Louise Brooks

The American silent-film actress Louise Brooks (1906-1985) is one of the great female icons in the history of the cinema. Although she starred in over thirty films, Brooks is best known for the role of Lulu in the classic German film Pandora's Box (1929), directed by G.W. Pabst. As played by Brooks, Lulu was a jazz-age beauty wearing high-fashion clothes and a severe black bob. She embodied the ideal of the Weimar-era "New Woman," a social role that connoted political equality, free-spiritedness, and gender ambiguity. Drawing on the vast Louise Brooks archive at the George Eastman House, this exhibition will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her birth. It is organized by International Center of Photography Assistant Curator Vanessa Rocco, and is the eleventh in the "New Histories of Photography" series, a project of the ICP/GEH Alliance.