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"As Julian Wasser tells it, when he first began shooting for magazines like Time and Life in the 1960s, celebrity-obsessed photographers did not yet exist. In the introduction to his new monograph, The Way We Were: The Photography of Julian Wasser (Damiani, $60), he writes, \u201CThe glamour of Old Hollywood was still intact, but at the same time, everyone was approachable. There were no reserved VIP areas in clubs, no bodyguards or security men, no hordes of paparazzi.\u201D With his Nikon in tow, Wasser was given unprecedented access to actors, musicians, politicians, and writers\u2014everyone from fresh-faced, teenage Jodie Foster to silver-screen heavyweights like Steve McQueen and Jack Nicholson. Looking through these collected images, we see not only a more relaxed Hollywood, but also America during a dramatic cultural and political transition.\n\nPinterestFacebookJayne Mansfield, 1964, Life.\n\nWasser is responsible for some of the most iconic images of beloved cultural figures. His portraits of Joan Didion with her daughter and of Didion alone in front of her Stingray Corvette at her Hollywood Hills home are among the best-known photos of the literary legend. Other gems include shots of John Travolta, which originally ran in Time, during dance rehearsals for Saturday Night Fever. This would be the film that made Travolta a star, but through Wasser\u2019s lens the actor appears very much the gleeful twenty-something he was\u2014wide-eyed, on the brink of tremendous fame. For a 1964 issue of Life, Wasser caught a carefree Jayne Mansfield dancing at the Whisky a Go Go nightclub. In that image, Mansfield sheds her celebrity and becomes any other woman out with her friends.\n\nPinterestFacebookMen on top of a Los Angeles bus, 1966, Life.\n\nAlong with these snapshots of a casual Hollywood, Wasser captured major moments in American political history, particularly the growing counterculture of the \u201960s and \u201970s. When the closing of a teen nightclub and the announcement of a police-enforced curfew ignited the Sunset Strip riots, Wasser entered the mayhem and immortalized a mob of frenzied youth clamoring for social change. (He notes in the book that \u201Cthe crowd included Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, artist David Hockney, Sonny and Cher,\u201D to name a few.)\n\nPinterestFacebookRobert F. Kennedy, 1968, Life.\n\nThe Way We Were is a time capsule that preserves not just images of cultural icons, but the spirit surrounding them. Perhaps the most engaging photo in the collection is of Robert F. Kennedy holding a press conference following the California presidential primary, taken mere minutes before his assassination. Bobby beams, and the crowd of journalists and politicos laughs and smiles with him. At Julian Wasser\u2019s hand, that euphoric moment is frozen for us forever."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/julian-wasser-the-way-we-were>