This week on The All Worlds Traveller, we continue Distant Era’s 2025 series Golden Age of the Silver Screen, an exploration of hard light and Hollywood during the big studio era of the early twentieth century. In part four of our series, we (re)introduce the extraordinarily talented actor and makeup artist Jacque Bischoff.
Our first entries into the series featured Gary Henderson, Elizabeth Quilter, and Charissa and Russell Johnson with looks that recalled Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Walt Disney, Vincent Price, Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, Fred Astaire, and film noir.
Jacque Bischoff
Jacque has appeared frequently in The All Worlds Traveller over the past few months. We met during photography for Idle Muse Theatre Company’s production of The Tempest, in which Jacque played Ariel (with five other actors, including Gary Henderson) and for which Jacque designed makeup. Thanks to a recommendation from Idle Muse managing director Kati Lechner, we began working together regularly. Jacque did makeup for Natania and Nick’s engagement session, for Gary Henderson’s and Kati Lechner’s headshots, and also for her own headshot session in December of 2024. Jacque is an excellent communicator with a high degree of professionalism who brings her best to her work.
When we discussed the series, Jacque said, “I love the idea of playing with gender for a shoot like this, because there aren’t a lot of women photographed in those kinds of silhouettes. I’ve attached a couple of images that I really like.”
The images Jacque sent referenced Marlene Dietrich, Nicole Kidman (in a retro shoot) and Nella Regini, which should give some context for the direction we took the session.
The Session
Inspired by the images Jacque sent and the wardrobe she put together, we built our session. I was particularly struck by the light in the Nicole Kidman retro reference image, which we attempted to emulate in some of our shots. Jacque was the fourth subject we photographed, following Elizabeth MacDougald’s test session, Gary Henderson, and the Johnsons.
In the Spotlight
I’d finished the Johnsons’ session with a spotlight earlier that week and wanted to start with that light while I still had my setup in place for that kind of shot. Jacque flowed from one idea to the next, and we kept shooting until we had an abundance of images.
Shaping Light on the Background
We swapped our spotlight out for a window gobo. It seemed to go with Jacque’s hat and coat, a noir kind of look. In this setup, she looked like a character who’d walked straight out of Gotham City. Considering Batman first appeared in Detective Comics in 1939, we were in just the right era. Once again, we shot until we had an abundance of options we loved.
Focusing Light and Obscuring Shadows
Throughout our session, while Jacque delivered look after interesting look, I concentrated on focusing the light for each of those looks, choosing which part of the image to reveal and what to obscure. We created these effects by our choice of hard light and its positioning. This is a natural progression of the work we began in our second series, Portraits from a Distant Era, and continued (quite deliberately) through The People of Light and Shadow.
All That Jazz
Having photographed the whole session with spotlights and gobos, I wanted to end with a sequence under more traditional Hollywood lighting reminiscent of the period, so I placed a hard light reflector on my light, and we did a final array of images. I know that Jacque is a skilled improvisor and clown, so near the end I just told her to cut loose and do whatever, which yielded a lot of wonderfully fun images.
Editing and Post Processing
Golden Age of the Silver Screen has been a unique editing experience. In our initial test session with Distant Era MVP Elizabeth MacDougald, the images looked great right out of camera. After working months and months to produce a single result from our other current series, Gods and Heroes of the Aegean, it felt so freeing to have images ready to go right away. So what ways did I find to complicate the process?
Introducing Imperfection
Comparing our initial test images with photographs from Hollywood’s golden age, the digital images are extremely sharp and accurate. In the 1930s and 1940s, George Hurrell was shooting on 8 x 10 film through uncoated lenses, the film often underexposed, developed intensely for high contrast before being physically retouched; the effect is stylistically different from what our modern cameras produce directly out of camera. Even the color of the black-and-white images from the Golden Age of Hollywood varies remarkably—just take a look at the references Jacque provided at the beginning of this post. Most of my inspirations for Golden Age of the Silver Screen weren’t a straight black-and-white conversion in an image editing program; many had a subtle tint to them that I didn’t immediately recognize until I began working on my own images.
Revising in Reverse
For most of Golden Age of the Silver Screen, I wasn’t satisfied with using the images right out of camera, no matter how good they looked.
Throughout the series, I introduced imperfections to the images, from sharpness to color cast, in order to bring them closer to the images that inspired me. That is, until we reached our final session with Elizabeth Quilter, when I placed softening filters on my lenses. As a result, that session has comparatively little post processing, since the results were, to my eyes, much closer to the images of the period. It was a consequence of fate that Elizabeth Quilter’s birthday fell at the time I was ready to launch Golden Age of the Silver Screen. It meant I’d release that session first, as a birthday gift for Elizabeth, and then I’d edit all the sessions I’d photographed previously so that they aligned with the look we’d established using filters on our lenses.
Working with Jacque Bischoff is always a pleasure, whether as coworkers creating something for our client or making art together. I am grateful for her excellent work and collaboration.
