PART 1 OF A SERIES
Play Through © 1976 Steven Silverstein. All rights reserved. Photographed in Paris, France.
Either the pandemic lock down was going to make me depressed or I could use the time to do things that were creatively productive or nostalgic, or maybe a little of both. I decided that depression wasn’t an option.
I’m always in need of better organization but didn’t really need to go all the way back to the 1970s to find something to organize. And I could have discovered nostalgic sentiment in the 80s, 90s, or first ten years of the new millennium, but the 70s were as good a starting point as any and overdue. I never quite understood Tom Wolfe’s definition of the 70s as the “me” decade except for the contrast from the 60s which had been a generation determined to make radical change for the betterment of society. I think, though, Stephen Paul Miller was closer to the reality of the 70s by calling it the “undecade” – a period marked by cynicism, boredom, disillusionment and frustration, which kind of reminds me of our new normal. Looking back, those things likely influenced my leaving Los Angeles and heading to Paris, at least partially.
I dusted off archival boxes of images from that first decade in Paris and began looking through old Ektachromes, Kodachromes, and prints. A number of them caught my eye but one, especially, reminded me of the freedom that we’ve been missing of late, a leisurely summer day on the golf course or poolside. It also held hints of abstraction, which I’m drawn to these days. Ironically, the image is not Parisian at all. The image was by a young American photographer delivering an American dream to the Parisians. How many in Paris actually have the luxury of golf or the sparkling turquoise waters of a swimming pool?
I’ve always been a conceptual photographer and in the early days was frequently asked to come up with editorial fashion concepts. I had worked for the brilliant fashion magazine Depeche Mode only a few times when I was asked by the art director, Jean-Michel Verger, to shoot a cover for their new men’s Chaussures edition. I had conceptually photographed shoes and other images in Los Angeles that were in an eight-page cover story and interview in the acclaimed Zoom magazine just before this assignment, so it wasn’t a stretch to photograph shoes or my version of California conceptualism.
Even so, the shoot turned out to be challenging. Having to bring our own diving board to a public pool at a hotel penthouse with an open glass roof was just the beginning. Nothing about it after that was easy: the angles, the model on the board, reflections in the water. Somehow, though, THE shot, that magical shot, revealed itself.
Looking back at the photograph, I was reminded of a dreamy David Hockney pool painting, although Jean-Michel and I collaborated on it together without being influenced by his work. Maybe at the time, though, in the chilly spring of Paris, I shared a similar dream of sunny Los Angeles.
A Bigger Splash (1967) by David Hockney. Photo Credit: Tate, London
In the mid 1960s, Hockney did the opposite of what I did a decade later. He left dreary London and landed in Los Angeles, embracing his own artificially romantic and conceptual vision of my hometown. Literally and figuratively he dipped into the backyard culture and potential that the West Coast represented, moving away from abstraction into a kind of bright and sometimes stylized realism. Hockney used photographs to record what he saw, as an aid to remember but not verbatim. He felt that the artist’s personal vision was what added depth to a picture to make it come to life. As a painter, he had to suggest light and shadow, in the depths and surfaces of the pool.
Pools and Steps, Le Nid du Duc (1971) by David Hockney. © David Hockney
I’ve always used photography as the medium of my expression. For many years I shot realistically, as a fashion photographer. But there were some days when I was able to infuse conceptualism into the images, as I did with Play Through. In recent years, I have pushed my photography further, striving for something as far from realism as possible, through abstraction.
Although Hockney and I were worlds and mediums apart, it was a similar pull of Los Angeles glamour that I sought to capture that day in Paris, combining the best of it in one tongue-in-cheek, seductive fantasy. Mine was founded in reality but even less so than one of Hockney’s pool paintings. The golfer on a diving board, playing through, would never have happened. It was a figment of my imagination, an odd voyeurism, painted with the lens of my camera.