Capturing the Young Wistful Beauty of LA

Release year: 2010

Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket

Pages: 160 pages

Size: 10.83 x 8.19 x 0.98 in (27.5 x 20.8 x 2.5 cm)

Edition: 1st Edition

Condition: Very good(vintage)

Publisher: ‎ STEIDL

“I have always been a dreamer,” writes photographer Paul Jasmin in the introduction to his new book, California Dreaming. It is a state of mind perfectly suited to his hometown of Los Angeles—a city whose famously muslin sunlight has long been a lure for artists, directors, actors, photographers, and young hopefuls looking to capture a slice of LA’s legendary dazzle. These striving talents are the subjects of Jasmin’s new tome (which follows 2002's Hollywood Cowboy and 2004's Lost Angeles), a series of portraits shot in and around the photographer’s Koreatown apartment, a Spanish-style mission revival building where newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst is rumored to have once sequestered his lover, the movie star Marion Davies. The pictures offer a mythic narrative of youth and longing: lost lovers and nubile beauties in the desert or idyllic gardens. Jasmin—or “Jazz,” as his friend Bruce Weber dubbed him—says he aims to create images that “are a bit more beautiful, or heroic, or glamorous than perhaps the subjects are in real life.”. 

California Dreaming is photographer Paul Jasmin’s celebration of the climate and the youth of Los Angeles, a city he has lovingly documented in previous volumes such as Hollywood Cowboy and Lost Angeles. Most of the photographs printed here were shot in and around Jasmin’s fascinating apartment on Wilshire Boulevard (in a building that William Randolph Hearst once bought as a love-nest for Marion Davies), and express both the dreams of the youths Jasmin photographs and Jasmin’s own candidly vicarious reveling in their youth and the future before them:”that is my fantasy life,” he avows, “they keep me dreaming.” California Dreaming makes the ultimate argument for Los Angeles as a golden mirage of both glamorous aspiration and sunsoaked leisure, and also describes Jasmin’s additional roles as a teacher at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena-where he meets most of his subjects in this monograph- and as a legendary Hollywood host and connoisseur of the city’s many charms.

Paul Jasmin was born in Helena, Montana in 1935. He lives and works in Los Angeles where he teaches at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. His previous book Hollywood Cowboy was published in 2002. He is a regular contributor to L’Uomo, Vogue, Teen Vogue, W, Vogue Homme, Jane, and Interview.