In the mid-1970s, in run-down Los Angeles apartments, Steve Kahn made the photographs that became The Hollywood Suites. The publisher dates the work between 1974 and 1976. The pictures divide into two groups. The Hollywood Suites (nudes) presents young women, often partially clad and sometimes cropped, in a sexually charged atmosphere. The Hollywood Suites (mirrors, windows and doors) turns to architectural interiors, where mirrors and doorways carry the unease; select doorways are embellished with geometric patterns in twine. The images are grainy, with an unnaturally sharp contrast between darks and lights.
Alternately provocative and haunting, the series was exhibited on the West Coast and in Europe during the 1970s and included in group exhibitions such as Exposing: Photographic Definitions at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1976 and The Altered Photograph at P.S. 1 in New York in 1979. Kahn, born in 1943, belonged to a generation of Los Angeles photographers that included Robert Heinecken, Ilene Segalove and Jerry McMillan, who brought conceptual and collage approaches to the picture. His work is held by institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art in Toulon, France, and De Beyerd Museum in Breda, Holland.
Nazraeli Press published the book in 2014 as a 56-page slipcased hardcover with 51 duotone plates. The series had been encountered mainly through gallery and museum display; the book gathers it into a single volume, at a scale that lets the grain and hard tonal contrasts of the plates register. The publisher lists the title within NZ Library Set One, a series devoted to artists active in Los Angeles during the 1970s.
The collector’s interest follows from what the volume holds together. A series otherwise known through dispersed prints and exhibitions is assembled here in one place, and the book anchors the work in a defined Los Angeles context. For a collector drawn to the conceptual and collage-oriented photography that emerged in that city, this volume serves as a substantial gathering of Kahn’s central series.
