JULIAN WASSER: JOAN DIDION
A remembrance.
Danziger Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of Julian Wasser’s photographs of Joan Didion, 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.
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.
His portraits of Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz, and a young Jodie Foster have become part of the visual history of Los Angeles—a record of a cultural world poised somewhere between Hollywood, art, literature, and the counterculture. However, it is his photographs of Joan Didion that have become Wasser’s best known and most iconic images.
In 1968, TIME assigned Wasser to photograph Joan Didion at her rented house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. Her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem was becoming a literary sensation, confirming Didion as a writer of exceptional precision and an acute observer of the shifting social landscape of California.
“I’d read her fiction,” Wasser recalled, “and she didn’t miss a thing. She was such a heavyweight person.”
Didion was living in the house with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana Roo. Wasser remembers the encounter as notably unceremonious.
“It was a nice, cozy house,” he recalled. “And she was a very easy person to talk to. No Hollywood affectations.”
The photographs began inside the house before Wasser and Didion moved outdoors, where he photographed her with her recently acquired yellow Corvette Stingray.
The resulting pictures have acquired an almost emblematic status. Didion appears variously as writer, mother, and improbable California icon: seated quietly in the domestic interior; holding Quintana Roo on her lap; and 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 became especially influential as images of style. Their visual language has continued to reverberate through fashion and popular culture, notably in a later Celine campaign in which Daria Werbowy was photographed posed in the window of a car in an image recalling Wasser’s portrait of Didion.
Viewed today, more than half a century after they were made, the 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.
They also evoke a particular idea of Los Angeles in the late 1960s—a place in which writers, artists, actors, musicians, and filmmakers moved through overlapping worlds, and where the distinctions between high culture and popular culture were becoming increasingly porous.
At the center of the photographs is Didion herself: composed but never fixed, stylish without appearing self-conscious, and already possessing the quality of watchful intelligence that would become inseparable from her writing.
Wasser’s achievement was to recognize all of this without overstating it. His photographs do not attempt to explain Joan Didion. They simply observe her—and in doing so created some of the most enduring portraits of an American writer of the twentieth century.