The Original Series Publicity Photos

It’s an understatement to say that there are a lot of photographs around from Star Trek: The Original Series. Indeed, and to use an appropriate analogy, it seems like there are as many different pictures out there as there are stars in the sky. There are photos of the cast on the bridge. There are photos of aliens and guest stars on various planets. There are photos of the sets. There are photos of the ships. There are…. well, you get the idea, there are a plethora of pictures available of TOS. Don’t mistake this for complaining, though. As far as we’re concerned, it’s terrific that there are so many pictures around. After all, most of us fans never get tired of gazing at snippets of our favorite science fiction show. But where did all of these photos come from?Perhaps surprisingly, the answer to that question is that there are really only two major sources of TOS photos: they’ve either come from “grabs” of film frames from the various episodes or they’ve come from hired, professional photographers who took publicity photos while the series was in production. (Occasionally, pictures do surface from other sources, such as from folks at the studio who had their Instamatics on them while the series was filming or from prints made from unused Lincoln Enterprises film frames. These kinds of photos, however, are the exceptions rather than the rules, relatively speaking.)

Before moving on to our next topic, we want to mention that the photographers evidently were kept pretty busy at their jobs. They not only took pictures of the actors on the sets – in between takes, of course— but they also followed them off the sets.