In 1968 Julian Wasser, known for his photographs of Hollywood stars, got an assignment from Time Magazine to shoot a young woman named Joan Didion whose novels had attracted national attention and whose essays, collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, would change the way generations of journalists look at the world around them.
In the years afterward, Didion wrote many more books, including the extended essay Salvador about the wars in Central America in the early 1980s, which is when I met her. Didion’s most recent works, The Year of Magical Thinking, about the loss of her husband, and Blue Nights, about the death of her daughter, are unmatched explorations of grief and the ways we try to learn to live with it.
So perhaps it was inevitable that the sadder frames among Wasser’s photographs of Didion became iconic. Probably you have seen one or two of them before: Didion’s enigmatic gaze as she looks out from the seat of her new yellow Corvette, and that same hard-to-read but wonderfully appealing expression as she stands in the shadowed interior of her rented house on Franklin Avenue. One of them, with Didion’s beautiful young daughter Quintana Roo on her lap, is simply heartbreaking for anyone who knows the later chapters in those lives.
But if you go to the little room at the Danziger Gallery on West 23rd Street in New York City where original prints of these pictures are on display until March 21, and if you look very closely at the enlarged contact sheets that are part of the exhibit, you will see a Joan Didion that few people know:
There she is, sitting in the Corvette. Sure. But for a moment the sadness melts away, and the enigma is gone. It is as if the Mona Lisa suddenly revealed an emotion she could no longer disguise. She is smiling—really smiling! She is happy. And seeing her that way, so are we.
Julian Wasser
