Marvin Rand's Legacy Captured
The late architectural photographer Marvin Rand finally gets his due in a new book
Text by Stephen Wallis
Posted February 22, 2018·Magazine
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/marvin-rands-legacy-captured-in-a-new-book
Postwar Los Angeles was a boomtown, industrially and culturally—an ideal playground for architects. The result was some of America’s great midcentury homes and commercial buildings, devised by talents such as John Lautner, Richard Neutra, and Rudolph Schindler. There to record these masterworks—for promotion and posterity—were a handful of photographers, the most famous among them Julius Shulman. But the forthcoming book California Captured (Phaidon) makes a case for his peer Marvin Rand as an equally significant chronicler of the scene.
An L.A. native, Rand (1924–2009) launched his studio in 1950, focusing on advertising and product pictures before shifting—partly on the advice of design historian Esther McCoy—to architectural photography. One of his early clients was Craig Ellwood, a charismatic architect who was married to the actress Gloria Henry and had a fondness for sports cars. Rand shot nearly all of Ellwood’s most celebrated projects, including two Case Study houses, brilliantly capturing their interplay of rectilinear volumes as well as their integration with nature. For Ellwood’s 1955 Hunt House, overlooking the Malibu surf, Rand photographed the highway-facing exterior as a hyper-minimalist silhouette: two cubic garages flanking an opaque glass wall, all framed by open sea and sky.
“It’s the incredibly graphic sensibility and the way Rand approaches buildings almost as exercises in abstraction that really stand out,” says Emily Bills, who coauthored California Captured with Sam Lubell and Pierluigi Serraino. Another defining aspect of Rand’s work, she adds, is that “it was never about photographing a lifestyle image of L.A. His interest was really the structures and how they fit into the city.”
Take Rand’s 1956 shot of the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood. The cylindrical building, with its distinctive sunshades and spire, is seen from across a parking lot through an opening of tropical foliage. That building is perhaps the most famous creation by another of Rand’s key clients, Welton Becket and Assoc., the firm behind such L.A. landmarks as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center complex, and the Equitable Life Building—a modernist monolith with striking vertical striations, memorably shot in 1969 by Rand in three-quarter profile.
As California Captured vividly shows, Rand (a onetime AD contributor) photographed high-profile projects across Southern California, from the Salk Institute to the LAX Theme Building. But the book also highlights rarely seen works by such lesser-known architects as Lutah Maria Riggs and Douglas Honnold. The latter is represented by Rand’s nighttime shot of the drive-in Tiny Naylor’s, an evocative essay in light and shadow with cars parked beneath a soaring canopy. The authors, who spent more than five years combing through Rand’s archive—some 20,000 images strong—not only give the photographer his due but also further embellish “the grand mosaic,” as they put it, that is the story of California modernism.