In the 1920s and ’30s, if you wanted your picture in The New York Times — and almost anyone promoting a Broadway play or a charitable ball or an Antarctic expedition wanted to be pictured in The New York Times — you wouldn’t wait for us to come to you. You’d come to us.

Specifically, you’d come to the ninth floor at 239 West 43rd Street, under the same roof as the newspaper (but with a slightly different street address), where you’d find what a brochure described as a “splendid new studio

with sumptuously furnished waiting room for distinguished visitors, private dressing rooms for fashion models (to supply an ever-growing American and European demand for the latest American fashion pictures), dark rooms for developing and finishing pictures, a file room for thousands of photos and films of all persons appearing in the news.

History in Images The Lively Morgue The newsroom archive, called the morgue, has millions of photos. Most haven’t been seen for generations. Lens is dipping into this treasury to win a new audience for these remarkable images.

In the era between the world wars — even as smaller cameras, more sensitive films and near-instantaneous transmission methods were being pioneered — the studio photograph remained the staple of illustration in the pages of The Times. Such pictures are easy to dismiss today as stilted, archaic and fantastic. But they offer a window into their time that even an armchair anthropologist can open. Men conquer the planet. Women are introduced to society. Everyone is white and — except for actors — terribly earnest.

And reality is an illusion.

Consider Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd (Slide 1), “in the suit of sealskin he will wear when he flies over the South Pole,” according to The Times Mid-Week Pictorial supplement of Sept. 11, 1928. Looking every bit the “gallant knight of the 20th century,” Commander Byrd indomitably braces himself against the howling Antarctic winds with one hand on a tent (that seems unaffected by the icy blast coming in from the right) and the other on a pair of snowshoes, which — instructively — he is not wearing, since the snow seems to have the consistency of a firm mattress. If you had the photo in front of you, you’d see that the ambient weather is all the work of an airbrush. The print is almost heavy with paint.

The Times didn’t seem to come clean on the fact that Commander Byrd was “in costume” until they ran a picture from the same studio setting in the paper of Nov. 30, 1929, after Byrd had indeed flown over the pole.

The New York Times

Luminaries were legion in the photo studio. That’s Charles Laughton in Slide 2, as Hercule Poirot in “The Fatal Alibi,” which was about to open on Broadway when this picture was published on Feb. 7, 1932. Three days later, The Times’s drama critic, who then signed himself J. Brooks Atkinson, alternately praised Laughton’s “immensely entertaining exercise in poster portraiture” and lamented the fact that his colorful acting “diverts attention from the play.” Theatergoers might have guessed as much from the studio portrait.

While Laughton is almost instantly recognizable to people of a certain age, you might have to squint to make out the figures of Beatrice Lillie and Noel Coward in Slide 4, published on Jan. 13, 1929, when they were appearing in “This Year of Grace,” a revue for which Coward also wrote the book, music and lyrics. Spoiler: he’s on the right.

Even less familiar to modern eyes are such contemporary giants as the tenor Richard Crooks (Slide 13), a star of the Metropolitan Opera and the “Voice of Firestone” broadcasts, in a portrait that might almost have been painted in the 18th century; and John Barbirolli (Slide 6), at one time the music director of the New York Philharmonic, in a photograph that was very much of the Art Deco moment.

The New York Times

Princess Ketto Mikeladze (Slide 5), whose name scarcely registers in any household today, was once a dependable regular in the society pages, forever giving or attending charity balls when she wasn’t busy in her own gown and lingerie shop, Ketto Inc., at 8 West 56th Street. Her husband, the prince, had been killed in the Russian Revolution.

And how about that Kenneth McKenna? (Slide 15.) Ain’t he the bee’s knees? His was among the portraits of the “Matinee Idols of 1926,” published Dec. 26 that year. “Florenz Ziegfeld, America’s Most Famous Judge of Beauty, Selects the Handsomest Men of Broadway,” the headline said. Yes, The Times once ran its own “Sexiest Men” pictorial. Basil Rathbone was in it, too, if that gives you some idea how hot it was.

The Times has always been more of a picture paper than popular perception would have it. But it’s still difficult to get much historical information on photo operations in the early decades. At least we know that William Freese was manager of the photo studio during its golden years, from the late 1920s through the early 1960s.

Some mysteries are less penetrable. Consider the bright-eyed inventor (Slide 10), whose photograph appeared in the Mid-Week Pictorial on March 14, 1936, holding an umbrella windshield of her own design. Half the caption that was glued to the 8-by-10-inch print fell off long ago. All that remains is: “Mrs. Eva Landman of New … windshield, which she invented … tained when she was struck … structed from view. The windsh … not.”

Struck? Struck by what?

Or — this being New York — do we really want to know?