By ELIZABETH MARCELLINO Palisadian-Post Contributor Well, it’s about time. Peter Gowland, 92, a photographer since he first picked up a camera at 13, finally has a solo gallery show. An enthusiastic collection of friends, neighbors and mostly local guests spilled through the two levels and outside space of Frank Langen’s gallery g169 on West Channel Road on Saturday night. To be fair, the Santa Monica Canyon resident’s work through the years has been largely commercial”he earned his bread and butter with magazine covers, advertising jobs, and headshots; he produced an annual pin-up calendar for a tool company for more than 30 years. He’s best known for glamour shots of models and actresses, which include Jayne Mansfield, but also scores of unknowns. Many of the model shots from the ’50s shown on his Web site are nearly kitschy now in their exaggerated perkiness and mannered poses. They were probably effective in selling whiskey and power tools, with their side serving of playful sexuality, but it’s also not shocking that they didn’t have art dealers banging down Gowland’s door. But the work that Laura O’Loughlin has curated here as ‘California Girls, Hollywood’s Beach & The War Years’ serves mostly as counterpoint to those glamour shots. O’Loughlin’s reason for choosing the abstract underwater nude that graces the show’s invitation serves just as well as an explanation of her deft choices throughout”the work here ‘transcends the genre.’ The second-floor main space is devoted to 19 nudes and, while the models here could easily be the same perky gals found elsewhere, these images seem much more about art than commerce. The women are sultry and natural in their near or complete nakedness, not jutting out here or twisting around there to present their selves in calendar fashion. It’s not that they are without props. One woman’s torso, all that’s visible in a shot at the beach, is patterned with the sharp criss-cross shadows of a fishnet. Another girl, standing in only panties, wears a floppy hat that somehow unmistakably pegs her as from the ’70s. It’s also not simply the naturalism of the poses that differentiates this work. One image of just a pair of legs crossed closely together at the knee may have trapped the model in a pose as uncomfortable as any, while Gowland bent the light and shadow to his will. But for the viewer of the finished piece, the pose seems sculptural, not contorted, and pleasing in a much deeper, more interesting way than the simple retro pleasures of the calendar girls. Much of the focus is on the nudes or ‘California Girls,’ but O’Loughlin has split the show into a trinity of elements, with playful intermezzos along the way. The first floor entry showcases photographs from ‘The War Years,’ presented mostly in 8′ x 10′ format and captivating more for the subject matter they capture and their documentary value than any vivid artistry. A small second-floor anteroom off the main space holds ‘Hollywood’s Beach,’ a four-part story in itself, told wall by wall”50s and ’60s beachgoers; celebrities of the era such as Henry Miller and Tallulah Bankhead; a short series of children; and nostalgic pin-ups. All offer up a time otherwise lost to us and O’Loughlin, who pored through hundreds of photos and says she selected these because they ‘just touched us,’ seems to have a knack for finding images either poignant or unique. The beach photographs are also great fun, taken by Gowland during his own playtime. Viewers can see how much fun Langen and O’Loughlin themselves had with the show when some of Gowland’s miscellany pops out of nooks and passageways, as when visitors on their way back downstairs spot a 30′ x 40′ print of a younger Peter, naked, behind a small, strategically-placed palm plant. The show is not entirely cohesive, given the breadth of choices, but there are so many great moments that it hardly seems to matter. Gowland, seated on a stool in the middle of the room and surrounded for hours with guests asking questions and offering praise, is engagingly self-effacing. He offers full credit for everything he’s accomplished to his wife, Alice, 88, who has served as his agent, writer, publisher, assistant and ‘pinch hitter.’ Despite his clear technical expertise (he manufactured cameras as a sideline and wrote several books on lighting), he insists that his ‘best pictures have happened by accident.’ Though the show is hardly accidental, Langen does seem a bit surprised by its apparent great success. It gives him hope that the new gallery can be self-sustaining and that the canyon as a center of art and culture can be revived. ‘Every day is a gift,’ he says of having artists such as Gowland and Julius Shulman, the subject of Langen’s first show, in our midst, and he remains committed to showing local work. For Gowland, the gift seems to have been returned. At least twice during the evening, he deems the whole shebang ‘the biggest day of my life.’ Well, it’s about time.
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