Guest Register by Penny Wolin is a book and exhibition of never-before-seen photographs, providing a fascinating social document of the 1970s in Hollywood. Through word and image, her black and white images speak to dreams of success and the reinvention of self in the American West.
In 1975 at 21 years old, Penny came to Los Angeles, from Cheyenne, Wyoming, checked into a pay-by-the-week residential hotel on Hollywood Boulevard and began to make portraits of her neighbors. In these photographs, the residents of the St. Francis Hotel can be seen as people who could not fit in elsewhere, or, as Penny does, as people whose dreams are bigger than their rooms. The exquisite leather-trimmed ledger-styled book includes 51 plates and accompanying texts. Photographer Norman Mauskopf describes the work as, “a body of photographs and text comparable to those of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century…” The work represents a rare moment in Los Angeles and the vision of an intrepid, young photographer with a voracious curiosity about her surroundings. In the afterword, Hollywood Underground, Penny recalls the Hollywood of the time and shows images she made in the wake that followed as a result of this empathic document. Forty-seven years later, Crazy Woman Creek Press is presenting Guest Register for the first time.
Penny Wolin : Guest Register
Published by Crazy Woman Creek Press
First edition: ISBN: 978-0-9676357-4-3
88 pages, 51 tritone plates, tritone and 4-color
Binding: Casebound with branded leather trim
Size: 14 x 11 inches portrait
Language: English
Press run: 2000
Printing: Trifolio SRL, Italy
https://www.crazywomancreekpress.org/
