About the Author

At 12 years old I cut out every picture of classic Hollywood film stars that I could find in my local libraries’ books (with apologies to the Los Angeles County public libraries.) I spent endless hours gazing at the images of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and Katharine Hepburn. The mood, style, fantasy, and fashion captured in the black & white images that I obsessed over resembled nothing of the realities of growing up in a working class neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley. My early obsession with the fantasy of Hollywood’s Golden Era would later introduce me to the fantasy of fashion photography. Discovering Richard Avedon’s photographs of Dovima and Irving Penn’s photographs for Vogue during my teenage years forever changed how I wanted to look at the world. My interest in photography had begun.