JULIAN WASSER: JOAN DIDION
"Remembering"
Danziger Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of Julian Wasser’s photographs of Joan Didion – a remembrance of two great artists linked through one photographic assignment.
Made in Los Angeles in 1968, at a moment when the young writer was emerging as one of the most distinctive voices in American literature, TIME Magazine assigned Wasser to photograph Didion at her rented house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. Her collection "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" was becoming a literary sensation, confirming her place as a writer of exceptional precision and an acute observer of the shifting social landscape of California.
Wasser began his career in photography in the Washington, D.C. bureau of the Associated Press, where he met and accompanied the legendary news photographer Weegee, who would become an important and lasting influence. By the mid-1960s, Wasser had moved to Los Angeles, working as a contract photographer for TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE. There he established a reputation for an unusual combination of access and intuition: an ability to enter the private worlds of his subjects and make photographs that appeared spontaneous while remaining remarkably assured in their composition.
With regard to Didion, “I’d read her fiction,” Wasser recalled, “and she didn’t miss a thing. She was a heavyweight.” The photographs began inside the house before Wasser and Didion moved outdoors, where he photographed her with her recently acquired yellow Corvette Stingray.Didion appears variously as writer, mother, and newly minted California icon. Seated quietly inside her house; holding her daughter Quintana Roo on her lap; or framed by the sleek geometry of the Corvette, Wasser’s photographs seem to contain many of the contradictions that would become associated with Didion herself—the private and the public, fragility and authority, glamour and detachment.
Didion would later identify the portrait with Quintana Roo as her favorite. Yet it was Wasser’s photographs of her with the Corvette, together with the indoor three-quarter portrait, that have become especially influential style images. Their visual language has continued to reverberate through popular culture, notably in a later Celine campaign in which a model was posed in the window of a car directly referencing Wasser’s portrait of Didion. (To Celine’s credit, shortly afterward they convinced Didion to pose in her own Celine ad wearing chic oversize sunglasses.)
Viewed today, more than half a century after they were made, Wasser’s photographs are striking not simply because of the cultural stature Didion would attain, but because of Wasser’s instinct for the revealing moment. There is remarkably little theatricality in them. Their authority comes instead from proximity, observation, and an apparent absence of effort. In doing so Wasser would create some of the most enduring portraits of an American writer.