Stars, ready for their close-ups

How, then, might still photographers make their work as arresting as images that move? That was the dilemma that faced Hollywood studio photographers during the ’20s, ’30s, ’40, and ’50s. By the ’60s, several factors — the arrival of television, the dissolution of the studio system, the rise of Method acting — had altered the equation.

What photographers like George Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull did was use the same things the movies did, only more so: glamour, stylization, expressive angles, dramatic lighting, retouching. “Made in Hollywood: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation,’’ which runs at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art through Sept. 12, offers more than 90 examples of this alluring craft as practiced by Hurrell, Bull, and four dozen of their colleagues. It isn’t the most challenging or illuminating show. It’s hard to imagine a more purely pleasurable one, though.

Hollywood portraiture is a genre unto itself in the same way that court painting is. With both, recording an individual’s appearance is of secondary importance to flattering that individual. Any good portrait of a famous person assesses, or even interrogates, that person’s public image. What both Hollywood portraits and court painting do is affirm that image — and they do so with the complicity of viewers. Just as subjects want their monarch to look worthy of their allegiance, so do moviegoers want their favorite stars to look worthy of their desire.

John Kobal may have been the first person to recognize the special appeal, and lasting value, of Hollywood photography. Certainly he was the first to act on that recognition. In the ’60s, Kobal began collecting vintage prints of studio portraits and production stills. He amassed more than 4,500 of them before his death, in 1991. The only comparable collection is the Michael Ochs Archives, for rock ’n’ roll and popular music, which is now owned by Getty Images. Yet there’s a crucial difference between the two. There are three million items in the Ochs Archives. Kobal, in contrast, preferred class to mass. Documentation was fine, but adoration was what he was after.