The Way We Were: The Photography of Julian Wasser

This long-overdue monograph presents an astonishing panorama of a bygone Los Angeles from photographer Julian Wasser. Some of the images are very well known--Joan Didion leaning against a Corvette Stingray in Hollywood, 1968; Marcel Duchamp playing chess at his seminal 1963 Pasadena exhibition--while many others, such as Barbara Hershey and David Carradine in bed in their Laurel Canyon house, Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston at Jack’s Mulholland Drive home, or the Fonda family lined up on the family sofa, paint a picture of a very private Hollywood of the 1960s and 70s, when privacy was possible and celebrity culture had not yet completely consumed the country. Mingled with these iconic faces are pictures of California counterculture such as the Hog Farm Commune in Sunland; surfers in Malibu Beach; musicians such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Frank Zappa, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell and Elton John, documentation of events such as Robert Kennedy’s campaign and the Watts riots; shots of Clint Eastwood on the set of Magnum Force, George and Marci Lucas with Martin Scorcese and Roman Polanski at Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive after the murder of Sharon Tate in 1969.Julian Wasser started his career in photography as a copy boy in the Washington, DC bureau of the Associated Press. He was a contract photographer for Time magazine for many years, and his photographs have also appeared in (and on the covers of) Life, Newsweek, People, Vanity Fair, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Oggi, Hello, Playboy, Elle, Vogue and GQ.