Giving Fame a Face : A photography exhibit at the Getty Museum addresses basic questions about being in a state of renown, such as ‘How do you create it?’

Fame used to be all talk.

Say you were a peasant in some far-flung province of Mother Russia in the middle of the 15th Century. All you knew about the Tsar of all the Russias was what you had heard. As to the visage of the Imperial Presence, for all you knew, he looked just like your Uncle Boris.

But, in the view of Getty Museum curator Gordon Baldwin, fame changed forever in the middle of the 19th Century. The reason? The invention of photography. As Baldwin explains, the new medium gave fame “a precise visual component it had not had before.”

Photography gave fame a face.

Baldwin, who is the Getty’s assistant curator of photographs, has chosen 45 of those faces to include in an exhibit called “Fame and Photography” that opens Tuesday at the museum in Malibu.

Southern California--universally acknowledged as the home of the fame industry--is an ideal place to contemplate the questions Baldwin addresses in the show, including, What is fame? Does fame last? And how to do you create fame?

Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty, thinks fame is an especially resonant theme for a photo exhibit. “Fame is a two-edged sword,” he says. “It has a noble side and a terrible side.” It is also a conundrum: “Is fame the spur that causes the clear spirit to rise high or is it something that drags us down?”

Almost inevitably, some of the portraits are of Hollywood stars. The first image visitors will see as they enter the exhibit is Edward Steichen’s 1924 portrait of Gloria Swanson.

She, of course, was the actress who uttered the famous line about movie stars--”We had faces then”--in “Sunset Boulevard.” But the face of the woman in this portrait, shot through a mysterious layer of black lace, is famous and intriguingly unfamiliar. Steichen’s Swanson is a visual surprise, a provocative variant on a face that moviegoers must have thought they knew almost as well as their own, having seen it so often, so much larger than life, on the silver screen.

Baldwin explains that, in the last century, there was a brisk trade in photographs of famous people. People bought cartes-de-visite, as photos of a certain size were called, collected them and displayed them in albums: They were the culturally respectable precursors of baseball cards. From the first, long before the advent of motion pictures, actors were favorite subjects. Indeed, the types of people who became famous then were the same types whose faces now fill the tabloids--political figures, artists of various kinds and royals.

“Sometimes you set out to make someone famous,” Baldwin says of some of the photographers in the show. He points to a portrait of the teen-age Prince of Wales taken by John Jabez Edwin Mayall in the 1850s. Mayall chose to shoot the future Edward VII in the uniform of a naval cadet. The authoritative costume suggests the even greater authority the adolescent king-to-be will eventually wield.

Great photographers have had the power to enhance the celebrity of people they admire. Baldwin cites the Frenchman Nadar (Gaspar Felix Tournachon), whose portraits of writers George Sand and Alexandre Dumas ( pere ) are among those to be shown.

“Nadar literally created a photographic pantheon of the artistically distinguished in Paris in the 1860s,” Baldwin says. The image of Sand is especially intriguing. Although Sand both scandalized and fascinated polite society by wearing men’s clothes and having affairs with Frederic Chopin and others, Nadar presents an eminently respectable Sand to the world.

Photographed at 60, the aging writer appears in an elegant dress, her coiffure perfect, handsome hanging earrings echoing the vertical lines time has dug deep in her face. Her expression is as thoughtful, even grave, as that of any of the male literary lions Nadar also froze for all time.

Baldwin emphasizes that this is not an exhibit of Hollywood portraits, although it includes such unforgettable images of stars as Cecil Beaton’s 1932 picture of Marlene Dietrich. (In that exquisitely lit photo, Dietrich engages in an aesthetic duel with an orchid and wins.)

Indeed, one of Baldwin’s theses is that fame is ephemeral, and so some of the photos are of the forgotten famous. Which is how Matthew Brady’s portrait of N.P. Willis came to be in the show. N.P. who? you may ask. Explains Baldwin, Willis was a journalist and a dandy whose name was once on everybody’s lips. “Now nobody knows who he is.”

“Brady was an indefatigable promoter of the idea of celebrity,” says Baldwin. He points out that Lincoln believed that Brady’s 1860 portrait of him at Cooper Union was a factor in his winning the presidency.

“If you’re doing a show of the famous, you’ve got to include at least one person who’s infamous,” says Baldwin. The exhibit’s notorious slot is filled by Rasputin. The photo of the mad monk who mesmerized Tsarina Alexandra Romanov was taken by Dmitri Wasserman, one of several little-known photographers whose work will hang beside that of such famous photographic artists as Julia Margaret Cameron. (Man Ray is among the superstars to be featured. His portraits include one made in 1920 of Rrose Selavy, a chic-looking flapper of a certain age who is actually the artist Marcel Duchamp in drag.)

Many of the portraits demonstrate the artist’s ability to manipulate his or her subject. A startling example is the 1960 photographic collage by Philippe Halsman that combines two diametrically opposed famous faces to create “A Portrait of Marilyn Monroe as Mao Tse-Tung.”

Baldwin also has included a strip of self-portraits Andy Warhol made in a photo booth in the 1960s. The masterful self-promoter is an especially apt subject for this show, Baldwin says. “Warhol was probably more involved with notions of fame than any artist of his generation.”

As an aside, Baldwin notes that the photo collection is the only Getty collection that includes American works or work from the 20th Century, such as the Warhol photos.

Baldwin quotes Warhol’s observation that everyone can expect to be famous for 15 minutes. Baldwin suspects that fame is becoming even more fleeting, as we are inundated with more and more visual images. If the age of photography gave fame a face, the era of MTV is cranking out so many new faces that fame may soon last no longer than a mayfly.

“Now it’s famous, diluted,” says Baldwin. “Fame is beginning to fragment.”

The exhibit will continue through May 23 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. Admission free, but advanced parking reservations required. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m Tuesday through Sunday. For information and reservations, call (310) 458-2003. For information in Spanish, call (310) 458-1104.