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Cardboard cutouts of celebrities, including Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, are popular for photo opportunities. They are made by printing a photographic image onto heavy card stock and transferring it onto corrugated cardboard or plastic. They are often used for promotional purposes and can be collectible. While they can deceive viewers in photos, they remain popular with tourists and fans.
While some celebrities still remain officially dead, this little quibble hasn’t stopped many tourists from having a photo or two taken with them. Whether it’s Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, or the President of the United States, a life-size cardboard cutout often serves as a placeholder for the real thing. The real Elvis Presley may be too busy to accommodate visitors to Graceland, but there is a cardboard cutout available for photo opportunities.
A cardboard cutout starts as a photographic image blown up to true-to-life proportions, then printed onto heavy card stock. The print is then transferred onto a sheet of corrugated cardboard or plastic to make it even more robust. The excess cardboard is carefully trimmed around the image to make it even more realistic. The owner of the cut-out carton can then mount it on a stand and place it in a public area for photography or promotion.
Some cardboard cutouts serve as promotional materials, featuring life-size images of professional models or sports figures or well-known celebrities. Cardboard cutouts are often placed near the products they promote, which has the effect of a professional endorsement or a favorable link to a recognizable public figure. Such promotional items using a cut-out full-size cardboard usually become highly collectible, although many are destroyed after the promotional campaign ends.
There are a number of tourist destinations where visitors can pay a nominal fee to pose with a cardboard cutout from a historical figure or current celebrity. Cardboard cutouts of former and current world leaders are especially popular in capital cities around the world. Visitors to Hollywood, California can also pose with many of their favorite celebrities in cardboard cutout form.
However, a few cardboard cutouts completely deceive the viewer. A two-dimensional image will almost always look unnatural whenever three-dimensional people pose around it in a photograph. The pose and expression of a cardboard cutout never change, which becomes apparent if multiple images are taken in a row. For a number of people, simply posing with a reasonable facsimile of a celebrity is enough.
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