Harrison Ford, Sharon Stone among portraits in new exhibit at Sotheby's Palm Beach
From the bright lights of Hollywood to the remote jungles of Honduras, Nancy Ellison traveled the world during her decades-long career as a photojournalist and portrait photographer.
For the next month, some of her work will be displayed at an exhibition hosted by Sotheby's Palm Beach at the Slat House in Royal Poinciana Plaza.
"Nancy Ellison: Icons Unveiled" is the first selling exhibition of the season for Sotheby's, which returns to Palm Beach for its fourth year.
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Featuring 33 portraits of pop culture icons such as Harrison Ford, Sharon Stone, Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson, the exhibition will be on display through Oct. 29. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; it is open on Tuesdays by appointment.
Ellison, a longtime resident, took the portraits over a three-decade period starting in the mid-1970s.
Sotheby's selected the photos for display at the exhibition, which debuted Friday.
"We are thrilled to kick off a fourth season in Palm Beach with ‘Nancy Ellison: Icons Unveiled,' a selling exhibition from the celebrated photojournalist and portrait photographer whose works are not only iconic but intrinsic, and capture her subjects’ essence," said Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s Head of Impressionist and Modern Art, Americas.
"A dear friend and trailblazing photographer in her own right, Nancy has received remarkable institutional and commercial success, and it is an honor to be entrusted with this range of works."
Ellison, 87, a Los Angeles native and grandmother of two who has lived in Palm Beach with her husband, Bill Rollnick, for nearly two decades, is a trained painter who became interested in photography in the 1960s.
While visiting photographer Robert Franck at his New York City studio shortly after her college graduation, she came across a table filled with contact sheets.
She began examining them and found herself mesmerized.
"Robert came over and said he usually didn't allow anyone to see his contact sheets," Ellison recalled. "I wouldn't let go. I held in front of me magic, art, beauty, and America as we honestly knew it to be. He and his contact sheets changed my life forever."
Ellison borrowed a camera and started taking photos of her sister-in-law, who was a young model.
Later, she photographed models for Ford Agency, an international modeling agency based in New York City.
"These beautiful young girls would make their way up five flights of stairs to be photographed by a young woman in paint-spattered work clothes," Ellison recalled. "I had no clue as to what I was doing. But my training as an artist led the way to both beautiful light and a keen understanding of the face and its angles."
Ellison's professional career took off after she returned to Los Angeles in the 1970s.
Her then-husband, film producer Jerome Hellman, suggested she visit the set of "The Day of the Locust," a 1975 film starring Donald Sutherland and Karen Black on which he was working.
Ellison took photos from the set, and her work caught the attention of the Sygma photo agency.
She was hired by the agency and then sent around the world to shoot images ranging from movie stars and singers to indigenous communities in Central America.
"Hollywood was the door that opened me to photo agencies and to the opportunity to work as a photojournalist," Ellison said. "For nearly two decades I worked on assignment covering Hollywood and human interest stories, from Mosquito Indians to the CIA in Central America, to headhunters in Borneo."
No matter the assignment, Ellison worked hard to make her subjects look good and find "the intrinsic value" of who they were as human beings.
"If it's a woman, I want to find her sexuality, because I want all women to shine," she said. "I'm in collusion, especially with women. I want men to be their strongest. Everybody should be their strongest."
After Ellison remarried, she began focusing her attention on the arts. She and Rollnick moved to New York City, where she shot the Metropolitan Opera and American Ballet Theatre. She also took photos at the White House.
Ellison published more than a dozen books of her photos.
In Palm Beach, where she moved in 2005, she continues to wield her camera.
"The island, I discovered, and its ghosts, are far more interesting than simply a conclave of wealth and power," she said. "I grew up in Hollywood, a town filled with eccentric naive dreamers. Palm Beach has its own beautiful, eccentric soul.
"Only two personalities have been buried in Palm Beach. One is Addison Mizner’s spider monkey, Johnnie Brown. The other is his dog, Laddie. And where else can you find a mansion whose architect forgot to include an interior staircase? Obviously I am drawn to characters, eccentrics, singers, bookworms, headhunters, poets and gardeners. The list is endless, and all that speaks to the heart of this town."
Sotheby's is at 50 Cocoanut Row, Suite 101. For more information, visit www.sothebys.com/en/about/locations/palm-beach.
Jodie Wagner is a journalist at the Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at jwagner@pbdailynews.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Pop culture icons on display in new exhibition at Sotheby's Palm Beach
