Jeff Burton - Glamour Shots

In 1989, aspiring painter Jeff Burton was looking for work, having just graduated from the Master’s program at CalArts. He chanced upon an ad for a production company seeking a stills photographer. Burton had arrived in Los Angeles two years earlier, aged 24, a Texas transplant with stars in his eyes, an obsession with vintage Hollywood glamour, and dreams of working on movies. Instead, he found himself working in ‘The other Hollywood’, the pornography industry, with its own set of stars and notions of glamour. A world that delivered rather than just teased.

 

Burton had never taken photographs professionally and learnt on the job. Tasked with taking promotional images for film posters, box and magazine covers, and working by instinct, he quickly developed an aesthetic that drew on influences high and low, taking in sources as diverse as the Kobal Collection photographs of Hollywood icons, designs of classic albums from the 60s and 70s, and the portraiture of John Singer Sargent. These he invariably shot initially on Polaroid as tests for lighting and styling.

 

The polaroids, thousands of them, mostly shot over the course of a decade for Catalina Video (which Burton fondly describes as the ‘Disney of gay porn’) and Falcon Studios, sat untouched in his archive for years; ephemera from a vocation he had long left behind.

 

Glamour Shots, published by BARON, is a collection of those cover images, removed from the means of production and set alongside others more recognisable from work Burton later exhibited through his longtime gallerist, Casey Kaplan, at museums and galleries worldwide, and which resides in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) and the Guggenheim (New York).

 

This is Burton’s fifth monograph. The others are Untitled, Dreamland, The Other Place, and Las Vegas. In them, Burton delineated a liminal space between art, porn, and photography, between looking and seeing, abstraction and desire. He has moved between the worlds of fine art and high fashion, shooting campaigns for Tom Ford, Yves Saint Laurent, Cartier, Cerruti, and editorials for Paris Vogue, W, New York Times, Numero, Arena, and Interview, blurring the lines between commercial and visual art. Glamour Shots tells the story of how that work came to be.

 

Hardback Book

112 Pages

21.5 x 25.5 cm

Pre-order delivery Autumn/Winter 2026