Guest Register by Penny Wolin Review by Lawrence Di Stefano
Guest Register
Book by Penny Wolin
Published by Crazy Woman Creek Press
Review by Lawrence Di Stefano
ISBN: 978-0-9676357-4-3
88 pages
“Penny Wolin’s Rooms” A Review of Guest Register
In poetry, a stanza is a grouping of lines separated by blank space, often recurring.
Stanza means room in Italian.
Penny Wolin’s Guest Register is not a collection of poetry—it is a book of 34 photographs taken at the St. Francis Hotel, in Hollywood, in 1975. Each medium-format, black-and-white frame is an open door to one of its rooms, and thus, a life. Each portrait is of a particular guest in their room, a room they would rent for an extended period of time. Now, close to 50 years later, these doors are opened.
Unspool a roll of exposed, medium-format film and hold it up to the light—what you’ll see might look like a series of square, identical rooms.
To Wolin, it’s the rooms and their occupants that are important, not the hotel itself, which kind of surreally doesn’t appear in any of the photographs in this book. She reflects on this in the accompanying essay, “Hollywood Underground”, included as an afterword.
“Intentionally I did not photograph the building exterior. Its physical form did not speak to me. What drew me inside was something both universal and singular. It was the relationship between the individual and the room, melding together to form a uniquely personal place, for as long as people called the room their home.”
Wolin’s choice of film format—the black-and-white square of 120 film—is appropriate in the uniform framing of its diverse subjects, allowing them to fill the same, square form. It is, indeed, a perfect “melding”. Like a poem’s form imposes a particular experience in the reader—one that communicates something beyond what is said or, in this case, seen—Wolin’s photographs frame their subjects within its walls. It then becomes rooms within rooms—a kind of imposed confinement. This uniformity puts emphasis on what is occupying the frame, or room, and thus, what rises to the surface is, ultimately, the human. Wolin continues,
“It still stuns me to see how different the rooms are from one another. But the actual structure of them is not different. If they were stripped to the bone of personal possessions, people, past lives, one would see there are far fewer architectural floor plans than the more numerous dwellings created by the human spirit.”
Moving through the physical book itself—which looks and feels like something from a 1940s hotel lobby (the book is bound in a pebbled kind of leather), one experiences the hotel’s tenants in a very authentic way. The book’s layout and presentation of the photographs stays true to this. Between rooms in the hotel there might be a dark hallway—some break into silence, perhaps. The viewer moves from stanza into the flat darkness of a blank, black page which punctuates each photograph like a distinct pause—a break back into silence. Then a return, the next room—another open door—but completely different from the previous. This book has its poetic turns. It is unpredictable and full of surprises. In fact, the book opens with one, which I won’t spoil.
As both a poet and photographer, I find Wolin’s observations compelling. Continuing with a poetic lens on Wolin’s work, I found myself reading each photograph as a kind of stanza—say quatrains or four-line blocks—within a single, long poem. This, I think, has to do with the confining structures of both the rooms in each photo and frame of the photograph and how they are punctuated with the flat, black pages—as silence does in the breaks between stanzas—but also, it has to do with how we learn its patterning, as stanzas in poetry can establish, in the succession of each image and that progression—its accumulation. Each photo depicts a guest in their same-sized room and what we begin to notice is what differs from the previous. We learn this pattern early on and learn to anticipate it. Again, this allows what is human to rise to the surface as its main subject. In one photograph, it might be a poster hung on the wall that we notice. In another it’s the same wall, but blank. The human subjects become the rooms (no names are given, just the room numbers) and the rooms, in turn, become them.
As a viewer of these fine, tritone prints—the big, 14×11 book was printed in Italy—there is both the confining nature of being framed by a square, as well as a kind of grandness in their execution. The prints are big and the subjects are well-lit, posing in their little rooms for their big close-ups. Wolin’s direction of these portraits reflect the grand history of Hollywood—after all, the St. Francis is located on Hollywood Blvd.
“I had no inkling that my personal and professional identity would take form by living and working in a hotel that once hosted the great names of a grand visual era, and now housed a multiplicity of personalities that represented the breadth of humanity.”
The residue of this history, of the “grand visual era” is ever present in Guest Register. Although the hotel itself isn’t important to Wolin, the past that permeates its walls is unavoidable.
“Built in 1926 during the height of the silent film era, it rested upon tunneled underpasses that once allowed gowned and tuxedoed stars to stroll undetected to searchlights-in-the-sky movie premiers…By the time I arrived 50 years later, the tunnels were closed off and the hotel had a much different clientele. But still, the timeless lore of glamor, success, and luck were the talk of the tenants and the pride of the staff.”
As mentioned earlier, each portrait is appropriately titled by room number, which, as the viewer makes their way through the series, creates its own kind of architecture in the mind. Each photograph has a short caption which adds a narrative layer to this experience as well. It captures the complexity of a place like the St. Francis. For example, some of the captions overlap with other captions, capturing the network of inevitable relations in a place like this.
The most profound connections, we’ll never know for sure. What is evident in all these
photographs are the subjects’ connections to the eye—the lens. In a place like Hollywood, the camera lens is, in many ways, the eye of the world, and of possibility. In the case of these particular tenants, this eye is meaningfully turned onto them at a moment in their lives that is most vulnerable and real.
They speak for themselves.
Guest Register builds a visual narrative, poetically. It is concise in its scope and form, yet within the confines of its small, identical rooms, it manages to capture a greater range of the human condition. Take the title, Guest Register, referring to those formalized records of guests that hotels keep or kept. Handwritten names of each guest fill the grid of boxes (a St. Francis guest register lines the inner covers of the book). Every guest has their own unique signature and as in Hollywood’s rich film history, it is recorded forever. In these portraits too, the souls of its subjects come through and become part of that same filmic history. Wolin speaks to this,
“…souls are not stolen but revealed by this magical act of freezing reality upside down by using reflected light that comes through clear chunks of glass, etching itself onto processed animal hoofs—gelatin—with sprinkles of crystals. Then, after the image becomes latent, it is doused in some who-knows-what chemicals that make the moment adhere right side up and tight to the reins of history.”
Penny Wolin’s rooms reveal. The doors to these rooms are left open.
Penny Wolin is the author of two other seminal photographic documentary monographs, Descendants of Light, and The Jews of Wyoming. She is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and one from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has exhibited solo at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Her work is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Santa Barbara Art Museum, Harvard University, and the Layton Collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Lawrence Di Stefano’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Southern Humanities Review, Free State Review, STIRRING, Bear Review, The Shore, and Santa Clara Review, among other journals. He holds an MFA in poetry from San Diego State University.
7 December 2022
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