Slim Aarons, photographer: Poolside Gossip, 1970
Palm Springs, la vie en blanche, playground in the desert for Hollywood; every little modern house with its swimming pool and palm tree oasis. Richard Neutra's Kaufman House was early, 1947. This picture, above, is by Slim Aarons who was both celebrity and celebrity photographer. These are the beautiful people of 1970 where architecture is an important signifier but also a non-competitive backdrop. The contemporary architectural photos of the Kaufman House are unpeopled, still, pure:
Richard Neutra, Kaufman Desert House, Palm Springs, 1947. Julius Shulman, photographer
In 1960 Robert Doisneau, well known for his Paris street photography in black and white, was commissioned by Fortune Magazine to do Palm Springs; 23 reputedly banal images were published, and then in 2010 Flammarion published the whole archive in a book, Robert Doisneau: Palm Springs 1960.
It includes images such as this one:
Robert Doisneau, photographer: Palm Springs, 1960the other people of Palm Springs, not celebrities from film but in wealth. Clearly the town acted as a resort and a protected, beautiful club. Today one can get maps of the famous houses and drive by them: not famous for their architecture but because Barry Manilow lived here (Kaufman House) or Frank Sinatra lived there (Twin Palms, now owned by Jimmy Pattison), which must be perfectly wretched for the people now living in these precise horizontal machines for easy living. Or not. As in the beginning they are guarded/shuttered/defensive on the street side. It is an interesting split between defence at the front and openness at the back that failed to make it to mainstream houses of that era with their picture windows, open carports, declamatory front doors. These things don't appear in Palm Springs architecture which is part of the enduring subtlety of this kind of modernism. It is complex, socially-informed, ultimately protective of the lives within it.