Tag Archives: photographer

Change Maker: Remembering Chavez Ravine photographer Don Normark

Don Normark (BFA 49) was a 19-year-old Photography student at Art Center College of Design, taking pictures near the freeway in Los Angeles one day, when a neighborhood high on a distant hillside caught his eye. Normark’s curiosity drew him to Chavez Ravine, an intact rural enclave of hundreds of Mexican-American families, and his love and compassion for the community kept him coming back. His 1948–49 photographs of Chavez Ravine became an in-depth document of a soon-to-be-lost world—a painful chapter in LA’s history culminating in the construction of Dodger Stadium in the 1950s. The work was largely unknown until 2003 when Chronicle Books published Chavez Ravine: 1949, along with former residents’ memories collected by the photographer.

Normark, who lived in Seattle, passed away on June 5 at age 86 following a battle with lung cancer, leaving a legacy of elegiac and iconic images that capture the transitory character of Los Angeles with uncommon sensitivity and resonance. His contributions have elicited an outpouring of recognition for his singular contribution to LA’s photographic history, including this moving obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

Continue reading →

Photo alum Star Foreman goes for baroque with Golden Age glam Hollywood portraits

Los Angeles photographer Star Foreman’s vibrant, campy tableaux have defined publications such as LA Weekly and Pasadena Magazine.

Her family history proved pivotal in getting her very first gig with LA Weekly. Creative director Darrick Rainer liked Foreman’s work and interviewed her around the time he was planning the Weekly’s first annual theater issue. When he found out that she grew up going to plays and musicals almost every weekend because her grandfather was T. E. Foreman, a newspaper theater critic for 50 years, he assigned her the cover on the spot. Rainer later chose Foreman’s work for the paper’s Top Covers of 2013.

Foreman’s trademark tableaux are inspired by Golden Age Hollywood, burlesque, and a love of fashion and design. “I love shooting fashion,” she says, “because at any given moment fashion is changeable. Great fashion photography transmutes itself, becomes art that is enjoyed for its aesthetics, absent the need to sell something or someone.” Continue reading →

In Memoriam: Beloved Film faculty member, Michael Gottlieb

Michael Gottlieb

Michael Gottlieb

It is with great sadness that I write to inform you of the passing of our colleague and member of the film faculty, Michael Gottlieb.  Michael was in a tragic motorcycle accident late last week, and we are deeply pained by his loss. He was 69 years old.

Writer/Producer/Director/Photographer Michael Gottlieb was raised in New York.  The man whom he thought of as a father, Dr. Francisco Marino, was a prominent psychiatrist who mentored Michael through his teen years and beyond. Michael began his professional career working as an assistant on film and photo shoots and found great success as a fashion photographer. This, in turn, led to his becoming a Clio Award-winning commercial director and cinematographer, making many national spots for such clients as Xerox, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.

Continue reading →

We shall not see his like again: Remembering Photography alum Wayne F. Miller

“We began as artist and dealer, but it developed into the most important personal relationship I made in my 16 years in the field,” says Chicago gallery director Paul Berlanga of his friend, Art Center alumnus Wayne Forest Miller (Photography ’41). They met in 2001, at an exhibition of Miller’s work at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. “After a momentary glance at his work on the walls [the Bronzeville series], I knew the Stephen Daiter Gallery needed to represent this man.” Miller, a Chicago native, was 82 years old at the time, with a long and legendary career behind him — World War II photographer in Edward Steichen’s elite U.S. Navy Combat Photo Unit, member of Magnum Photos, and recipient of two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships for his landmark project documenting the African American community on Chicago’s South Side in the late 1940s. Miller, who lived in the Bay Area with his wife of 70 years, passed away on May 22, 2013. Berlanga gave a eulogy at the California memorial service last fall, and now shares his memories of the photographer — “Wayne always preferred ‘working photographer’ to artist” — with Dotted Line.

Continue reading →

Rock ‘n’ roll soldier conquers Art Center…and Hollywood

Sam Gonzalez

Samuel Gonzalez Jr. Photo by Lindzee Meltzer.

“There is no true terror in the bang, only the anticipation of it.” — Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s wisdom provided the inspiration for the concept of “CATASTROPHE,” a month-long exhibition of elaborately staged, large-scale, dark-toned photos created by undergraduate Film alum Samuel Gonzalez Jr. opening today (Jan. 28) at the ArcLight Theaters in Hollywood.

The 30 photographs on display in the theater lobby through March 28 juxtapose surrealist images illustrating the turmoil of the human condition against period landscapes, all the while alluding to humanity’s relationship to the artificiality of a heightened cinematic experience. The psychological narrative animating the photos informs the show’s subtextual ideas about the collision between film and reality. Gonzalez’ eerie pieces blend beauty with horror, love with betrayal and truth with despair, suggesting an open world of endless interpretations and possibilities.

Gonzalez has gained an intimate understanding of this particular confluence of ideas, after spending much of his life creatively interpreting the world around him to create new opportunities for himself. As a young Army recruit stationed in Iraq, Gonzalez’ deployed a creative outlet to offset the stress of combat by starting a rock band called Madison Avenue (after the ironically named path on which his barracks were built). That experience paved the way (financially) for him to attend Art Center’s film department and has since provided the inspiration for the mini-series he’s currently developing with one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers.

Continue reading →