna before she even enters the studio. Prince is Prince. Michael Jackson is already a media construction. Jodie Foster already possesses a public history. The photographer therefore does not have to manufacture an identity from scratch. He intervenes within an existing identity, fissuring it, shifting it, or amplifying it. This is what gives his images their almost cinematic dimension. They do not seek spontaneity; they embrace fabrication.

In Madonna as Marlene, made in 1986, Rolston transforms Madonna into an imagined heir to Marlene Dietrich, the German-born star whose androgynous glamour and sexually ambiguous screen persona helped redefine the image of the Hollywood woman in the 1930s. The reference points specifically to Dietrich in Morocco (1930), Josef von Sternberg’s romantic drama set against the backdrop of the French Foreign Legion, in which she famously plays with masculine dress and performance. But Rolston is not simply paying tribute to a cinematic icon. He layers one image onto another: Dietrich, Morocco, the backstage, the makeup mirror, cross-dressing, classical Hollywood and Madonna, already emerging as the ultimate figure of reinvention. The result is a visual palindrome: Madonna looks back at Dietrich, while Rolston makes us look at Madonna through Dietrich. The same logic runs throughout Rolston’s work. He does not quote the past to illustrate it; he uses it as a latent code, allowing an earlier image to acquire a new charge when inhabited by a contemporary subject. Molly Ringwald, the defining young actress of 1980s Hollywood and a central figure of the so-called “Brat Pack,” is recast as Clara Bow, the original “It Girl,” whose nickname was born from the title of the 1927 silent film It. The quotation is therefore not merely visual: it connects two generations of female stardom, two moments when youth itself became a form of cultural currency. With Jodie Foster, the reference is more oblique. Rolston invokes Dorothy Arzner, the only woman to direct for the major Hollywood studios during the Golden Age, to mark Foster’s own emergence behind the camera. The choice also carries a discreet subtext: Arzner’s life and relationships existed within a largely unspoken queer history of Hollywood. The reference allows Rolston to acknowledge that history without spelling it out. With Cyndi Lauper, the strategy becomes almost mischievous. He places the outspoken 1980s pop star in the visual guise of Mae Murray, a celebrated star of the silent era. The tension between Lauper’s famously expressive persona and the mute, highly stylized language of silent cinema is precisely the point. The quotation works because the two identities do not quite fit. Prince, meanwhile, becomes deliberately unreadable, suspended between masculine and feminine, black and white. Michael Jackson appears crowned before popular culture has fully established him as the “King of Pop.” In each case, the reference is doing more than decorating the image. It creates a collision between identities, eras and cultural memories. For Matthew Rolston, the archive is never inert. It is a living vocabulary. He takes images we think we already know and places them on new bodies, where their meanings begin to shift. The photograph becomes less a portrait than a site of cultural memory in motion.

A PHOTOGRAPHY THAT REMEMBERS

Perhaps this is what makes Rolston’s work particularly compelling today: his photography is profoundly conscious of the history of images. He does not work within a present stripped of references. He works with the ghosts of cinema, fashion, and photography; images that have accumulated meaning over decades and continue to haunt the contemporary frame. That education took place not only through magazines and photographs, but through places. Larry Edmunds, the legendary Hollywood Boulevard bookstore and memorabilia emporium, has long been a landmark for anyone fascinated by the mythology of old Hollywood. Its shelves and archives offer a physical encounter with a vanished visual culture: vintage photographs, movie posters, books, and ephemera from the studio era. For Rolston, such material was not simply collectible. It was a working archive. The vintage prints found at Larry Edmunds, the portraits by Hurrell, his mother’s magazines from the 1930s, figures such as Dietrich and Clara Bow, all of these constitute less an iconographic repertoire than a kind of visual unconscious. They form the deep archive from which Rolston continues to draw, consciously or otherwise. His photographs are contemporary, but they are never innocent of what came before. Matthew Rolston therefore photographs with memory. This is a fundamental distinction. He is not necessarily looking for the new image; he is looking for the precise displacement of an old one. The practice belongs to a postmodern logic in which originality no longer resides in the absence of reference, but in the way, references are reassembled. The image becomes quotation, mental montage, a collision of temporalities. A Rolston photograph can therefore contain several eras at once. Hollywood of the 1930s meets the pop culture of the 1980s. The contemporary star meets his or her historical double. The present begins to perform its own past.

GLAMOUR AS CONTRADICTION

Yet it would be reductive to confine Matthew Rolston to the category of glamour photographer. His glamour of that period was never entirely innocent. There is an acute awareness of artifice in his work, sometimes even a form of visual perversity: the more sophisticated the image appears, the more insistently it seems to ask us to look at what lies behind that sophistication. He frequently cites George Hurrell as one of his major influences. But what interests him in Hurrell is not simply formal perfection. It is the tension contained within it. Hurrell once reportedly summed up glamour as a kind of “suffering look.” True beauty, then, is never entirely comfortable. It needs a flaw, an excess, a sense of unease. This contradiction becomes one of Rolston’s engines. Glamour is sumptuous yet artificial. Celebrity is public yet constructed. The character is fabricated yet may reveal something real. Disguise conceals and, paradoxically, reveals. For Rolston, artifice is not the enemy of truth. At times, it is its revealer.

LOS ANGELES, OR THE FACTORY OF THE IMAGE

This is where the notion of The School of Los Angeles takes on its full significance. In Matthew Rolston’s account, 1970s Los Angeles remained photographically marginal compared with New York. Major East Coast magazines did not yet regard California photographers as natural interlocutors. The situation gradually changed with Matthew Rolston, Herb Ritts, Greg Gorman, and a handful of others. Their work helped bring a sometimes-ironic take on Hollywood glamour back to the foreground and establish Los Angeles as a photographic center. But their shared subject went beyond glamour. It was the image as cultural industry. Hollywood produces films, stars, narratives, bodies, mythologies. Rolston’s photography does not merely record this industry: it reproduces its mechanisms within the frame itself. The studio becomes a set. The photographer becomes a director. The celebrity becomes an actor. The portrait becomes fiction. Matthew Rolston photographs Hollywood as Hollywood would like to be photographed. And sometimes, as Hollywood would like to be believed.

WARHOL: CELEBRITY AS ARTWORK

His connection to Andy Warhol is crucial here. Discovered by Warhol while still a student, Rolston entered Interview and encountered a world in which celebrity was no longer simply a media phenomenon: it had become artistic material. Warhol understood, earlier than many others, that the public persona could itself become a work of art, and that the manufacture of celebrity could become art’s true subject. Rolston inherits this intuition but shifts it. Warhol flattened celebrity into a Pop surface. Rolston stages it. One exposes the mechanical repetition of the icon; the other explores its theatrical possibilities. And yet they share the same fascination: what remains of a person when their image becomes more famous than they are? That question runs throughout Matthew Rolston’s work.

RITTS, GORMAN, ROLSTON: THREE POLITICS OF PORTRAITURE

This is also what makes the comparison between Matthew Rolston, Herb Ritts, and Greg Gorman particularly fertile. They are not three variations on the same style, but three ways of inhabiting the territory of glamour. Ritts works through physical presence, the sculptural body, geometry, and light. Gorman takes a more psychological approach to presence and the face. Rolston pushes portraiture toward theatre, character, and fiction. One might almost say that Ritts sculpts, Gorman reveals, while Rolston transforms. But their real point of connection lies elsewhere: all three understood that the icon never exists naturally. It has to be produced. This may be the deeper meaning of The School of Los Angeles. Not a school with a manifesto, doctrine, or shared aesthetic, but a constellation of photographers who understood, at roughly the same moment, that celebrity had become one of the great visual materials of contemporary culture. Churchward describes them as central figures in the return of Hollywood glamour and in the recognition of West Coast photography by major New York magazines.

FROM ICON TO SELFIE

And then the system turned itself inside out. Contemporary culture no longer needs photographers like Rolston to manufacture its characters on a daily basis. Everyone now has their own studio, their own lighting, their own art director, their own communications department: a phone. The selfie is the paradoxical culmination of this history. What Rolston once accomplished with an entire team—choosing a reference, constructing a scene, styling a body, inventing a light, producing an image can now be experimented with by anyone, alone. The old celebrity was photographed. The new celebrity photographs themselves. Matthew Rolston observes this shift with a certain distance. He recognizes that figures such as Kim Kardashian no longer need a photographer to reinvent their persona; they continuously produce their own visual mythology. Yet this transformation does not make his work obsolete. On the contrary, it allows us to understand it more clearly. Rolston had already identified, long before the explosion of social media, what our era has since generalized: identity is a visual construction. We are no longer simply what we are. We are also the way we choose to appear.

THE IMAGE AFTER THE PERSON

Ultimately, this is where Matthew Rolston’s critical force lies. His photographs of the 1980’s speak less about celebrity than about the progressive disappearance of the boundary between person and character. He does not ask his subjects to be themselves. He gives them the possibility of being several people at once. Madonna becomes Dietrich in order to become Madonna again. Prince becomes indeterminate so that his identity can precisely escape definition. Michael Jackson becomes king before the title is officially bestowed upon him. Jodie Foster becomes Dorothy Arzner. Each time, the invented character does not necessarily conceal identity: it expands it. Matthew Rolston does not photograph identity. He photographs its potential for transformation. Perhaps this is what distinguishes his work from straightforward glamour photography. Glamour becomes a language, costume a syntax, reference a form of memory, and the face a territory of fiction. At a time when everyone can become their own photographer, stylist, and director, his work takes on an almost archaeological dimension. It preserves the memory of a moment when the manufacture of the icon was still a profession. But it also contains something prophetic. What Rolston staged in the 1980s, a transformed identity, a face turned, tongue-in-cheek, into a character, a person turned into an image, has now become one of the ordinary gestures of contemporary culture. The difference may simply be this: Matthew Rolston knew that it was a performance.