Excerpt from “Riviera”
by John Brian King
Softcover, 112 pages (99 color photographs), 21 cm x 19 cm. ISBN: 9781943679119.
Among the [Eutropheon] restaurant’s most dedicated patrons, conversation likely turned to musings about leaving the city behind for good. The Richters knew of a certain German vegetarian hermit living about 100 miles to the east, in a hut near Palm Springs. [William] Pester must have embodied a shining ideal, a vision of what was possible should city dwellers choose to fully immerse themselves in the natural life.
The sparsely populated desert appealed to the Nature Boys, who often headed out to the arid mountains and their hidden canyons. Tahquitz Canyon was a preferred oasis, a refuge from the heat where a rocky trail led to the rarest of sights: a thin waterfall rushing over massive gray boulders into a pool. It was an ideal place to camp, or even live for several months. [Gypsy] Boots later recalled a conversation there with [eden] ahbez as they took in the calming beauty of the canyon, where red-tailed hawks carved into the clear sky. “Someday there will be a million beards,” ahbez predicted. It took nearly twenty years, but he was right.
“Hermits in the Canyons,” from Sun Seekers: The Cure of California, by Lyra Kilston.
Riviera documents the eerie fragments of existence left behind in one city. John Brian King photographed Riviera from 2016 to 2018 in Palm Springs, California, and its surroundings; a full-time resident at the time, he used a cheap instant film camera to give his photographs a unique, washed-out, hazy aesthetic. King depicts a city that is frozen in a visually arresting state of decline, cataloguing the totems of an absurd civilization. “I wanted to photograph the Palm Springs that I lived in and interacted with every single day,” King writes, “the beautiful, the mundane, the ugly, the hot desolate nature of Coachella Valley. I wasn’t interested in the tourism-board view of Palm Springs, of martinis by the swimming pool and candy-colored, Instagram-ready desert art installations. I was interested in the debris – architectural and natural – left behind by generations of people who lived in or visited Palm Springs to escape, to exist, to die.”
John Brian King is a photographer, filmmaker, designer, and writer. His two previous photography books — LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles, 1980-84 and Nude Reagan — were also published by Spurl Editions. His photography has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Buzzfeed, Lenscratch, Amadeus, Flavorwire, AnOther, WeHeart, L'Œil de la Photographie, Impose, KCET’s Artbound, and Yet Magazine.