FLIPPING THE LENS

The artist’s self-portrait, taken in her hotel room 526.

spirit of the “Life Library of Photography” books she subscribed to as a child, Wolin worked room by room, shooting honest, matter-of-fact images with a medium format Hasselblad camera. She also kept a 35-millimeter camera on hand to capture quicker, spur-of-themoment images.

In the process, Wolin says, she learned “life lessons” from her subjects, an unlikely community that included the divorced man in room 215 who prized, above all else, his television; the widowed former Texas bronco champion in room 309; the former child actor in room 412; and the taekwondo master in room 415.

“I learned so much about the human experience,” Wolin says. “I learned about tolerance. And that we all do the best that we can — they did. I learned to tell who’s on the up and up and who’s not, the difference between good and evil, between success and failure, between having opportunity — which I had — and not having opportunity, which many of them didn’t. And that at the end of the day, we’re all the same, we all laugh and love and feel and want to succeed with what we do.”

The St. Francis is long gone — the building is now the Gershwin Apartments. And Wolin, who’s still based in L.A., went on to become an accomplished portrait photographer whose work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Harvard University, among other institutions. Her editorial work has appeared in publications including Vanity Fair, Life and the Los Angeles Times. But she never published her photographs from the St. Francis — they sat tucked away in her archives for 47 years. Until now.

The resulting book is at once deeply rooted in a moment in time and universal, both Hollywood nostalgia and — with its subjects’ bushy mustaches, smoldering More cigarettes and wide, polyester shirt lapels — a snapshot of a decade. It’s about chasing dreams and the freedom to embrace one’s true identity. And it’s a testament to the enduring lure of Los Angeles for those seeking reinvention.

Here, Wolin recalls the stories behind several of the photographs.