Multiple exposures on double vision the photography of george rodriguez

1. 5/31/2018 Multiple Exposures: On “Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez” - Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/multiple-exposures-on-double-vision-the-photography-of-george-rodriguez/#! 1/5
Multiple Exposures: On “Double Vision:
The Photography of George Rodriguez”
By Geoff Nicholson
MAY 27, 2018
WHEN I FIRST started living in Los Angeles, I met a wise man, in fact a
recent arrival from New York, who said to me, “In this town, you can
forget about that ‘six degrees of separation’ stuff. Here, it’s more like two
or three degrees.”
I’ve come to understand his point. The guy from AAA who came to start
my car had a lot of stories about working on the old Jeep belonging to
Barry White’s widow. When one of my ankles went bad, I found myself
sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with Lou Ferrigno (though he didn’t
wait nearly as long as I did). For that matter, I once sat at the same lunch
table as Werner Herzog, who told me he thought John Major was a great
British prime minister. I thought it best not to argue about that.
There are, no doubt, a lot of questions here concerning the nature of
separation and the nature of connection. Herzog and I will not be calling
each other to organize a night out bowling. But even so, Los Angeles does
offer these brief, unlikely, and generally positive interactions across
divides of class, race, and wealth. Of course the divides remain in place,
but at least we see that we’re not living in completely separate universes.
Double Vision
The Photography of George
Rodriguez
By Josh Kun, George
Rodriguez
Published 2018
Hat & Beard Press
192 Pages
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2. 5/31/2018 Multiple Exposures: On “Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez” - Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/multiple-exposures-on-double-vision-the-photography-of-george-rodriguez/#! 2/5
And when it comes to degrees of separation, if you happen to know the
photographer George Rodriguez (I, alas, don’t), it seems you’re well on
the way to connecting with pretty much everybody in the city. In a career
spanning at least 50 years, his photographic subjects have included
Marilyn Monroe and Cesar Chávez, Rock Hudson and Frank Zappa,
Dolores Huerta and Brooke Shields, Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif,
Edward James Olmos and Sugar Ray Robinson, to name but a few.
Even so, there are some surprises, some unexpected juxtapositions in the
photographs. Is that Magic Johnson hanging out with the Dodgers while
wearing a “Certified Bikini Inspector” T-shirt? Afraid so. And okay, we
know that Ronald Reagan was a Hollywood guy, so it’s no big surprise
that he’s at some L.A. dinner with showbiz folk, but it’s still amazing to
see him and Nancy at the same table as George Burns, while Sonny Bono
looks on from a less prestigious spot behind them. Judging by their faces,
they’re all having a thoroughly miserable time.
Another example: It seems all too predictable that Jesse Jackson would be
at a press conference during the United Farm Workers’ grape strike and
boycott, and we know that Martin Sheen embraced his Hispanic roots and
had a connection with Chávez, so yes, he, too, gets a place at the table,
but that guy on the far right who looks like Robert Blake … Yep, that’s
Robert Blake.
The fact that most of the Chávez pictures were taken in Delano, up in
Kern County, and that one or two of the others were shot in Tijuana and
Louisiana slightly spoils my L.A. connectedness thesis, but Rodriguez is a
Los Angeles guy through and through. He was born in 1937 to a Mexican
father and a Mexican-American mother. The family business was a shoe
repair shop in downtown, and he went to Fremont High School in South
Los Angeles, a place known at the time as the “doo-wop high school” —
The Penguins and The Jaguars were alumni, and quite a few other bands
too. As someone who grew up in England with an unlikely taste for doo-
wop, I’m as amazed by this as if he’d been educated at Hogwarts. At
Fremont, he learned to take photographs on a four-inch-by-five-inch
Anniversary Speed Graphic camera, and his jobs after graduation
included working in a photo lab and as a photographer on a luxury liner.
His first “Hollywood” employment was as an assistant to Sid Avery, who
famously shot celebrities in their “private moments” for The Saturday
Evening Post.
So the professional “glamour” aspect of his work was there early on, but
at the same time, initially for his own benefit, he also photographed
considerably less glamorous scenes of Chicano life. Josh Kun’s
introduction to Double Vision: The Photography Of George Rodriguez
The Neobaroque Immigrant: Aura
Xilonen’s “Campeón gabacho”/
“The Gringo Champion”
By Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Apertures and Aperitifs: On “The
Photographer’s Cookbook”
By Geoff Nicholson
Waiting For Chavez: The Farm
Workers Union and the Future of
Labor Organizing
By Tom Gallagher

3. 5/31/2018 Multiple Exposures: On “Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez” - Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/multiple-exposures-on-double-vision-the-photography-of-george-rodriguez/#! 3/5
tells the story, from 1968, of Rodriguez running the photo lab at Columbia
Pictures and, on his lunch breaks, driving down to East Los Angeles to
photograph the walkouts and blowouts — student demonstrations against
educational inequality — which Kun calls “the first major public actions
of the Chicano movement.”
Rodriguez was also on the spot to photograph a requiem procession for
Robert Kennedy in East Los Angeles, the Chicano Moratorium march, a
neo-Nazi demonstration against Hubert Humphrey outside the Palladium,
and the aftermath of the Rodney King riots. He was also there for the
Sunset Strip riots, but they didn’t impress him much. “It wasn’t really a
riot,” he says. “They were just stopping traffic and acting wild.”
At other times on the Strip, on non-riot nights, he photographed Jimi
Hendrix, The Doors, and Jackie Wilson at the Whisky a Go Go. He
photographed B. B. King in Long Beach, Arthur Lee in Northridge, Diana
Ross at the Forum. He shot album covers for Van Morrison, Albert
Collins, and Booker T. & the M.G.’s. He even had a spell working for the
Laufer company, shooting covers for magazines such as Yo!, Soul
Illustrated, and Tiger Beat. Cover models included MC Hammer, The
Jackson 5, and Shaun Cassidy.
It’s a testament to Rodriguez’s skills, and perhaps his affability, that he
was welcomed by so many different people into so many different worlds.
Being likable isn’t the first requirement of a photographer but it seldom
does any harm, and if you’re getting up close to photograph Frank Sinatra
or Ice Cube, you really don’t want to piss them off. Perhaps he was
simply benign. Certainly there’s no obvious viciousness in the
photographs.
So yes, Rodriguez’s work as a whole isn’t exactly unified, but that’s okay,
and it’s what comes inevitably from having the kind of patchwork career
experienced by most freelancers. You go where the work is and you can’t
afford to be too choosy, although that doesn’t mean you abandon your
pride. Again in the introduction, Rodriguez tells the story of shooting in
the Laufer studio: “[A] writer asked an actor what he did before acting.
He said, ‘I worked in a factory and they had me back there with all the
Mexicans,’ I just stopped taking pictures and walked out the door.”
In a note at the end of Double Vision, Rodriguez says, “Originally my idea
for this book was to document the Chicano, Mexican-American
experience,” and he had to be persuaded by friends and colleagues to
include the other work. His original concept would have made a perfectly
good book, and that subject matter is thoroughly represented in the
current volume, but it seems to me this book is more interesting for taking
a wider view of the world, for demonstrating and connecting the various

4. 5/31/2018 Multiple Exposures: On “Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez” - Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/multiple-exposures-on-double-vision-the-photography-of-george-rodriguez/#! 4/5
degrees of separation. This breadth also rather undercuts the title: these
are more like multiple exposures, layered superimpositions.
Which leads me to argue, amicably enough, with something Josh Kun
writes in his introduction. He argues,
We have little room for the double-exposed, for the double lifers, and
the cultural two-timers. We like identities to fit neatly into single
categories, and we like social experiences to line up with and mirror
those single categories without ever mixing within the frame or
spilling out of it.
I’m not sure who the “we” is in that passage, but in contemporary
photography that notion strikes me as simply untrue. Catherine Opie, to
take a local example, is as known for her photographs of lesbian life as
she is for photographs of mini-malls as she is for documenting the Obama
inauguration, and none of it feels like a contradiction.
In the age of Instagram, things are changing all the time, but above all, for
better or worse, the changes seem to involve a blurring of hierarchies,
where a picture of a passionate political rally is given the same status as a
photograph of a grilled cheese sandwich. But long before Instagram,
Mapplethorpe could photograph hardcore gay S-and-M, then do a portrait
of Susan Sarandon with her child, and then photograph exquisite floral
still lifes. These weren’t separate identities. The different worlds informed
each other, and still do, so that a collector can put a Mapplethorpe
photograph of a white lily on the office wall and there’s a considerable
thrill in knowing this is a picture by the guy who photographed himself
with a whip up his butt. Rodriguez is hardly in that category, but knowing
that the man who photographed Rosa Parks also photographed Lucille
Ball and Natalie Wood does deliver a certain frisson of its own.
As I lived with Double Vision, I found myself wondering whether there
are any “great” or “iconic” pictures in the book, and ended up thinking
this was probably an irrelevant question. I happened to be reading an
interview with John Sypal, an American photographer based in Japan,
who, among other things, runs the website tokyocamerastyle.com (there’s
a book with that title, too). He says,
You know, I’ve never ONCE heard a Japanese photographer ever
comment on form or structure of a single picture — instead it’s an
overview of all of them at once in a set […] I’d argue that Araki and
Moriyama have made plenty of truly incredible photographs that
stand alone magnificently — but at the same time, the entirety of
their output serves as “work” as much as single pictures do.

5. 5/31/2018 Multiple Exposures: On “Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez” - Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/multiple-exposures-on-double-vision-the-photography-of-george-rodriguez/#! 5/5
I think this applies to George Rodriguez, too. Photography is always a
series of separate, frozen moments, but put enough of them together and
they form a world and a worldview; the whole picture becomes greater
than the sum of the individual frames.
And yet there’s one Rodriguez photograph I can’t get out of my head,
even though it’s not especially startling or dramatic in itself. It shows
Michael Jackson apparently yelling at Leif Garrett on a sports field. A
caption tells us they’re at the 1977 “Rock and Rock Celebrity Classic,”
but that doesn’t explain much. There’s something genuinely enigmatic
about the picture. It’s impossible to tell whether Jackson’s yelling in
enthusiasm or encouragement or mockery, but Garrett doesn’t seem to be
taking it well. Jackson looks so confident, Garrett looks so defenseless,
and they both look so youthful; Jackson would have been 19, Garrett three
years his junior, but they both look younger than that. Is it over-
interpreting to see that picture and think it’s a depiction of doomed youth?
Well, possibly, but we know that one way or another, in very different
ways, both these guys were certainly doomed. Did Rodriguez have some
intuition about this when he took the picture? He surely knew how
vulnerable child stars could be. In his endnote, he talks about
photographic luck and the years of preparation and learning that go into
becoming “lucky.” Here posterity has joined up the dots for him, and for
us, and reduced the degrees of separation.
¤
Geoff Nicholson is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of
Books. His latest novel, The Miranda, is out now.