Art Shay. Liz Enjoying Smell-O-Vision with Husband Eddie Fisher, Chicago.

A January night in Chicago

In January 1960, in Chicago, the photojournalist Art Shay photographed Elizabeth Taylor and her then husband, the singer Eddie Fisher, in a cinema. They were watching Scent of Mystery, the first film to use the Smell-O-Vision system.

The print is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, a gift from Shay himself. It is a gelatin silver print, about 31 by 24.5 cm. The back carries a Life magazine stamp, a photographer's credit stamp, Shay's signature and pencilled notes, among them the words Liz & Eddie. These are the traces of a picture that once passed through a newsroom.

The title says Liz is enjoying herself. Shay's own account, kept by the museum, tells another story. As he tells it, the couple were diplomatically making believe they enjoyed it. The picture is a moment of public politeness, not quite a true reaction.

The machine in the basement

Smell-O-Vision was developed by the Swiss born Hans Laube. Scent of Mystery was produced by Mike Todd Jr. and directed by Jack Cardiff. According to Variety's review, odours were piped through plastic tubing to individual seats, released on cue by signals on the soundtrack.

The world premiere took place on 6 January 1960 at the Todds' Cinestage Theatre in Chicago. Taylor came to Chicago that month for a personal reason. Mike Todd, her late husband, was the producer's father. According to Shay, she came to Chicago to introduce the venture of Todd and his son.

In Shay's account, one scene is set in an orange grove, and the scent of orange blossom was blown up from the basement into the auditorium. When the leading lady came close to the camera, the audience would smell her perfume over everything else. He described the smell machines below as looking like the engine room of a submarine.

A huge apparatus to produce something invisible. And according to Variety, not everyone at the premiere claimed to have smelled what was released.

The photographer outside the game

Art Shay was born in 1922 in the Bronx and took up photography at twelve. According to the Art Institute of Chicago, he served in the US Air Force in the Second World War, then worked for Time and Life. In 1948 he moved to Chicago and turned to photography full time. More than 25,000 of his pictures were published, over 1,000 of them magazine covers.

Shay photographed the famous and the poor, big news and private moments. In this picture he stands where a clear eyed observer stands. He is not swept up by the promise of a new technology. He watches people sitting in front of it.

Smell-O-Vision, in Shay's words, was one of Mike Todd's few financial flops. He closed his account with a pun: critics agreed it stank. Twenty years later John Waters borrowed exactly that joke for Polyester; see Polyester in Odorama.

The photograph was shown in a collection rotation at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Viewers standing before it more than half a century later smell nothing. They see only two faces, and guess what the cinema smelled like that night.