Betty Grable, Pin-Up Girl

Betty Grable by Frank Powolney

Betty Grable, actress and pin-up girl star who gave the “most consistently bad performance in 1941” according to the Harvard Lampoon (as quoted in Goldberg, 1991, p. 124), is the focus in what is “probably more famous than any World War II photograph except the raising of the flag in Iwo Jima”(Goldberg, 1991, p. 122). Largely a pawn to Twentieth-Century Fox’s publicity department, to gain popularity, ticket sales, and personal fame; Betty Grable’s iconic pin-up girl image of her looking back towards the camera in high heels and a white bathing suit helped motivate the war front in World War II. Taken by Frank Powolney, “a Fox still photographer”, in the early 1940’s; the picture was taken as part of a publicity shoot and used in promotional contests by Twentieth-Century Fox to advertise Grable’s movies, then later in 1944 used as inspiration and focus of the Pinup Girl movie. Given the context in which the picture was taken, there is very little attention given to the photographer in Vicki Goldberg’s The Power of Photography: How Photos Change Our Lives, although there is much information given on the impact the photo had.

        Besides being one of the better-known World War II photographs of today, at the time Betty Grable’s pin-up girl image was: “prefer[ed]…to all other women. [And,] it was alleged at the time…that one of every fifteen men in the Armed Forces belonged to a unit that had elected her their mascot, dream-girl, honorary commander, or whatever. …A fighter plane called Pin-Up Girl had the picture pasted to its fuselage. …The Air Force made it official by blowing the photograph up large, marking it off in sections, and using it to teach fliers how to read aerial maps. The original photographs as even said to have been found on captured German and Japanese soldiers” (Goldberg, 1991, p. 122).

        Literally changing the landscape of the war front during World War II, Betty Grable’s image was not considered to be just a sex icon for people to stare at, as what images of pin-up girls are commonly seen as being today. Her image stood for what soldiers were fighting for. “One vet is alleged to have said: ‘There we were, in those damn dirty trenches. Machine guns firing. Bombs dropping all around us. We would be exhausted, frightened, confused and sometimes hopeless about our situation, when suddenly someone would pull your [Betty Grable] picture out of his wallet. Or we’d see a decal of you on a plane and then we’d know what we were fighting for” (Goldberg, 1991 p. 122-123). Betty Grable emphasized this thought in the New Yorker (as quoted by Goldberg, 1991, p. 122): “A lot of these kids don’t have any woman in their lives to fight for, and I guess what you would call us girls is kind of their inspiration. It is a grave responsibility.”         

Given all of the information that Vicki Goldberg provided in The Power of Photography: How Photos Change Our Lives on the impact Betty Grable’s pin-up girl image had during the early 1940’s there is no surprise as to why this particular picture was popular. However, out of all the images to have come out during the World War II era, why would Betty Grable’s promotional pin-up girl image be one of the most prevalent and famous even today? As Goldberg pointed out, without context an image such as Grable’s pin-up girl picture today would be viewed as sexist and insignificant. Out of the 1,000s of photos featuring the war front, concentration camps, afflicted people, and political and military leaders from all points of view; Betty Grable’s image still holds value.         

War photography is at times a questionable venture that produces even more questionable product. “In a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask that images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism or good business sense. How else to get attention for one’s product or one’s art? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again?” (Sontag, 2002, p. 5). From a journalistic standpoint were monetary gain and fame can be the best motivators, in order to sell photographic works for publication and gain notoriety the images need to be more breathtaking and captivating than others. When it comes to wartime photography this can mean images of death, pain, and hardship. Both for the photographer and the viewer “[i]t seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is almost as keen as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. …There is a pleasure of flinching” (Sontag, 2002, p. 7). Considering the motivations towards wartime photojournalism one also has to consider the fact that photos are “always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (Sontag, 2002, p. 8). With each additional shocking and disturbing image(s) coming from the view of the lens on the war front “unprecedented coverage of the front line developments ensures that the general public is bombarded with misleading and often bias representations of war” (Trbic, 2006, p. 25).         

When people talk about wartime photography today, particularly World War II, the majority of the time Betty Grable’s image of her in a bathing suit is not commonly brought up, or at least is not the first image people think of. In the class discussion on photographs to teach literacy there were a few from the World War II era, but all were of concentration camps and/or political leaders of the time. As Sontag (2002) states, people remember through images: “The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs. This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding and remembering” (p. 14). World War II was a major war, so naturally what will come to mind first are the images of death and those associated with death. However, considering the potential bias in wartime photography value to images and values given to images can be imposed upon by the photographers’ point of view and/or through those writing the captions (Sontag, 2002).         

Betty Grable’s bathing suit image is then in a sense, one of the most honest images to come out of the World War II era. The photo was blatantly produced for promotion by the studio Betty Grable worked for at the time, and commonly shown without a caption it was up to the viewer to impose their own. Undoubtedly falling into the second strong desire Sontag (2002) mentions “showing bodies naked,” the image is mostly presented as-is with no hidden message or agenda. The importance of the image is then given to by the viewers, most likely due to Grable’s beauty alone. The continued significance it holds today may not necessarily be in the content of the image or the context in which it was taken, but by the common importance and personal value it was given by such a huge amount and wide variety of people.         

“War was, and still is, the most irresistible – and picturesque – news” (Sontag, 2002 p. 10). People will always be drawn to war photography as significant images when discussing twentieth century photography, as war seems to have been (and still is) such a never-ending aspect of life. Capturing the graphic nature of war can be all too easy (although life threatening to the photographer) and all too subjective in nature. It is not necessarily the images that take our breath away for all the wrong reasons that stick, but the very few that give feeling of hope and happiness whether the photographer intended the image to or not.

Bibliography

Goldberg, Viki. (1991). The Power of Photography: How Photos Change Our Lives. New York: Abbeville Press.
Sontag, Susan. (2002, September 12). Looking at War. The New Yorker.
Trbic, Boris (2006). 'The Nightmare of their Choice': Photographic Dispatches from the Frontline. Screen Education, No. 42, 20-25.