Julian Wasser
30 Jun - 01 Aug 2012
JULIAN WASSER
The Passenger
30 June – 1 August 2012
Julian Wasser began his career in photography in the 1950s as a teenager shooting crime scenes in Washington D.C. which he sold to The Washington Post. At the age of 14 he installed a police radio in his father’s car and cruised the streets of Washington DC at night photographing robberies and murders in the capital. In the morning his father would see his son’s photos on page one of The Post and thought that there was another Julian Wasser working as a photographer in Washington. His “Schule” allowed him to go to events during school hours to photograph Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. While working as a copy boy at the Washington bureau of the Associated Press he met the legendary photographer Weegee, who then became his mentor. After attending university and doing his military service as an officer in the US Navy he moved to Los Angeles and worked as a contract photographer for Time-Life for many years. He was responsible for numerous familiar images, especially from the 1960s, when Los Angeles began to take off in the American consciousness. His photos have appeared in magazines such as Life, Vanity Fair, Time and Newsweek, Fortune, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Der Stern, Jasmine, Esquire, Playboy, Elle, Italian Vogue, GO, Rolling Stone, Interview, The Wall Street Journal, the London Sunday Times Magazine, and the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Monopol in Berlin, Le Centre Georges Pompidou and La Cinemathèque Française in Paris. His black and white images possess a venturous character. His photographs from the 1960s in Los Angeles graphically represent an important era in the L.A. art scene, musicians and nightclubs, and the transition from the old to the New Hollywood. Furthermore his work is considered to be a critical discourse of political and social issues and the civil rights era. He is famous for capturing influential people in their daily lives. Because of is instinct of being in the right place at the right time, he was able to make iconic images of that era.
“The Passenger“ show at Wentrup, Berlin will focus on images of personalities from the arts and music and film scene in LA and Hollywood. President Barack Obama has Wasser’s photo of Martin Luther King hanging in The White House, Vanity Fair Magazine included his photo of director Roman Polanski at the Sharon Tate murder house as part of their 20th century iconic images story. His image of artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude girl has been used by or is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Getty Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Norton Simon Museum of Art and many other museums and private collections throughout the world.
Julian Wasser lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
The Passenger
30 June – 1 August 2012
Julian Wasser began his career in photography in the 1950s as a teenager shooting crime scenes in Washington D.C. which he sold to The Washington Post. At the age of 14 he installed a police radio in his father’s car and cruised the streets of Washington DC at night photographing robberies and murders in the capital. In the morning his father would see his son’s photos on page one of The Post and thought that there was another Julian Wasser working as a photographer in Washington. His “Schule” allowed him to go to events during school hours to photograph Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. While working as a copy boy at the Washington bureau of the Associated Press he met the legendary photographer Weegee, who then became his mentor. After attending university and doing his military service as an officer in the US Navy he moved to Los Angeles and worked as a contract photographer for Time-Life for many years. He was responsible for numerous familiar images, especially from the 1960s, when Los Angeles began to take off in the American consciousness. His photos have appeared in magazines such as Life, Vanity Fair, Time and Newsweek, Fortune, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Der Stern, Jasmine, Esquire, Playboy, Elle, Italian Vogue, GO, Rolling Stone, Interview, The Wall Street Journal, the London Sunday Times Magazine, and the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Monopol in Berlin, Le Centre Georges Pompidou and La Cinemathèque Française in Paris. His black and white images possess a venturous character. His photographs from the 1960s in Los Angeles graphically represent an important era in the L.A. art scene, musicians and nightclubs, and the transition from the old to the New Hollywood. Furthermore his work is considered to be a critical discourse of political and social issues and the civil rights era. He is famous for capturing influential people in their daily lives. Because of is instinct of being in the right place at the right time, he was able to make iconic images of that era.
“The Passenger“ show at Wentrup, Berlin will focus on images of personalities from the arts and music and film scene in LA and Hollywood. President Barack Obama has Wasser’s photo of Martin Luther King hanging in The White House, Vanity Fair Magazine included his photo of director Roman Polanski at the Sharon Tate murder house as part of their 20th century iconic images story. His image of artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude girl has been used by or is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Getty Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Norton Simon Museum of Art and many other museums and private collections throughout the world.
Julian Wasser lives and works in Los Angeles, California.