![]() It also speaks of a relentless creative curiosity and open-mindedness that, as Sawka’s documentary shows, was not always immediately apparent in his everyday interactions with people. The more free-flowing narrative style of Stock’s Californian pictures was surely informed by his dalliance with the moving image, which began when he left Magnum in 1968 to focus on documentary film-making. In another, he captures an ecstatic Earl Hines pounding on the piano in a smoky club, the sense of the music’s joyous momentum palpable in a single stilled moment.Īgainst all this, the images in California Trip mark a dramatic departure, though one that had been taking shape in his work throughout the 1960s. In one evocative image, a struggling musician, Bill Crow, lugs a bass across a Manhattan street in what looks like the early hours of the morning. In a style that was unadorned and intimate, he set about capturing the reality of the nomadic jazz life as well as its drama. Following the success of the Dean series, he began photographing jazz musicians, merging stark, monochrome portraits of the likes of Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong with often dramatic images of their performances. ![]() ![]() Stock had joined Magnum in 1951 and, the following year, shot an extraordinarily candid series about Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia for Life magazine. “He made some quite bitter comments about the pictures, that people weren’t seeing them as they should because the icon got in the way.” Stock’s widow, author Susan Richards, who describes him as “the most confident person I ever met”, recalls that the prominence of the Dean photographs “maybe bugged him a little bit, but he also knew that the iconic stature of images enabled him to have the lifestyle he had”. “Dennis was not always happy about the prominence of the James Dean photos,” says Hanna Sawka, who directed the illuminating 2011 documentary, Beyond Iconic: Photographer Dennis Stock. ![]() Stock’s shot of James Dean, New York, 1955. View image in fullscreen ‘The icon got in the way’. In the immediate wake of Dean’s untimely death in a car crash, Stock’s images attained an almost mythic aura that remains to this day, arguably overshadowing his other work. When the ensuing photo essay appeared in Life magazine, it helped cement Dean’s status as a new kind of film star: moody, intense and ill at ease with the Hollywood fame factory. Stock befriended the young Dean after seeing an early screening of East of Eden and subsequently photographed him on the wintry streets of New York and on a trip back to his family home in Fairmount, Indiana. With hindsight, it is clear that California Trip upends our received notion of Dennis Stock, who remains most famous for his intimately observed images of the young James Dean in the months before his death in September 1955. To Californians, he wrote, this was “all so ordinary as to be mundane”. In one photograph, a tousle-haired infant frolics next to a Hells Angels motorcycle gang member. There are images of sun-kissed, back-to-nature hippy couples and marching black militants, missile bases and utopian communes, endless Californian beaches and a towering stack of rusting cars in a scrap yard. View image in fullscreen Photograph: Dennis Stock/Magnum PhotosĪlmost 50 years later, and nine years after his death, California Trip now seems both prophetic and elegiac, Stock’s free-flowing approach allowing the contradictions of the time to speak for themselves.
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