A Collection of Vintage Photos Feat. Greta Nissen

Greta Nissen (1906 – 1988) was a Norwegian-born American film and stage actress. Nissen was originally a dancer. She made her debut as a solo ballerina at the National Theatre in 1922. She toured Norway and participated in several Danish films.

In early 1924 she went as a member of a Danish ballet troupe to New York. There she was hired to do larger dance numbers. Here she was discovered by film producer Jesse L. Lasky of Paramount Pictures, and would appear in more than twenty films.

She was the original choice for leading lady in Hell’s Angels (1930), an epic film made by Howard Hughes. But she lost the part due to her strong Norwegian accent.

In 1933 she moved to England and In 1937 she retired from acting in films altogether.

Greta Nissen via

Greta Nissen via

Greta Nissen via

Greta Nissen via

 Greta Nissen via

 Greta Nissen in Fazil via

Incredible Vintage Portraits by M. I. Boris (1887-1962)

M. I. Boris (Boris Majdrakoff) was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and educated in the studio of the pioneer Balkan photographer and Bulgarian freedom fighter Toma Hitrov by Hitrov’s widow, Elena Chernova. Boris eventually married their daughter Ivanka Hitrova, also a photographer. In 1922, in pursuit of Ivanka, and to evade retribution for shooting a man, he moved to New York.

Throughout the 1920s, he expanded into Society portraiture as a supplement to his theatrical and movie star projects. In the late 1930s, his style grew less painterly and more “straight” as he established himself as a fixture in the New York scene.

An adherent of Jungenstil, the proto-modernist aesthetic that reigned in Austria before the War, Boris developed a mode of portrait photography with sinuous profiles and backgrounds aswirl with quasi-abstract graphic patterning. He brought the style to New York in 1923. His pictures bear strong affinities with those of Orval Hixon, Homer K. Peyton, and William Mortensen in the aggressive manipulation of the negative and the concern with creating a synthetic image of great allure.

His vintage prints of the 1920s are among the rarest and most visually arresting of the portraitists of the inter-war years (source).

Dorothy Phillips, by M. I. Boris via

Greta Nissen, by M.I. Boris c.1926 via

Louise Brooks, by M.I. Boris c.1926 via

Lois Wilson, by M.I. Boris c.1922 via

Katherine Burke, 1923 via