Reviews about photography, photographers, and the photographic arts.

“Paris had Brassaï. And Berlin had Newton. But Moshe had L.A., babe,” Jeff Weiss states from the Foreword of L.A. Babe: The Real Women of Los Angeles 1975 – 1988, by Moshe Brakha. Weiss doesn’t so much state Brakha’s iconic status as write a swooning love letter. From the mid-70s to the mid-80s, in a rough-edged cocktail of “Romance and Sex [and] this intangible point of view. Moshe always called it ‘Social Criticism.’” Beyond the babes and the cars and the punk rock there was something more to the frame. Beautiful photographs and beautiful women, yet they provoke questions. Weiss asks, “Why on the roof? Why is she smoking in the fireplace? […] Why is the American flag stuck in her underwear?”

But before we can answer these questions, we have to unpack the title. Specifically two words: Real and Los Angeles. For the longest time, and still even today, Los Angeles has had the bad reputation of being fake. Plastic. Hollyweird. Somehow, because entertainment is one of the major industries of this sprawling megalopolis laying on the San Adreas fault-line that it has taken on the stereotype of fakeness in all its manifold grotesquerie. Nothing more fake than a bottle-blonde with silicone tits, right? But is it really that fake? No more false and contrived as Grant Wood’s American Gothic or some focus-tested demographic slice animated Frankenstein-fashion by a giant advertising agency to be fed back into the gullible maws of the “real ‘Murricans” in the flyover states? Compared to Los Angeles, Real America^TM is simply another marketing fabrication and about as over-used as the word “authentic” on a restaurant menu.

The book itself is a lavish production. But one can expect high-quality images and presentation from Rizzoli. In black and whites or color, posed or candid, Brakha captures a moment on film. Some are set in natural surroundings, others are staged, weird monuments of artifice and femininity. There are black and white “street shots” with women hovering over the Hollywood Walk of Fame or stalking atop the individual Stars like crazed spiders. We see the Runaways, Bette Midler, Sherilyn Fenn, and a young Janet Jackson. And various musical luminaries like Joan Jett, Lita Ford, and Exene Cervenka. Other nameless women appear in diverse states of undress. But like his German counterpart Helmut Newton, Brakha “for the Art of it,” as Weiss states. “Shooting up the bars and underbellies, the dark shadows and sunlit beaches.” The only real negative one can give to this stellar collection is the lack of photo credits. While the time and location is given, the subject is not. But that is a minor quibble in light of gorgeous presentation. This is a coffee table book for the discerning cosmopolitan or the aesthete flirting with the decadent and declassé. Los Angeles is the sprawling megalopolis, the place where dreams are made of, and L.A. Babe is a refreshing daydream, a delectable volume worshiping sun, sex, and sensuality.