A young man journeys away from the British pronouncements of “Rule Britannia” to the ringing German endorsements of Sieg Heils to the sonorous shores of California where “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.
Fortunately Christopher Isherwood found a pronounced spirit of endorsements and calm in the Palisades of Southern California.
Half a century later I had traveled through the same British and German cities and landscapes. I had certainly lived a dreamy calm in Southern California.
My camera has been an enabler for four decades. There are tales my camera shares. There are stories I need to tell. I have hundreds of stories ahead. Today, the sanctuary of Los Angeles is a nice place to start.
The hundreds of the cultural puzzle I would come to know were artists, collectors and the peripheral world where dreamscapes informed my eyes. The LA art world had intimate vistas and intricate intimacies for my camera from 1983 until 1990. It seemed for awhile that my life was made up of days gazing at Leger’s, Picasso’s, Jackson P’s, Diebenkorn’s a Ruscha’s and Warhol’s and hundreds more artists that were laid bare for me to admire.
While the above seems otherworldly and delightful, I still wanted a bit of television gamesmanship: Behind curtain number one...!
A friend of mine, a well known artist at the time suggested I photograph an interesting artist who had lived an interesting life. I arranged for an invitation to photograph the portrait artist Don Bachardy.
I drove along Sunset Blvd, somewhere between Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades. I was soon to be a party to California’s hypnotic coastline and all the trimmings the mythical Sirens offered. I safely turned towards Bachardy’s studio.
Before I exited my convertible, I fondly remembered the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne rhapsodizing about their weekend drives to locations unknown. Most of their weekends were a spirited driving excursion for the sake of discovery and awareness.
Like Joan and John, I too drove the nearly 500 square miles Los Angeles offered me. In some ways the Los Angeles cultural history is the most American in our 50 states. The immigration maps are indelibly drawn by generations of Chinese, Japanese, Hispanic, British, German and so many more. I reminisce and coddle the city’s histories.
A blond tan man with thick rimmed glasses greeted me. It was Bachardy. How could I miss him, his German Expressionstic Blue Rider style self portraits blanketed the sun drenched walls. This was what a California studio was supposed to be like.
We moved along his terrace. We gazed at the ocean. This was an art experience that was foreign to me. There were no challenges, no challengers. The sun drenched rooms ruled my karma.
As I sort of danced through the spacious environs with cameras in tow I came face to face with a new set of eyes.
This short squat handsome older man was smiling wide. Bachardy introduced me to his partner, Christopher Isherwood! “Cabaret” anyone?
The generations we look forward to and the generations we embracingly reminisce about are our DNA. Without the the two we are empty vessels. My life as a photographer has been about connecting the dots.
Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories” and other writings were the template for Cabaret and many other plays and movies. Can’t you hear Liza loudly whispering,”Thank you Christopher”.
For the next hour or so the three of us chatted. But all I wanted him to talk about was the voices of the German Palisades. Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg and Billy Wilder and more emigrated to Los Angeles before World War Two. It seems that the Palisades was the most German commune. Cultural phenomenons were at my finger tips.
Oscars, Nobels, and Pulitzers reveals were within a petal’s whisper.
I decided that I wasn’t creating a cultural biography. I instead kept my camera at work and pocketed my curiosity for another day.
As I began to make the pictures that mattered, I realized that sometimes the experience of great company, is a life to be lived.
