Night vision: Mean streets of Silver Lake
The aftermath of a teenage party over the weekend in the Silver Lake hills.
May 20, 2012
May 18, 2012
Are we all paparazzi now?
Although the term paparazzi was first coined in Italy, it has reached its zenith — or its nadir — on this side of the Atlantic, aided by the internet, the money to be made and the ease of picture-taking technology and dissemination. It's debatable which came first, the insatiable desire to document the famous or the need for the masses to see endless images of celebrities caught acting like normal people. Added to the mix is another layer, as celebrities themselves post their whereabouts and thoughts on their Twitter accounts, courting the popularity that we always knew they craved despite their protests.
Some of these issues of celebrity were addressed at the Getty Wednesday night at "Are We All Paparazzi Now?," a discussion in conjunction with an exhibit called "Portraits of Renown," celebrity portraits dating back to the 1800s and including Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Georgia O'Keefe, Edgar Allan Poe, Josephine Baker, Andy Warhol and Anderson Cooper as an infant, photographed by Diane Arbus. The show hangs, not accidentally, adjacent to an expansive show of the work of Herb Ritts, whose sun-drenched and beautifully composed images of people like Madonna and Richard Gere had almost as much to do with their ascension in the public eye as did their talent.
Since directing "Teenage Paparazzo," a thought-provoking 2010 documentary about a 13-year-old Los Angeles boy who threw himself into the pursuit of the celebrity image, Adrian Grenier has taken on the role of educator. The star of "Entourage," usually the object of the camera's lens himself, screens his film and speaks to teens and adults about the perils and paradoxes of celebrity in American culture. He often uses the term "hall of mirrors" to describe the state of society today. It seems apt, as I often wonder if people have forsaken actually living their lives for the shared experience of documenting their lives, pausing to photograph the meal that's just arrived at their table, the painting they are looking at in the museum or the shoes they are trying on. Now that we know celebrities are just like us, proven by the endless flow of images of them shopping, pushing strollers, sipping lattes in their sweats or heading to or from the airport, we've come to the point where we've deemed our own lives just as worthy of exposure.
The discussion, taking place at a major museum, begs the question: the portraits that grace the walls of the Getty seem several cuts above the images that we are bombarded with daily. Yes, the paparazzi quench the desire for our society's need to know everything about those we have put on the public pedestal. But is there anything about these images that can be called art? Squiers noted the difference between making pictures and taking pictures. "Great photographers make pictures," she said.
Today's paparazzi certainly give us images that provide a glimpse into our society and what it values at this moment in time. One quizzical audience member referred to them as "bullshit." Galo Ramirez, the lone paparazzo on the panel, responded, "If it's bullshit they want, it's bullshit I will give them." At the same time, he acknowledged the lucrative market for his work, refusing to put an amount on what an image could bring him but saying that whatever he is paid makes it well worth his while to wait at someone's home for hours. He is hoping to snag the hottest shot on the market in the next "news" cycle: Angelina Jolie in her wedding gown.
The panelists at the event, which was co-sponsored by Zocalo Public Square, included Grenier, Carol Squiers of the International Center for Photography, Carolyn Davis (a photo editor at Us Weekly) and Ramirez, who famously crashed his car into one driven by Lindsay Lohan as they both made U-turns several months ago. He recently got pictures of the coroner's van taking Whitney Houston's body from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Carla Hall, an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times, moderated the panel.
Grenier has taken the issue of celebrity and run with it, having the self-awareness and smarts to see its many layers. He acknowledges that pictures tell a story and there is nothing inherently wrong with storytelling. "But we have to leave the celebrity experience and have human experiences with each other," he said. "I don't want to tell anyone how to live. I just want people to see as many perpectives as possible."
Carla Hall, Carol Squiers, Adrian Grenier, Carolyn Davis and Galo Ramirez.
Both photos: Iris Schneider
April 14, 2012
Remembering Herb Ritts
Walking through the J. Paul Getty Museum's new exhibition, Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, I kept thinking back 20 years to when I wrote a profile of Ritts for the Los Angeles Times. I was writing about the photography market for the paper, and there were few bigger players locally than Ritts.
Djimon with octopus, Hollywood. 1989. © Herb Ritts Foundation
Familiar photos of such people as Madonna and Richard Gere are among the show's highlights, but the beautifully printed photographs feature unfamiliar as well as familiar figures, celebrities as well as people made celebrities by Ritts' photos. Perhaps more important, the exhibition demonstrates a very creative mind at work, maximizing his models, light and settings.
Not that I was surprised. The day of our visit, Ritts eagerly gathered up his magazine layouts and books, proudly turning pages for me to see one photograph after another. As he did so, I sensed that the tentative smile and ingenuousness charming me must surely have gone a long way in similarly charming his photography subjects. This show proves me right with its oiled bodies, strangely turned limbs, unexpected celebrity poses and even a model crowned by a dead octopus.
Ritts' Hollywood Hills home was a showplace for photography, including print after print by photographers he admired. I recall he'd built ledges along the walls for photographs, rather than framing them, so he could move them around. The day I was there, his library's prime spot was held by one of Berenice Abbott's glorious photos of New York at night, and around the house were recognizable masterpieces by other legendary photographers.
He considered himself a photography collector, he told me, and on display were great photos by Man Ray and Edward Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Paul Outerbridge. He said he had just purchased others by Joel Peter Witkin and Robert Mapplethorpe, and when we later discussed the photo market, we talked as much about his buying more of their work as about others buying his work.
The Getty's companion show, "Portraits of Renown: Photography and the Cult of Celebrity," places Ritts' work adjacent to walls of iconic photographs by everyone from Nadar and Edward Steichen to Diane Arbus and Andy Warhol. Ritts died in 2002, but remembering the way he spoke of his photographic influences--including Weston for his simplicity, Helmut Newton for his risk-taking, and Irving Penn for nearly everything else--I imagine the juxtaposition would have made him a happy man indeed.
Stephanie Seymour, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz and Naomi Cambell pose for Herb Ritts in Hollywood in 1989. © Herb Ritts Foundation
Tatjana, veiled head, Joshua Tree 1988. © Herb Ritts Foundation
"Herb Ritts: L.A. Style" is at the Getty Center through August 26.
Barbara Isenberg is a Los Angeles-based arts writer. Her most recent book is the Los Angeles Times bestseller "Conversations with Frank Gehry."
Previously on LA Observed:
Getty acquires 69 Herb Ritts photographs
The Getty's gardens to close for three months
Getty Research Institute acquires two Man Ray archives
March 26, 2012
Night visions
I stopped at LACMA around midnight on Saturday night to check out "The Clock." So did a lot of other people. The line to get a seat for the 24-hour screening was down the stairs and onto the Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk.
March 23, 2012
Hollywoodland -- your land, my land
Remember in 2008, when a Chicago investment group stuck a For Sale sign on 138 acres of open space next to the Hollywood sign? They bought the land from the estate of Howard Hughes in 2002 for close to $1.7 million, got it zoned for four McMansions (because we're short on those) and then offered it up for $22 million. Bob Pool broke the story, and a lot of people got really steamed.
Today, fellow Angelenos, thanks to an impassioned fund-raising campaign by Mr. Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge and the Trust for Public Land, those 138 acres now belong to us. Even with a final sale price of $11.7 million, it wasn't until philanthropist Aileen Getty stepped in with a million-dollar-plus donation, and Hugh Hefner kicked in the final million that the deal was done. (A complete list of major donors is here.)
So say thank you in the best way possible -- go for a Hollywoodland hike.
Pix from yesterday's ceremony after the jump...
February 5, 2012
Discovering Francesca Woodman
How is it that until about a week ago I'd never heard of the photographer Francesca Woodman? She has been hovering about in my universe for years, but I'm embarrassed that I completely missed her. It took a look through LACMA's newly opened In Wonderland: Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists to be enlightened. Fate intervened and our paths finally crossed.
Woodman is one of the nearly 50 artists included in this "first exhibition devoted to the female surrealist artists who worked in Mexico and the U.S," as the press materials read. Born in 1958, she is the youngest and one of the lesser known artists in the show that includes superstars of the movement Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson.
Woodman's black and white images, made primarily with a square format camera and printed small, demand that the viewer come in close. Reading the wall label next to the first photograph, "Self Portrait talking to Vince" (top photo here), told me that her life was shockingly brief (1958-1981) and that she photographed in Providence, R.I. My first thought was that perhaps she had been a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I graduated. Later in the day a Google search confirmed it. Woodman was a photography student at RISD from 1975 to 1978, around the time I was there, and in the same department, although she was 2 years behind me. It's entirely possible that we may have passed in the hallway or on the street. Other images in the LACMA show were made in Rome where Woodman spent her junior year as part of RISD's European Honors Program.
Like the mystery of her abbreviated life, Woodman's images are haunting and provocative. The level of her work is highly sophisticated for someone so young and still in school. Woodman often photographed herself, sometimes nude, sometimes clothed. She used props, blurring, and dilapidated interiors (not hard to find in Providence.) She experimented with cut paper, reflections and alternative processes. She used her sexuality, her relationships and her environment to develop themes in her work. The disturbing spookiness in some of them hit me hard. Sadly, an ominous feeling about her proved true. I learned that Woodman committed suicide in 1981 at the age of 22, not long after graduation and a move to New York City.
In the 2010 documentary The Woodmans, a revealing and sometimes unsettling look at the photographer's family that I watched after seeing the show at LACMA, her close RISD friend Sloan Rankin acknowledges that Woodman was far more artistically evolved than the other students. But also chronically needy. "She was a fragile person. It caused her to make beautiful pictures," Rankin says. As I watched the film, clues about her emotionally complex life emerged. Maybe also clues into her imagemaking. I felt little sympathy for her parents, both accomplished artists in their own right. They are clearly still wrestling with not only their daughter's suicide, but with the fact that her artistic success has far eclipsed their own. "As Francesca has become more and more famous, we've become the famous artists family," her mother Betty says in one scene.
While Woodman is part of a large group at LACMA, she is currently the star of her own show up north at SFMOMA. Francesca Woodman is the most comprehensive exhibition of her work ever mounted. Her RISD work is well represented, as well as her experiments with the diazotype process (think architects' blueprints) and her fashion photographs. The show fully explores Woodman's body of work, which impressed me as hugely accomplished for someone barely entering adulthood. She had hoped to pursue fashion photography in New York, but struggled with finding opportunities.
Even a drop of the attention her work is now receiving might have been a huge gift to Woodman following her graduation from RISD. She battled to survive professionally in New York, and according to her father was "discouraged and demoralized in her personal life." There was intense therapy, medication and a failed first attempt at suicide. Making photographs became a rarer and rarer occurrence.
Then again, perhaps no amount of validation or success would have been enough to save the life of a young woman so deeply in pain. Her apparently overwhelming inner demons broke her spirit before she could find a way to harness them. Surely trouble was brewing long before she arrived in Providence. However, her images have survived and taken on a brilliant life of their own. Although I'm late to the game, I'm glad that at last I've found them.
Trailer from the documentary on Woodman's life:
"In Wonderland: Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists" runs at LACMA's Resnick Pavilion through May 6.
"Francesca Woodman" runs at SF MOMA though Feb. 20 and will travel to the Guggenheim Museum in New York in spring 2012.
Photographs by Francesca Woodman courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
January 25, 2012
Night visions
In the projection room tonight at the Million Dollar Theater, for Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory," with projectionist Tom Ruff.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive will be presenting classic films at the historic Broadway movie palace each Wednesday night through March 28. Upcoming showings include "Bus Stop," "Shampoo," "Bridge on the River Kwai," and "Taxi Driver," among others.
Latest in the Night Vision photo series by Iris Schneider
Photo: Iris Schneider
January 2, 2012
Photo: Occupy at the Rose Parade
Occupy LA protesters demonstrate at the end of the Rose Parade on its route through Pasadena. Photo by Iris Schneider.
Night Vision: Before the Rose Parade
The City of Los Angeles float turns onto Fair Oaks Avenue moving into position for Monday's Rose Parade. Latest in the Night Vision series by Iris Schneider.
November 30, 2011
Aftermath at Occupy L.A.
November 18, 2011
Weegee's Hollywood
Weegee's plastic lens turned on Elizabeth Taylor circa 1950..
Here's a riddle from the art world: Who was part huckster, part experimental trailblazer and part social commentator, lampooning society's adoration of celebrity, but longing to be one at the same time? Warhol, you say? No, turns out it's Weegee, the cigar chomping photographer — aka Arthur Fellig — who fled New York in 1946, where he made his reputation as a chronicler of the night, of crime scenes and the spectators who gathered to watch, to turn his sights on Hollywood.
Claiming he was "through with the newspaper game," after selling the title of his book of New York photographs called "The Naked City" to a producer who turned it into a movie, he was drawn to Hollywood. But, as the sweeping show currently up at MOCA proves, Weegee was a lot more complicated than we thought.
November 5, 2011
Robert Reich at Occupy L.A. *
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich speaking on Saturday at Occupy Los Angeles, outside City Hall.
This weekend, Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, visited Occupy LA and spoke to a small crowd gathered on Spring Street shadowed by City Hall's American flags. It was exhilarating to hear someone who had been in Washington's inner circle speak honestly about bringing fairness, compassion and equality back to the American economy and thereby restore the principles of our democracy and of capitalism itself. "Capitalism cannot function when so much wealth goes to the top," he said. It's one thing to walk through the Occupy LA camp and see statements like that scrawled on a cardboard sign, but quite another to hear someone of Reich's background—as Clinton's Secretary of Labor and a respected teacher and writer—state it.
Reich started his talk by thanking everyone from the Occupy LA movement, and urging them to give themselves a pat on the back. "Because of you, people in this country are beginning to discuss issues that have been avoided for years...Nothing good happens in Washington unless good people outside of Washington are mobilized, energized and organized to make sure that good things happen," he said.
Reich is currently Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a professor of economics at Harvard and Brandeis and has published 13 books on the economy. He knows this stuff. And like a patient and wise educator, he told the crowd: "Let me tell you the facts. And we've all got to make sure we have the facts together because they are the truth and we've got to speak the truth over and over and over again."
"This economy is richer than it has ever been but we are cutting education, child welfare services, getting rid of teachers. They are saying we can't afford it. We CAN afford it. Our economy is twice as large as it was in 1980 but wages have stagnated for 3 decades. Where did the money go? To the top 1%. This is not class warfare. Our system has gone out of balance. We have to save the system from itself...It is not just our economy that suffers with these inequties. It is also our democracy that suffers."
He named individuals like the Koch brothers as some who have benefited from this inequity. "Our democracy is too precious to allow it to fall into the hands of a few people who are usuing their fortune to pollute and corrupt American democracy."
It was shocking and refreshing to hear someone who knows the economy and the way our government works--or doesn't--speak so plainly. He went on to name some other culprits who have helped get America where it is today: the Supreme Court, whose recent decision about campaign finance, namely that corporations can be treated like people when contributing to political candidates, has done its part to send our democracy down the wrong path. "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas and Georgia start executing corporations," he said.
After his rousing, validating speech—in which he told the occupiers that, while the Occupy movement may not be a movement yet in terms of defining its' demands and refining its methods, it is "motivated by a moral vision of what America could be. There is a powerful and indestructible moral vision underlying this movement"—he lingered to chat and debate with individuals in the crowd, signing autographs but mainly talking economics and solutions and commiserating with beleaguered veterans of our country's current economic woes.
He said one of his great regrets in life is that he failed to get the endorsement of the Democratic party in 2002 when he attempted a run for Governor of Massachusetts against Mitt Romney. "I would have beaten the pants off him," he said.
And perhaps changed the course of our upcoming Presidential election.
Sadly, only a smattering of the occupiers gathered on Spring Street to hear these words. Many others probably did not even know he was speaking, or chose instead to hear the speakers from the south steps advocating the benefits of hemp, or engage in small debates on communism vs. democracy, or just hang out and enjoy a beautiful California Saturday.
September 29, 2011
Night vision: The Closer
Crew films an episode of "The Closer" on Fuller Avenue near Beverly Boulevard, at about 1 a.m. Third installment in the Night vision series. Click on the image to see it larger.
August 19, 2011
Night vision: 2nd and Beaudry
At 2nd Street and Beaudry, just west of the Harbor Freeway from Downtown. Second in the Night Vision series.
August 9, 2011
Night vision
Iris Schneider is starting an occasional series of photos on Los Angeles at night. She's calling them Night Vision. She spotted Steve McQueen last night on Union Avenue near 12th Street in Pico-Union.
November 24, 2008
Photography of Carleton Watkins
The Plaza, Los Angeles, circa 1880 by Carleton Watkins / J. Paul Getty Museum
Carleton Watkins, whose images of 19th-century California are the stars of an exhibition at the Getty Museum, had a simple motto: to stand "where the view looks best." Weston Naef, the Getty's senior photography curator, calls Watkins "the greatest American photographer before Alfred Stieglitz....He was an artist in the very strictest sense of the word. He was probably the first American to show a purely photographic imagination — as opposed to a painterly imagination...."
For Naef, the exhibit represents decades of admiration for his subject. Watkins was probably the first to photograph Yosemite and his astounding images of the valley and the Mariposa Grove of big trees propelled the first federal protection of the Sierra Nevada wilderness.
Born in 1829 in Oneonta, New York, Watkins arrived in San Francisco in 1850 and was hired by childhood friend Collis P. Huntington (who later founded the Central Pacific Railroad) to deliver supplies to Gold Rush mines. After fire consumed Huntington's enterprise, Watkins worked as a carpenter and bookseller and began taking scenic daguerreotypes of the Mother Lode country. He moved to San Francisco and photographed the estates of the city's wealthy, making important contacts through Huntington and at social occasions in the home of Jessie Benton Fr�mont, writer and activist wife of the former U.S. Senator and general John C. Fr�mont.
Watkins accepted commissions to provide photos for court cases and clients such as the State Geological Survey, but it's his personal projects that display his abundant spirit of exploration. Watkins reached Yosemite via the Mariposa Trail for the first time in 1858-59 and returned many times. He had a San Francisco cabinet maker create a camera capable of accommodating glass plates as large as 18 inches by 22 inches. The amazingly detailed photographs made with the unique "mammoth plate" camera brought Watkins international renown. He used an enclosed wagon to transport hundreds of pounds of camera equipment, glass and chemicals needed to develop his glass plate negatives, sometimes pulled by mules and sometimes loaded on a rail flatcar. He traveled hard miles around California and the Farallon Islands off San Francisco, and ventured afar to destinations such as Yellowstone, Puget Sound, South America and the Arizona Territory outpost of Tombstone.
Watkins produced more than 1,100 mammoth-plate photographs, making him one of the 19th century's most prolific photographers. Some of his best-known images are panorama views of San Francisco in the 1860s and rare images of the crumbling California missions. He traveled by rail to southern California for the first time in 1876-77 and again in 1880-81 to photograph the burgeoning oil industry, agriculture, and other subjects.
Thompson's Seedless Grapes, Kern County 1880 by Carleton Watkins / J. Paul Getty Museum
The Los Angeles that Watkins visited would have seemed like a wild west boomtown (and part Mexican pueblo.) It was far from most evidence of civilization. H.H. Bancroft in "Bancroft's Guide For Travelers by Railway, Stage, and Steam Navigation" called Los Angeles:
The oldest and largest city of Southern California, having 5,614 inhabitants, many of whom are foreigners. It is situated in a narrow valley, about 22 miles from the sea, on the Los Angeles River. The city is rapidly growing in population and wealth, and the surrounding country abounds with extensive and flourishing vineyards, groves of oranges, lemons, olives, and other tropical fruits. Connected with San Francisco by steamer and railroad, via San Pedro�
In Los Angeles, Watkins continued to associate with influential people like Don Benito Wilson, a rancho owner and former mayor. Watkins, according to Naef, had an "ingrained sense of history" and made a point of photographing the historic plaza where Los Angeles was founded. It's not by accident that the stereograph contains elements that are symbols of the city's origins, including the old plaza church ( Our Lady the Queen of the Angels), Fort Moore Hill and the adobe home of former Californio leader Andres Pico. It's conceivable that Watkins would have encountered Pio Pico, California's last Mexican governor, sunning himself on the plaza.
Watkins' record of the state's historic Franciscan missions took him all over California, starting with Mission Dolores in San Francisco. His photograph of Mission San Fernando, Rey de España, is in the Getty show. While here he also photographed the beach in Santa Monica, locales in the San Gabriel Valley and Point Fermin lighthouse.
Beach and Bathing House at Santa Monica, 1880 by Carleton Watkins / J. Paul Getty Museum
Though he achieved international fame and commercial and artistic success, Watkins' endured financial distress when his sight began to fail. In 1895-6 he lived with his wife and children in an abandoned railroad car, until Huntington deeded him a ranch in rural Yolo County. In the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, Watkins lost all of his glass-plate negatives, business records, archives, and personal papers. In 1910 he was committed to Napa State Hospital for the Insane. He died in poverty in 1916 and was buried in an unmarked grave. It was a tragic end for the artist who, according to the Getty, played a "dominant role in establishing an outdoor photographic tradition in California."
Says Naef, "his photographs were as perceptive as the words of a poet and they provide a unique personal vision of the birth and growth of California."
Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins runs at the Getty until March 1, 2009.