If anything is more synonymous with Palm Springs than palm trees, it’s celebrity culture. Streets and buildings are named after famous musicians and actors who frequented our desert in the ’50s and ’60s, and the Coachella Valley continues to attract stars today.
An upcoming photo exhibition in Rancho Mirage is all about this celebrity culture. Hollywood Cool, opening at MAD.KAT Gallery on Saturday, Feb. 17, features the photography of John R. Hamilton. Hamilton’s work focuses on “a love of celebrity and the freedom of the American West” via photos of countless celebrities shot from the ’40s through the ’90s.
The Hollywood Cool exhibition opens on the same day that Hamilton’s photography is being featured at a Modernism Week event titled “John Wayne, Hollywood and the American West.” The talk will feature photos from the Hamilton collection, as well as commentary from Ethan Wayne, director of the John Wayne Cancer Foundation and president of John Wayne Enterprises, which acquired a portion of the collection; Laurie Kratochvil, curator of the John R. Hamilton Archives and former photo editor of Rolling Stone magazine; and Amy Shepherd, executive director of the John R. Hamilton Archives and vice president of John Wayne Enterprises.
During a recent interview with both Shepherd and Russ Tolman (the partner of Kim Tolman, gallerist and curator of MAD.KAT), they discussed how the Hollywood Cool exhibit came to be.
“I saw Amy and her associates, Laurie Kratochvil and Ethan Wayne, present at Modernism Week last year at the Annenberg Theater,” Tolman said. “At that point, a gallery was something that was kind of a dream of Kim’s, but we hadn’t really decided to move ahead with it. We really enjoyed the presentation and the photography, so when we started the gallery, and we were looking at putting together our ’23-’24 season, we just thought that it would be natural to see if they’d be interested in doing an exhibition during Modernism Week, so we contacted them, and they said yes.”
That Modernism Week presentation last year was titled “Hollywood Cool: The John R. Hamilton Lost Photography Archive Exposed,” and featured an array of photos from the Hamilton collection.
“This year, we’re doing a little bit of a deeper dive and looking at John Wayne specifically, and we’re titling the talk ‘Hollywood in the American West,’” Shepherd said. “We’re really digging into the Western photography for the talk at Modernism Week. As far as the gallery show, that’s not a direct connection with Modernism Week, but we are on their calendar, so I guess it’s partially connected.”
Shepherd said people love to explore the wide range of Hamilton’s photography.
“We had a really great reception to our talk last year,” Shepherd said. “It was almost sold out, and then they asked us to come back, so I think that’s always a good sign that they wanted to hear more. … We still have people coming up to us, even today, saying that they really enjoyed the talk. Modernism Week is a decorator’s mecca or paradise, and I think decorators are always looking for new and fresh artwork for their projects.”
Tolman said MAD.KAT’s Hollywood Cool exhibit will feature 52 gems from Hamilton’s large body of work.
“We’re going to have quite a nice exhibit of some of the best of that archive,” said Tolman. “(The prints) are going to be quite large and impressive, so I think it’s going to be a pretty striking exhibit.”
Amy Shepherd and John Wayne Enterprises purchased the Hamilton photography collection 10 years ago, and worked tirelessly to preserve and digitize the body of work. Shepherd writes in a blurb on johnwayne.com: “Because Hamilton lived and worked in the era before digital photography, it was necessary for him to duplicate slides on a Repronar slide copy machine in order to submit his images to the magazines. This posed a challenge to us, as we need to find the earliest generation to be used as a source image for digitization and restoration. … (With the photos) being nearly 60 years old, the restoration work required careful cleaning before being scanned raw (i.e. without any corrections). Once scanned, the image was then matched to the photographers’ prints and corrected for color balance, saturation, tone and spotted to remove any remaining dirt.”
Shepherd explained: “We were able to spend some time on it and digitize it, as it was all analog at the time, all negatives and prints. We went through a process of curating a collection and digitizing it to preserve it.”
One of the highlights of Hollywood Cool is that 12 of the works are original 11-by-14 and 16-by-20 gelatin silver prints developed by Hamilton himself. Shepherd explained how these prints have been preserved.
“We need to store (them) properly,” Shepherd said. “The main thing is the storage conditions. We do take efforts to store them properly with the right archival materials at the right temperature. It is an ongoing process to preserve the silver gelatin and the negative.”
I asked Shepherd and Tolman each to pick one favorite photo.
“There are so many good ones, and my favorite probably changes a lot, but I really love the portrait of Paul Newman,” Shepherd said. “It’s really a striking photograph. I love the Jayne Mansfield on the barn; it’s just really campy and fun. I love the Steve McQueen, and we’re doing that in a large-scale format, and it’s a close-up of his face.”
Added Tolman: “I have to mention Kirk Douglas and his tighty-whities, standing outside his trailer near Indio during the filming of There Was a Crooked Man … out there—and his helicopter is just near the edge of the photo.”
The talk “John Wayne, Hollywood and the American West” will take place at 9 a.m., Saturday, Feb. 17, at the Annenberg Theater at the Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 N. Museum Drive, in Palm Springs. Tickets are $18. For tickets or more information, visit modernismweek.com.
The opening reception for Hollywood Cool will take place at 5 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 17, at MAD.KAT Gallery, 71590 Highway 111, in Rancho Mirage. The exhibit will be on display through Sunday, March 10, and admission to the gallery is free. For more information, visit gallerymadkat.com.