Something About California Bugged Dennis Stock

Dennis Stock is best known as one of the Life magazine photographers who lived on a steady diet of movie stars and jazz musicians in the 50s and 60s. Working almost exclusively in black and white, he managed to get past all the usual perimeters to produce the kind of shots he became famous for—up close and clean. But there was much more to his work, and his process.

If you’ve ever wondered, while trying to drive through Southern California, what the culture was like in 1968, before everything was surveyed, measured, and paved—if you’ve ever wanted to get the feel of California before 1970, with all its contradictions—you could look at Dennis Stock’s photographs. You’d see the southbound grade on Highway 101 from Del Mar to Torrey Pines, empty except for a single VW Bug. There’s the beach at Playa Del Rey in Los Angeles, deserted except for a couple of sunbathers beneath the enormous shadow of a Boeing 727. Surfers, bikers, nudists. Hollywood, Malibu, Irvine. All were photographed before the crush, before the 24-hour news feed, and long before instant media, when life was infinitely simpler and definitely cooler. 

Cool is an elusive quality, ever changing and hard to pin down. You may not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it. Cool is innocent of pretention. It moves freely between subcultures and demographics because cool is its own passport. Cool will get you in and back out. Stock may or may not have been cool, but one thing is certain—he photographed the coolest of the cool.

His curriculum vitae reads like an American fairy tale. He joined the U.S. Navy at 17. Following World War II, he started at Life as an apprentice photographer, then continued as a contract shooter. That meant the magazine would guarantee payment for whatever idea he dreamt up, and underwrite and publish a photo-essay based on his pitch. Working for the oversized picture weekly represented the pinnacle of Americana photojournalism during the golden age of publishing. 

“We got a call from California,” recalled the late Ralph Graves, who worked as a reporter, bureau chief, and managing editor for Life from 1948 to 1972. “One of our guys was out there in Hollywood, Dennis Stock. He had this idea to go to a farm outside Fairmount, Indiana, with this unknown actor—a kid named James Dean—and shoot a biographical picture essay. He said, ‘He’s a fantastic actor!’ I said, ‘OK, go ahead and do it—we’ll guarantee you two days.’ I think he spent two months on the road with Dean—out to Indiana, over to New York, and back to L.A. when Rebel Without A Cause started production. Did you see the pictures? Who shoots a portrait of a movie star on a farm with a pig?”

Only one other organization commanded more worldwide respect among the photographic cognoscenti than Life magazine: Magnum Photo, the legendary international agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. While at Life, Stock was invited by Capa to become a Magnum agency photographer, tracing a fantasy career arc in less than ten years. To be invited to join Magnum was like to being asked to play in a small combo with Jimi Hendrix. You couldn’t move any higher up the photo food chain.

“I met Dennis in Paris,” said photographer Anthony Friedkin when I contacted him. “We were at Henri Cartier-Bresson’s apartment, you know, above the Tuileries Garden. Robert Delpire introduced us, and we sat there—me, Josef Koudelka, and Cartier-Bresson—looking at Stock’s prints. Dennis was a fucking wonderful photographer, the real deal—very good with people, charming, great energy. When he was invited to join Magnum—of course you had to be invited, and you had to have a unanimous vote among all the photographers—there wasn’t a single no vote. He was very comfortable with the pressure, with celebrities, very relaxed. His pictures of James Dean are classic, but he shot everybody—John Wayne, Marilyn. There are some great stories out there about him. Ask Francoise Kirkland about Paris sometime…”

Stock’s friend and fellow New Yorker, Humphrey Bogart, introduced him to the director of Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray, who in turn introduced him to James Dean, resulting in the two months he spent on the road with actor, and ultimately the iconic 1955 portrait of Dean cruising Times Square in the rain. Stock also photographed, befriended, and moved in the same circles with other mega-stars of the twentieth century, including Audrey Hepburn and Frank Sinatra. He shot what is probably the best portrait ever made of Dennis Hopper while on location in Peru. His stills of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Grace Kelly look more like fleeting memories than formal portraits.

But, for all his savoir-faire, something bugged Stock about California. He was the quintessential New Yorker—intellectual, compelling, intense—and to Stock, California was all over the map, filled with career revelers, surfers, Hells Angels, and other oddballs. “For many years, [it] frightened me,” wrote Stock in the preface of his book, California Trip (1968 – 1970). “The contrasting arenas of life shook me up. Even I though I found the sun and fog, sand and Sierras, which conveyed a firm image of stark reality, the mother vision of life, the state seemed unreal. The people were constructing layers and dimensions of life that unsettled me. Surrealism was everywhere, the juxtapositions of relative levels of reality projected chaos. For the young man with traditional concerns for a spiritual and aesthetic order, California seemed
too unreal.”

After wrapping assignments in Hollywood, or photographing corporate emperors in L.A., Stock would wander off on his own to Watts or Venice Beach, San Francisco or La Jolla—constantly shooting, constantly trying to get California to hold still long enough to understand it. Looking at his intimate and precise portfolio in California Trip, you can see how he tried to define the beach towns, the hippies, and the bikers. You can see how he travelled in and out of different groups with his camera, quietly composing and shooting all the things that troubled him about the state: tacky artificiality sharing the road with stunning beauty. 

The result is a straightforward and unsentimental record of California’s subcultures—the beaches, the ghettos, and the film sets—containing the unique sense of openness and possibility in the years just prior to the population explosion, the freeways, and the ensuing real estate boom that changed California forever.

[Feature image: In this image titled “Corona Del Mar,” a surfer is posed behind a 9-foot board on a set of California State Park stairs, giving the surfboard a playful anthropomorphic look. However, the location is not Corona Del Mar. The stairs, immediately recognizable to any local San Diego surfer, are the middle set of steps leading to Barney’s reef near Pipes in Cardiff. The surfboard is a pristine Hansen Superlight model with converging stringers and an early interchangeable fin box, undoubtedly purchased across the highway at Hansen’s Surf Shop. 1968.]