The Dreamer
Paul Jasmin, 1935-2025
I made a silly joke online this week about being the kind of dork who rents an apartment in Gore Vidal’s former building in Rome to get some writing done — like, why am I like this?
Not a day later, I heard that my godfather (well, my fake godfather, as I have always called the great photographer and teacher Paul Jasmin), from whom I learned so much about how I want to see the world and how to navigate it, was touch and go. And obviously I knew right away (of course, I have always known) why I am like this. I have had the ridiculous luck to be sort of initiated into the romantic fantasies of my godfather, and indeed those of my father, and my mother, to live in this way. Granted, I am about five minutes away from utter insolvency and living under a bridge, but I still can’t believe I’ve had it so good for so long, have had the encouragement of these corrupting forces, these degenerate dreamers urging me on.
As I sat here, for the last couple of days, in a kind of frozen vigil, I kept thinking about the most recent conversation I had with Jazzy, on his birthday a couple of weeks ago. He was turning 90. I was in Shanghai at the time, which he seemed to think was funny, and fitting. He had finally read my book, and told me that I’d really nailed that sonuvabitch Peter Beard. I laughed — he was always so so funny — and sort of hemmed and hawed, dissembling, trying to diffuse my awkwardness, but he kept on, as if it were important that he make his point then and there, and said some unbelievably flattering things that I’m embarrassed to repeat here.
There were tears running down my cheeks as I giddily tried to explain that everything I’ve ever been able to do was because he had encouraged me to do so, that in his running off to to live with the Beats and Bowles in Tangier in the 60s (among many other heroics), he had showed me a way to live that I have always aspired to, that in his work and celebration of romantics — “dreamers” as he’s always called them — he gave us all permission to be who we wanted to be, even in a world that didn’t necessarily reward such a thing.
I wanted to tell him that it was all dedicated to him, that the life and work he was congratulating me for was not only made possible by his example and his encouragement, but done in his honor. I hope he heard me. Jazzy died yesterday at home, surrounded by friends, beloved by everyone I know.
***
I have done oodles of stories on Jazz over the years, in the Times, in Nowness, with Lisa Eisner, and, most recently in a love letter to the LA he showed me. Maybe the most cohesive was something we did around his big show at Fahey/Klein a couple years ago. I have tried to wiggle that into some sort of sensible shape, and line up the tenses. I may have mongrelized it; I am a bit of a mess, but in here I wrote much of what I wanted him to hear from me:
***
Viewed from our manic, exasperated present, the photographs of my fake godfather Paul Jasmin have an unbelievably alluring, lazy decadence about them: all that emptiness, all that golden Californian sunshine so wonderfully squandered; all of those gorgeous, laconic bodies in no kind of rush to do anything much other than one another. Jazzy’s Los Angeles, which he photographed for nearly 40 years – since he moved west to escape New York, where he worked as an illustrator for fashion advertisements, much like his friend Andy Warhol – is a kind of a dreamscape. And, as in a dream, the “real” world and its concerns appear in his pictures only as abstractions (if at all) – a distant ribbon of smog and sandpaper plaster architecture in the background of a portrait of a dolorous youth.
In many of the photographs that were part of his show, Lost Angeles, at Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles (which was, somehow, his first big show in town), LA is itself in conversation with his subjects: lavender hills in the sunset, a shoulder for a golden-haired girl to cry on; a canyon of palms, down the slope from Whitley Heights, calling you down from your safe perch into the dense thickets of sin. But like so many of the pictures that have been collected in his books, Hollywood Cowboy, Lost Angeles and California Dreaming, it is the mood of the people, their matinee-idol faces, that is so enchanting.
Here, for example, is Anjelica Huston in profile, a blossom behind her ear, flat crown hat tilted jauntily to the side, looking impressively majestic, a rural queen up above a Californian landscape; there Sofia Coppola, topless but for her hair hanging down to her heavily charmed sarong, a 1970s Cleopatra, ready to ruin the life of her interlocutor. If they are in fact quite regal figures (and what else would you call actual Hollywood royalty?), these images make of their subjects something else, something more like icons. In her photograph, Huston could be an actor of her father’s generation, maybe Rita Hayworth, in a romantic caper set on the Costa Brava. When I mentioned this to Jazz, he closed one eye, cocked his head and squinted with the other. “Yeah,” he said in his raspy voice, “you’re right, that picture is not today at all.” He was sitting at his living room table, appraising a series of prints for the show. “It could be a picture from the 1940s or 1950s. But basically, it's what I see now. That's how I want the people to be. Innocence with a little bit of an edge.” Coppola does look innocent in her photo, as if she maybe ran away with the wrong band. But there is edge there, too, like she might be some sort of belly-dancing assassin.
Coppola was, of course, one of Jazz’s students, if informally – she didn’t regularly attend his beloved photography class at ArtCenter in Pasadena (as did Dewey Nicks, Melodie McDaniel and a slew of other wildly accomplished photographers from the last 30-odd years), which he taught, well into his 80s, every Friday afternoon – she just dropped in on him at his apartment, between her own classes at CalArts, to sit around his table, as I was doing — had so often done throughout my life — to talk about pictures, about the worlds those images hint at.
The world that Jazzy’s pictures point to is very specific – and obviously somewhat autobiographical. There is, about his subjects, a bit of the 1950s silver-screen grandeur of the movies (starring, say, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift) he grew up watching every week in his hometown of Helena, Montana. And then there is the longing, the windswept, desert light lonesomeness of, say, the stories of Paul Bowles – the writer who Jazzy sought out and met in Tangier on one of his flights from art school in Paris, where he’d gone to study painting. Like Bowles’ characters, Jazzy’s too have a kind of idyllic isolation, a romantic remove.
In addition to France and Morocco, a young Jazzy wandered his way into Cairo, to Taormina, Sicily, and then, ultimately, to New York in the late 1950s. As he describes it, New York was then still a hopeful place, where everyone knew everyone (or at least slept with them) and you could kind of make yourself up of whole cloth.
“The 1960s were fabulous for young people,” he said. “Central Park. Every weekend, when the weather was nice, every young person would go to Central Park and it was Be-Ins. That term doesn't even translate into the 21st century. Be-In, love-in. Acid… But today you wouldn't dare take those kinds of drugs because the world isn't kind.”
This gauzy, mythical sort of innocence – subsequently lost – could be said to be the primary subject of Jazzy’s photography. It is in the illustrations that he made working in advertising; it is in his paintings. And it is, in addition to his own aspirations to become an actor (his is one of the voices synthesized into a slurry that became Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho), what drew him to LA.
“LA is filled with dreamers,” he said. “It's filled with people that came maybe to be movie stars. And this building,” he said, “Los Altos,” the 1925 building in Koreatown, where he lived for the past 20 years, “is filled with a lot of people who came with a dream and ended up doing something else.”
And that something else, that fall from the cloudy dreams that brought them west is how one enters the seedy Los Angeles of noir. There was shortly before his show a murder in the building – the same building in which the great early movie stars Clara Bow and Mae West lived, where it is also rumored that William Randolf Hearst kept his mistress. In recent years, it had fallen into a kind of garish Norma Desmond disrepair: fake filigree fading from the mission revival columns in the lobby, red plush carpet sprouting some sort of stuffing. Jazzy told me he had heard through the grapevine that the murder, a shooting, was drug-related, but this interplay of glamour and gossip, of desperation (or, in his words, “dreaming”), with myth and mayhem, is essential to both Los Angeles and Jazzy’s pictures.
I think of it as some sort of poetry that Jazzy’s first big break as a photographer in Los Angeles was shooting the stills on the set of American Gigolo, a film about hustling and about beauty corrupted, starring Richard Gere. I remember first experiencing his pictures much later, in my own Angeleno youth – when, at the time, he was shooting frequently for magazines including L’Uomo Vogue and doing ads for brands such as A.P.C. I remember the seductive maturity they contained. All of his subjects seemed to possess a sophistication that only comes by way of hard experience – they knew something about life that I’d never understand. They’d had their hearts broken, dramatically, they’d run away, run around, been there and back – and you saw the miles they’d covered in their eyes. To my then adolescent mind, it seemed as though the figures in Jazzy’s pictures all occupied the same milieu – a kind of debauched aristocracy, directly descended from the jet set, who’d moved out to LA on a vision quest or some such and become marooned there at the end of the world (at a house in Whitley Terrace probably), only because there was nowhere further for them to go.
“In LA, there is nothing to do,” Jazzy liked to say. “LA allows you time and space to reflect.” And Jazzy, who passed away at his home yesterday, at the age of 90, took full advantage. Apart from visits with friends — who he never failed to charm, inspire, bust up with laughter — in the past few years, he remained close to his little hermitage at Los Altos, with his cats, and his pictures. He ran Turner Classic movies around the clock, and read – magazines, yes, but mostly biographies of figures from the Golden Age of Hollywood. He had, however consciously, created for himself a buffer from the real world so as to live more fully in his own dream. And I wondered if that, in fact, wasn’t his actual art, his masterpiece – a world of his own creation, a perfect dream world, unfettered by reality – a dreamworld he gave us a little glimpse of, and an opportunity to visit, in his photographs.
Wonderful, seductive writing
Lovely tribute.