How Diane Keaton Moonlighted as a Photographer

Since Diane Keaton’s dying final Saturday at age seventy-nine, a lot has been mentioned about her nice depths as an actor, one who delivered to her greatest performances a vivacious vulnerability and flustered grace. She was different issues too: an openhearted memoirist, a designer, an androgynous icon, a single mom. Less mentioned is Keaton’s shocking contribution to pictures, a medium she held shut all through her life.

A few years in the past, a good friend with unimpeachable style gifted me Keaton’s first photobook, Reservations, revealed in 1980 by Knopf, and I’ve treasured it ever since. Like all nice photobooks, it appears endowed with talismanic powers. Clad in a flamingo-pink cowl, the monograph consists of forty-five black-and-white pictures of abandoned lobbies and banquet halls in luxurious resorts throughout the United States, taken through the Nineteen Seventies—presumably as Keaton traveled across the nation selling New Hollywood classics like The Godfather, Annie Hall, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Reds, which had begun manufacturing in 1979.

When making an attempt to explain the nervy heat of Keaton’s performances, individuals usually resort to “lived-in,” that film-criticism cliché. Her pictures are seemingly the other: unpeopled, icily noticed interiors that announce a “strong, direct photographer with a cool and deadly eye,” because the jacket copy places it. The guide makes no point out of her appearing credit, and why ought to it? No mere self-importance venture, Reservations is an angular meditation on American vacancy, the type Todd Hido would thematize to huge success twenty years later. Keaton locates a wry, forlorn comedy in awkward furnishings, plastic crops, florid wallpaper, ersatz backdrops, quirky lighting fixtures, and conspicuous cables snaking down white partitions, all shot deadpan (a phrase coined within the Nineteen Twenties for that different Keaton, Buster) and gilded with a harsh flash that renders surfaces barely unreal.

Certainly, the opposite Diane looms massive within the perturbing directness of those pictures. Like Arbus, Keaton favored Rolleiflex cameras, although she was most likely much less fussy about movie sort. One particularly Arbus-like picture finds two cheerless Christmas bushes put in atop a pair of tables on the Ambassador, a resort whose demolition Keaton fought passionately towards as a member of the Los Angeles Conservancy. That a number of of those resorts have since met the wrecking ball or modified to abroad possession lends the images an elegiac air. This high quality finds its fullest expression in a phalanx of stacked chairs within the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, or maybe in {a photograph} of a small eating desk, marooned in a sea of plush carpet at what was then the Fontainebleau Hilton in Miami Beach.

Keaton’s curiosity in pictures was wide-ranging. In the late Nineteen Seventies, she struck up a friendship with the curator and author Marvin Heiferman, who was then working at Castelli Graphics gallery in New York. They went on to collaborate on a number of books and exhibitions, together with Still Life: Hollywood Photographs (1983), Local News: Tabloid Pictures from the Los Angeles Herald Express (1999), and Bill Wood’s Business (2008), which options the work of a Fort Worth studio photographer whose negatives—all ten thousand of them—had sat in Keaton’s closet for twenty years.

“She was so smart about pictures,” Heiferman instructed me. “We would go into archives and sit there and be elbowing each other, laughing, pointing at things, going, ‘Oh wow, isn’t this weird?’” Her style, he mentioned, helped spur a wave of curiosity in business and vernacular pictures. She was an obsessive collector and a habitué of flea markets on each coasts. Her final fantasy, she as soon as told an interviewer, was to buy each pictures guide ever revealed. “My mission is to buy an old warehouse I can transform into a massive library of image-driven books and open it to the public.”

In 2007, Keaton’s good friend Larry McMurtry wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books calling consideration to her writing on pictures. In a letter to the editor, none apart from Janet Malcolm chided the Lonesome Dove writer for failing to notice Keaton’s personal work as a photographer. Malcolm praised the “mordant melancholy” of her Reservations photos, arguing that they “established her place in contemporary photography” and “form the pendant to Keaton’s wonderful acting career.” Diane Keaton’s place within the photographic canon is hardly assured, after all. She most likely wouldn’t thoughts. Long out of print, Reservations and her different photobooks endure nonetheless, as yet one more testomony to the compulsive creativity and liberated spirit of an artist who inhabited many various roles in life, all of them herself.