IN 1946 THE NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHER MURRAY GARRETT WENT TO HOLLYWOOD to open up the West Coast office of a photographic agency, and a few years later he struck off on his own. For more than a quarter-century, he recorded the doings of the movie world while television remade the rules (one of his assignments was a photo essay entitled “The Wolf at Hollywood’s Door”), and he assembled a vigorous and intimate record of life in the town that makes the whole planet a voyeur.

Recently, Garrett gathered his favorite photographs for a book called Hollywood Candid: A Photographer Remembers , which has just been published by Abrams. Garrett’s reminiscences accompany the pictures, which, as the sampling here attests, reveal along with their subjects a canny and consummate professional working with clarity, precision, and zest.