This series of photos by Edwin Bower Hesser comes from a set of almost nine hundred 4×5 negatives and contacts that my friend John Kobal brought over to my studio in NYC in the eighties and said, “These will mean more to you than to me”–They were of girls not boys.
There is a wonderful back story, classic Hollywood noir, that goes along with this photographer’s past and crosses the lives of Howard Hughes, Jean Harlow, Humphrey Bogart and lots of anonymous wannabes whose names have been lost on those beaches and in those lush woods.
Edwin Bower Hesser maintained successful studios in NYC and in Hollywood for a number of decades from the twenties into the fifties, and was an inventor of color films and techniques that became seminal to the history of photography.
Abe Frajndlich
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