Fred R. Archer

Fred R. Archer (1889 – April 27, 1963), was an American photographer who collaborated with Ansel Adams to create the Zone System. He was a portrait photographer, specializing early in his career in portraits of Hollywood movie stars. He was associated with the artistic trend in photography known as pictorialism. He later became a photography teacher, and ran his own photography school for many years.

Along with Edward Weston, whose portrait he took, Archer was known as one of the "two big names in art photography in those days out on the west coast". He socialized with and exchanged ideas with many other artists and intellectuals in Los Angeles for decades. He was "without a doubt, the individual with the longest history of participation in the Southern California Salon movement."

Raised in Los Angeles, Archer was experimenting with pictorialist photography as early as 1915, when he made a portrait of Edward Weston. Archer served in a military aerial photography unit in France in World War I, and returned to the United States in May, 1919. He began studying commercial art, and photography was at that time a hobby of his. In less than a year, Archer gained critical attention in two east coast photography journals, American Photography and Photo-era Magazine, which reported that he had exhibited five "somber" photos of the World War I battlefields of France at the Seventh Pittsburgh Salon.

In the early 1920s, he was hired as assistant head of the Art Title Department for Universal Pictures and was promoted to head the department the following year. He soon moved on to motion picture photography.

He worked for Warner Brothers as a portrait photographer until 1929, and later worked for Paramount Pictures. He also became a pioneer of advertising photography on the west coast.

In 1928, he wrote an influential article along with fellow photographer Elmer Fryer called "Still photography in motion picture work". Fryer succeeded Archer as head of photography at Warner Brothers in 1929.

Their article described the importance of still photography in advertising, marketing, production reference work and trick photography. According to Archer and Fryer, "A good 'still' will attract and hold attention where many poor ones will receive but a passing glance. Photography has striven for years to gain acceptance among the arts and the struggle has been long and hard. It is only within the last few years that photography has been raised from pure mechanics and given its well deserved place with the other arts." Their slogan was "the still sells the movies" which was a Hollywood truism for many years.

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