On the set of The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1965.
Photo: Ernst Haas
The Camera Behind the Cameras
On sets with Ernst Haas.
‘THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD’ (directed by George Stevens, 1965).
Ernst Haas photographed just about everything he could get in front of his lens. When he died in 1986, he left a huge body of work depicting deserts in the Southwest, skyscrapers in New York, pedestrians in Paris, monks in Vietnam. And movie stars — lots of movie stars. Haas looked at a movie set with a documentarian’s eye. The selections here, from the collection Ernst Haas: On Set (out this spring, from Steidl), take visible pleasure in Hollywood’s absurd, arresting artifice. And by the way: That really is Joan Collins’s derrière, next to the HANDS OFF sign.
*This article appears in the April 6, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.