Capturing the Feeling of John Portman

The first time I went to John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles was in 2006, for what was supposed to be a “Rain or Shine” Flaming Lips New Year's Eve Concert, which was ultimately rained out.

With no other plans, I instead wandered the hotel, which felt deeply familiar, but not entirely of this world. Its familiarity came from its use in many films, but even in 2006, the Bonaventure was incredibly untouched and seemingly frozen in time.

Its multiple floors of retail were stocked with merchandise that had been there since it opened in 1976. A cardboard cut-out of George Burns unironically harkened back to a different time by simply never changing.

In subsequent years, the building has changed, but to Portman’s great credit (and despite Westin’s best efforts) the building retains its transporting architectural character.

This image from 2012 (one of my first shots on Medium Format film) was the first time I felt I had captured something distinct about the building, albeit somewhat claustrophobically.

Throughout the years I kept trying to capture the feelings that captured me, to mixed results. Communicating this proved to be persistently difficult, but the pursuit and gravitational pull of the building allowed the space and time to translate this amorphous feeling.

In 2016 I got closer.

In 2017, I finally got it.

Even in the moment, this day, this light, felt like an amalgamation of everything I was hoping to ever capture about the place—but this was just one of many shots from the day and in no way did I think that this photo would become one of the most widely distributed images of this building.

This image (shot on the same day)...

...became particularly resonant when I realized (after the fact) that I photographed the same man doing the same thing—two years removed—by complete happenstance.

I was with my Uncle JD this day as well (photographed here drinking potato vodka from a water bottle).

Without going into details, it was a dispiriting meet-up with my uncle. In some ways I use the camera as a distancing mechanism. Loss is a reality felt, giving it context makes the feeling live, when I do my job right, maybe that is what happens. The photos become a record of fact, whatever felt is translated into something else entirely for the decontextualized.

Yet when it comes to the Bonaventure, the building is so ubiquitous within the languages of architectural photography and cinema, it evokes a feeling of familiarity. Even if that familiarity comes with contempt.

While I did enjoy a blurry 48-hour stay at the New York Marriott Marquis in 2003, my appreciation for Portman is an outgrowth of my appreciation of the Bonaventure. My appreciation for Portman’s other work was found mainly in photographs by Balthazar Korab, Ezra Stoller, and Wayne Thom—simply timeless works that could never be bested. These photos captured Portman’s brilliance contemporaneously and their concretizations of his work inadvertently highlight the many wayward attempts to “improve” Portman's spaces over the years.

In his 1962 novel The Moviegoer, Walker Percy notes that the United States “is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal.” America’s giant corporations prove this observation time and time again. Instead of striving for greatness, we often regress toward capital interests.

You see proof of this every day, but the endless corporate refinement has nearly rendered our society character-free. To this point, in Detroit GM is currently looking to demolish two Renaissance Center towers in a $1.6B redevelopment plan partially funded by taxpayers. Who is this truly for? The many or the few?

This photo of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta—Portman’s first atrium lobby—completely transports me. I wasn’t expecting this level of contrast, but it brought something new to a familiar image. What is so striking about Portman’s best work is its transporting qualities. Where on Earth is this and when?

As part of my ongoing project with MAS Context, “The Future Was Then,” I recently made a pilgrimage to Portman’s Hyatt Regency O'Hare Chicago to imbed. As luck would have it, I was there during Kevin Smith’s Chronic Con Festival which added an interesting layer to the proceedings.

On YouTube there is a nearly 30-minute video called “Bonaventure Adventure (Recreating a classic photo)” where some individuals decide to recreate my 2017 image from the Bonaventure—sans any awareness of me.

This video was one of many recreations before and since, but I recently took my dad to the Bonaventure and recreated the image on a point and shoot digital camera. In some ways, this feels like a bookend, but it’s probably not.