James Dean: Intimate portrait

James Dean died 60 years ago, after just one of his films had been released. Fiona Macdonald finds out how photos in a Life essay – brought together in a new book – helped to create an icon. The man who snapped Dean and became his friend, Dennis Stock, is portrayed on screen by Robert Pattinson in the new film Life.

When the Magnum photographer Dennis Stock first saw James Dean in a sneak preview of East of Eden, according to the Hollywood columnist Joe Hyams, he “knew he was witnessing the birth of a star, and felt that Dean’s appeal was immediate”. Stock went on to capture the actor – who died at the age of 24 in September 1955 – in a photo essay that seemed to offer an immediacy to match.

During the early months of 1955, he photographed Dean marching through a rainy Times Square and lying in a frozen barnyard in Indiana; stretching out his arms at a dance class with Eartha Kitt and playing bongos at a Sweethearts Ball in his old high school. In the images, he appears at times lost in thought, cheeky, unsure and puckish. This was before Dean had become famous. When he was killed in a car crash, just one of the films he starred in had been released: it was this series of photos that helped create the James Dean of the public imagination.

A new book brings together Stock’s pictures for the first time since they were printed in Life magazine 60 years ago. Published by Thames & Hudson on 6 October, Dennis Stock: James Dean offers a glimpse at the young actor in unguarded moments as well as revealing the tentative poses of a fledgling movie star. As Hyams wrote in an essay that appears as the introduction, “no photographers at that time had ever visited the childhood home of an actor, because few actors had ever been willing to expose their roots, to admit that the seeds of their talent came from quite ordinary soil”.

Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos

Dean’s mother died when he was nine and his father sent him to live with his uncle and aunt in Indiana. Stock documented his return to their farm, writing in a text accompanying the photos that “it is probable that Jimmy never got over his mother’s death”; in the grey half-light of a Midwest February, the photographer snapped him in pensive mood. Other pictures reveal Dean’s humour, as he grins lopsidedly while sitting cross-legged in a yard surrounded by cattle, or plays his bongo drum to a pig.

“At this point he was straddling two worlds – the world of his origins in Fairmount and the early stages of stardom,” wrote Stock. “And so he went back to Fairmount, to examine his origins.” During his trip home, Dean asked his grandparents about his background. As Stock remembered, “One factor they didn’t discuss, which certainly was pertinent, was that as a child Jimmy used to play theatre with his mother. They had built a stage, and they would make up plays, which they then would perform with little dolls.”

Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos

Another image shows Dean at a rehearsal for a TV drama. Stock’s thoughts on his acting style accompany the photos: “Capitalising on the limits of the adolescent’s ability to articulate, Dean used his body to the utmost. His expressions were exceptionally graphic… I mentally photographed his rich variety of powerful gestures.” That range of expressions found its way into Stock’s images, which never settle into Hollywood formality.

 “I was aware that the relationship could be parasitical if I did not photograph in meaningful ways, but simply relaxed with the exclusive opportunities I had to cover stars and up-and-coming stars,” Stock wrote. “Dull photographs of famous people are often acclaimed primarily because of the status of the subject.” In the image below, Dean strides through Times Square, peering ruefully at the rain clouds. “If the photograph was good in spite of the subject, I felt I had succeeded.”

Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos

“The story, as I explained it, was to reveal the environments that affected and shaped the unique character of James Byron Dean,” wrote Stock. “I made a point of socialising a great deal with Jimmy, for the more I knew about his moods, the easier it would be to anticipate gestures and situations.”

One photo offers an eerie coincidence as Dean looks at the headstone of an ancestor in Fairmount who shared the name of Dean’s character in East of Eden. Stock – who died in 2010 – later recalled how he felt when he first saw the film: “as young Cal, who struggles to communicate with an intransigent father he loves, Dean expressed hues and shadings of adolescence that had probably never been seen before.”

Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos

The images from the Fairmount trip reveal an uneasy homecoming. As Stock wrote, “For Jimmy it was going home. But it was also the realisation that the meteoric rise to fame that had already begun… had cut him off forever from his small-town Midwestern origins, and that he could never go home again.”

It was a photo essay that “revealed the origins of the actor” – but it was also to provide a haunting record of the actor after his early death. Several images show Dean posing playfully in a coffin at a Fairmount furniture store. As Stock recorded, “He would return to Fairmount in a coffin only seven months later.”

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