You could say that photographer Laure Joliet is in the image business, but her work is about depth as much as surface. She has a way with spaces, rendering them intimate and mysterious at the same time, capturing the revealing detail you notice out of the corner of your eye. Though her subject is often interiors, a large part of her job involves getting to know people. “I spend the day with them and find out things I don’t know that you would normally get to find out, what they’re passionate about. It feels really satisfying to have that experience.”
Joliet developed her skilled but instinctual approach partly as a reaction to the conceptual rigor of CalArts, where she got her BFA in 2001. “It got to a point where I couldn’t take pictures without thinking about how I was going to defend the work in a critique. So I had to take a break for a long time to be able to enjoy it again.“ After a few years of production work and blogging for Apartment Therapy, she took a position with an interior designer, shooting the end results, and that gave her “the confidence I needed to call myself a photographer and to put myself out there.” Since then, numerous commercial clients and publications like The New York Times and California Home + Design — not to mention our own site — have featured her work. As her assignments have increased, she’s lately felt a pull towards projects that are somewhat more tangible, that “you can hold in your hand.” These include the beautiful black and white print posters now available at her online shop. And launching today is a guest artist print with Debbie Carlos, who shot Joliet’s Echo Park home for us.
So how was it, being on the opposite side of the lens? “I felt all the things I know someone is feeling when I show up at their house. ‘Tell me if I need to move anything! Does this look okay?’ Really, everything was fine. And it gave me an excuse to pull out and share things that aren’t necessarily décor but are really important to me.” In conversation with Joliet, you quickly get the impression that her home is a real reflection of herself: easy-going, understated, and West Coast cool.
Raised briefly in Paris, Joliet grew up in LA and currently calls Echo Park home. Her 1BR apartment in a 1926 bungalow is just 500 square feet, but when looking for a place three years ago, she didn’t think she could afford more than a studio. “The fact that the living room and the bedroom were at opposite ends of the house, it was like I had struck gold.” Over a vintage chair hangs a brass and rope light made by Joliet’s friend Morgan of The Brick House.
Joliet and her Abyssinian cat, Hazel. “She has many fans. My mom started a Facebook page for her. I try not to pay attention because it’s mildly embarrassing. But she does have a hashtag: #Hazelcat.” Out the bedroom window, Joliet has a view of palm trees that line the edge of Elysian Park. “Dodger Stadium is just over the hill, so on Fridays during the season, when they have a home game, they do fireworks that you can see from my window. That’s kind of the magic of why I decided to live here.”
On the wall, a 30 x 40 print of Joliet’s from college, where she learned how to do color printing. Ever since her dad gave her a camera at age nine, she’s “looked for the quiet moment, like the little mess of change and receipts, dead flowers in a vase in a corner, that’s always what I was attracted to. I still want to find that moment.”
Joliet picked up this woven basket at a thrift store in Desert Hot Springs on the way back from a trip to Joshua Tree. A practical place to store extra linens, it also feeds her “nostalgia for the kinds of things my mom had growing up. That seventies/early eighties vibe.”
One of many plants in Joliet’s home, this was a gift from her friend Bianca D’Amico, who runs the botanically-oriented Chaparral Studio. “She makes terrariums and she paints tiny little figures that go into them and often they’re naked,” laughs Joliet. “She’s kind of a kindred spirit of mine here in LA and she always gifts me with plants. I can never see her without her giving me something.”
Joliet’s mother is American, her father French. Her French grandmother, a weaver, made this piece that she had framed and now keeps in the bathroom. “I think the eyes are beads and the red part is actually ammo for some sort of toy gun that she probably found on the ground. When I was young, I thought that she a witch, collecting garbage. It was only later that I really respected and admired who she was.”
A dreamcatcher Joliet bought at a gift shop in Monument Valley as a souvenir of a road trip with friends Makoto and Ben of Scout Regalia. “Monument Valley is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. We got there at night and there’s only one hotel, called The View. So you wake up at dawn and it’s otherworldly. It’s really magical.”
“This was a gift from my friend Morgan, who is an avid thrifter. It’s the ultimate cat lady accessory because it’s also a brooch.”
Joliet’s mother, shot by ’70s fashion photographer Laurence Sackman, during her modeling days in Paris. “My mom has done a lot of different jobs. When I was growing up, she put herself through art school and was a painter and sculptor.” She now works as a landscape designer. “This is one of my favorite images. So I have it in a frame and it slipped and I have never fixed it.” It lives on a gallery wall in the hallway.
Along the same wall is of a rendering of a rock formation she filched from her father. To the right is a series of dying peonies Joliet took with her Fuji Instax mini camera. Joliet, whose education was in film, typically uses a Canon Mark III 5D, works mainly in Lightroom for processing, and does fine-tuning in Photoshop. “You don’t have to have all the bells and whistles to make it work. I keep it pretty simple.”
“A Lady Cave made by my friend Bianca,” of Chaparral Studio. “Mine is a custom one that includes me and Hazel. She makes Man Caves now too. And Lovers Caves. She’ll do all kinds of different ones. You can buy readymade ones or order custom ones. She’ll make them as raunchy as anyone needs.”
“One of my French grandmother’s treasures. This is a little embroidery I got when she died. Frogs were kind of a thing for her. French people are often called frogs, so there’s that. She did a similar weaving about the same size as the one in my bathroom that had these little frogs that had all gotten crushed by tires. She collected them, let them dry out, and then she wove them in! She was… eccentric.”
Her kitchen window gets perfect light. Left, a begonia from a cutting Joliet’s mother gave her. At right, a mint plant in a Tracy Wilkinson pot. “She’s a good friend. I have more of her pottery in this house than probably anyone else’s.” The original 1920s counter tile is classic California, says Joliet.
“I took a trip with a friend to the middle-of-nowhere desert in California for an event called Gem-O-Rama. All the other people there were Boy Scouts and geologists. It’s a part of the desert that has very mineral-rich soil. They explode the ground, and then people come and pick through it. The people who really know what they’re looking for are looking for specific gems that you can only see in that region. We just showed up with a bucket and picked anything that was sparkly. They now live in a glass cookie jar in my kitchen.”
Joliet holding a Gem-O-Rama fragment. Her bracelet came from lighting and furniture designer Brendan Ravenhill. “He made these bracelets for fun. It’s a bent piece of brass, from a boating supply store. It doesn’t rust and doesn’t make your arm green. The same way I listen to songs, I’ll wear the same jewelry for years.”
Hazel in the living room. The George Nelson lamp “was one of the first “real’ things I ever bought. I bought it 10 years ago, and it was like, I’m gonna be a grown up! I’ve actually been thinking that maybe it looks dated now? Ten years ago you got a Nelson bubble lamp, a Saarinen pedestal table, some midcentury teak piece — those were the staples. Now you need a woven basket,” she laughs, “a great, destroyed Persian rug, some kind of seventies pottery.”
A philodendron in the living room is the resting place for a seagull toy Joliet had when she young. “I’ve always moved it with me but I haven’t always had it up. When I moved in here, I was moving out a big relationship and being on my own again. It’s kind of nice to have that connection to something older and bigger.”
On the mid-century credenza inherited from her American grandmother, Joliet keeps a stack of magazines, including British journal The Plant, for inspiration. In addition to her mini Fuji Instax, Joliet has a regular size one she also uses for instant photos, like these, with her assistant Michelle.
“The butterfly box is another thing I stole from my dad. I have a vague memory of going to a butterfly and insect show and we chose all of those. There’s no wall space, so it just sits on different parts of the floor. It feels sad not to have it up and prominently displayed but also, the place is so small that if you put it on the wall it starts to dictate, and my style isn’t exactly cabinet-of-curiosities.” A cowhide rug runs under a coffee table constructed from a thrift store slab of wood and hairpin legs.
A wall of inspiration, including tears from the Times magazine, Instagrams that Joliet printed, a postcard she shot for a hair salon client, and a poster of gems she bought at Otherwild, a graphic design studio/shop in Echo Park.
“My French grandmother made me these little books that would include photos, ephemera from her day, and little notes.” In this one, a picture of Place des Vosges, the Parisian square where Joliet’s grandmother lived.
Bears in swimming costumes, from another book her French grandmother made for her. “She would send them to me on my Birthday and Christmas so I have many, many of them. I treasure them. What a good grandmother!”
A Polaroid of Joliet’s French Grandmother inside one of the little books. “This is part of why I want to make things you hold in your hand. It feels important.” To that end, she’s working on some zine-like collaborations with a couple of photographer friends. “So much of my job is pretty solitary. When you’re on a shoot there are a lot of people, but the rest of the time it’s me and a computer. It’s nice to be able to have partners in crime.”
Prints that Joliet made from her Instagram account. “There are so many amazing photographers working right now, who maybe don’t have art books or gallery shows, but who we get access to through Instagram and the Internet. Like Brian Ferry. Seeing his work inspires me to raise the bar.” She’s also a big fan of photographer Uta Barth. “One of her more known works is a series of light coming through the window every day and hitting the couch in her house. That’s the kind of work that has always resonated for me. It doesn’t hit you over the head, you get drawn in and have to pay attention to what’s happening.”
Joliet holding a photo she took at Monument Valley. The planter pot in the background belonged to her American grandmother. “A great piece of 70s pottery.”
The yellow book to the left is a “classic French cookbook from the region of Provence that everyone in my family has copy of. I have a great recipe passed down from all the women on my French side for flourless chocolate cake. I’ll also make my family’s apple tart that you bake in a cast iron skillet. I love to be in my kitchen, it’s a nice creative outlet, a break from sitting at the computer.”
Mixed in among family photos and reminders of her travels is this pink postcard by Jo Ann Callis, one of Joliet’s professors at CalArts. “She did a whole series of desserts in weirdly sexy set ups. I really love having that up on the fridge.” Just underneath and to the right is a postcard by Wolfgang Tillmans, another favorite of Joliet’s.
Potted succulents, including firesticks, kalanchoe, and cuttings from her mother, sit out on the front porch. “My mom’s mom was an avid gardener, she had the most amazing, tropical landscape in the middle of Los Angeles, and I grew up not too far from her, so I saw a lot of that garden. I grew up barefoot, watering plants.”
“I have a front porch and a little strip of lawn but no backyard.” She’d love to have more space outside to eat or have a dinner party. Which doesn’t seem like too much to ask for in LA, but, she says, “I don’t want to get spoiled.”
There must have been something in the air back in 2009, because Freunde Von Freunden, the Berlin-based website whose voyeuristic, photography-based interviews are of a piece with our own obsessions (i.e. barging in on people's home and workplaces and showing ourselves around) — started just a few weeks before Sight Unseen's launch at the end of that year. "We never look for apartments but for people," they say, and that's always been our mission as well — to get at the personality behind the product, and the narrative behind each new release. To that end, since we introduced you last week to Isabel Wilson's textile and jewelry line with Chen Chen — and considering we've more than covered her partner in crime — we figured it was high time to get to know the RISD grad's incredible,intricate work. Luckily FvF beat us to it, with a gorgeously photographed editorial by photographer Brian Ferry, which appeared on the site just last month, and which we're excerpting on Sight Unseen today.
“Always listen to your mother” isn’t exactly the kind of central tenet they teach you at Harvard Business School. But for Emily Sugihara, the California-raised, Brooklyn-based designer behind the reusable bag line Baggu, it’s a piece of advice that’s been invaluable to the brand’s runaway success since its founding in 2007. Back then Sugihara was a Parsons grad working as an assistant designer at J. Crew, just coming to realize that a corporate job wasn’t her calling. “As a kid, I was very entrepreneurial, and I always knew I wanted to have my own company,” she says. At home over Christmas break one year, Sugihara and her mother began talking about making a line of reusable shopping bags. Her mom was “sort of a treehugger” and an artist in her own right — an expert seamstress who learned to sew making her own clothes as a kid in rural Michigan — and Sugihara was a die-hard New Yorker-in-training, sporting fingers turned purple each week as she lugged home bags full of groceries. Together they came up with a bag that’s almost exactly like the original ripstop nylon Baggu that sells today: long handles that fit comfortably over the shoulder, gussets along the bottom that allow things like milk and eggs to stack, and a single, double-reinforced seam that’s the result, Sugihara says, of her mother’s “sewing genius.”
In a recent interview with the New York–based photographer Tim Barber, who's known for his edgy portraits of artists and other downtown tastemakers, the folks behind the Urban Outfitters blog evoked some rather unconventional subject matter: UFOs, ghosts, chicken carcasses. Credit the fact that not only did the former Vice Magazine photo editor shoot UO's playful new spring catalog, but he's also currently judging a Weirdest Photo Contest for the retail giant. Of course, in his work with clients like Nike, Woolrich Woolen Mills, T magazine, Italian Vogue, and Stella McCartney, Barber has displayed a more serious side as well. We wanted to show both of them, so we went through his portfolio and chose some new photos to accompany our excerpt from the UO interview — instances where Barber has documented the private spaces of creatives, a la Sight Unseen.
