A Little Glamour In His Portraits

After 40 years as a professional photographer for dozens of publications (mostly Time Inc.) and photographing 13 books on sailing and architecture, Christopher Little is having some fun with his friends and his neighborhood.  

Little, currently a Norfolk EMT and mystery book writer, is still a photographer though his interests have shifted closer to home. His current show of photographs at the Norfolk Library, “High and The Mighty,” is twofold.  “High” — a group of color pictures of local scenes taken with a drone is hung on the back wall of the Library. Up front and around the side wall hangs “The Mighty” — a group of 18 black and white portraits.  

At People magazine, where he worked from the very first issue in the early 1970s, Little did portraits and picture stories about 74 different authors, in addition to hundreds of stories about all kinds of people, famous and not so famous. 

Using his skills  as a photographer of people, he staged the “Mighty” portraits to mimic old time Hollywood glamour portraiture. He persuaded his local friends (though he says not much arm twisting was involved) to impersonate certain early 20th century “types”— gangsters, gun molls, glamour girls and socialites. He emulated the lighting style of the famed Hollywood portrait photographer George Hurrell. The style, called “glamour lighting” in the industry, is iconic but rarely used any more. Often using five lights in the small studio he has in his basement, Little created a dramatic shadowy light around these characters. Their faces, transformed by the light, emerge from a dark mysterious background — not so much as portraits of themselves — but as renditions of an idea. 

Al Boucher, cigarette hanging from his mouth, smoke curling around his head, looks more like an esteemed mystery writer than the plumber that he is. Michaela Murphy, dressed in a feathered velvet beret, looks more a 1930s bohemian socialite than the art photographer and gas station owner that she is. Sometimes, the real character isn’t so far from the imagined one —Tony Kiser, man about town, entrepreneur and philanthropist is sporting an ascot, a panama hat at a rakish angle and a frisky glint in his eye. 

“High,” also from the work Little has completed in the last year, are much smaller color prints of familiar village scenes. The photographs are aerials shot with a drone and, because of the “tilt/shift effect applied to them, have the look of a model railroad town viewed from above. 

Because things tend to happen in threes — Little’s two bodies of work are showing at exactly the same time as the debut of his novel, “Ever So Silent: An Emma Thorne Mystery,” which is now available on Amazon and at the Norfolk Library.

“High and The Mighty” is at the Norfolk Library, through August. 9 Greenwoods Road East, Norfolk, CT 860-542-5075, www.norfolklibrary.org.