Autumn de Wilde in a rare moment in front of the camera
(Credit: Lauren Dukoff)
The Los Angeles-based photographer and music video director just released "Elliott Smith," a collection of photographs of the late singer-songwriter. Documenting his move from New York to L.A., the book serves as a visual record of his acclimation to southern California and also features a wealth of interviews that she conducted with figures from Smith’s life, from fellow musicians Sam Coomes and Joanna Bolme to L.A. producers Jon Brion and Rob Schnapf.
We had the good fortune of sitting down with Autumn to talk about her photographs, Elliott’s choice in basketball jerseys and Sunset Boulevard graffiti.
You kept your photographs under wraps for quite a while. What was the impetus to finally collect them in a book?
Well, the idea was kind of terrifying, but at the same time, there were articles coming out about Elliott that didn’t sit well with me. They were all really focused on the drama of his death and the people surrounding him. Certainly, that’s a very real part of what happened, but that’s not what made his music. I would see images of mine used with articles where I didn’t really agree with the facts they presented.
And you had a lot of photos.
Yeah, a lot. The original selection was 500 photos. It was hard to cut it down to 250. It wouldn’t have been that much if I hadn’t shot every scene of “Son of Sam” with a still camera as well. At the time, I was very into this movie called “La Jetee,” and I thought that would be an interesting way of telling a story. I think Elliott might have wanted the video to be all stills, and it would have worked well that way, too, but the footage was so nice, it was kind of a shame. I had done the footage and shot it on film as well, as backup. I didn’t know which one would work. So yeah….There were a lot of photos. There’s other photos and portraits and that could have gone into the book. I mean, there’s ones of him at a birthday party. (Laughs) Things like that.
In book's forward, Beck talks about the artist conforming to a photographer’s expectations. In a worst case, he said it was “almost like you have to leave your personality at the door.”
It should be about giving permission to play pretend and feel that what happens is not false or pretentious or fake. A lot of songwriters have to find a way to be themselves but still have fun. Beck has had a lot of good photographs taken of him, and he can be a lot like Peter Sellers in that he takes in his whole environment and places himself there in the photo. It doesn’t mean that he just strolls in and says, “Take my picture while I make this grocery list.” (Laughs)
A lot of the photos capture Elliott as he was first getting acclimated to L.A. Did he have any insecurities after moving from a “cool” city like Portland?
Right when he moved here, I remember him getting ready to play a show, and he and Sam Coomes were wearing Portland Trailblazers jerseys. He was worried and saying things like, “Maybe I shouldn’t wear the Blazers shirt. I live in L.A. now and I’ve gotta support the Lakers.” (Laughs) If he decided he was going to be a part of something, then he was a part of it. He was never afraid. It was really uncool at the time for someone who had lived in Portland to show up wearing the L.A. ’84 shirt. (Laughs) There was nothing about Elliott that was worried. I mean, he was very uncomfortable in his skin, but he was very confident about what he liked and what he believed in, and his music. He knew he was good.
He didn’t feel that he had to prove his capabilities as a musician?
I was thinking today about…how some my favorite people I’ve worked with, how they all focus on the good aspects of an experience. On what they liked about it. I hardly remember any of them talking shit. With everything they see or experience, they are collecting the best out of that experience. If you’re the type of artist where people can only remember how much shit you talk every day.…
It can’t be a good sign.
How much information are you collecting, really, for your art? I think Elliott’s great talent was looking at something outside of his world and pulling the best things about that into his world and making it personal. He didn’t care what the landscape was, if there was one good thing that jumped out at him, he would take it, he would make it his own.
Echo Park has certainly become iconic in its own right, but I feel that he certainly had something to do with that. Even if it was unintentional.
People started figuring it out because that photo shoot we did for "Figure 8" is all over Sunset Boulevard. I’m really glad that he was into the idea of using the colors and the landscapes of what I thought of as “my city.” I didn’t want to dress him up and put him somewhere completely unrecognizable. I wanted it to feel as though the colors in that video were accidental, that he was unaware he was walking by something so bright. It was a way for him to slowly lead people into new ideas and new ways of looking at him. He was a real joker! He liked to play pretend and goof around, and when I met him I just had no idea that he could be so light. And so sad too, of course. The extremes were pretty impressive.
How did you end up picking the Audio Solutions storefront as the cover for the album?
I went to junior high down the street from there, and over the years, I started to become obsessed with how fantastically ridiculous it looked. When Elliott and I started taking the photos for “Figure 8,” one thing he said was, “Everybody thinks I want everything to look dark and sad, but I love color and I wouldn’t mind trying to figure out a way to make the photos more colorful.” So I listened to the record over and over and I started thinking about where I lived and where I came from. When you grow up in L.A., there’s that thing where everything blends together kind of like one big disaster. It’s not like New York city, but what L.A. really is is just a series of fantastic buildings and then a series of really bizarre choices in what goes up next to these buildings. Mixing all the different decades together. As you drive around though, you fall in love with certain signs, certain buildings. I started looking for sections of color in places through the neighborhoods I was familiar with. I took some Polaroids of the front of Solutions and later, when he saw what I had put together, with the bright swirls of color, he said, “Yeah, it’s like a visual hook!” He didn’t want to bury himself in obscurity. He was drawn to bright things, to easily accessible ideas.
Have you seen the recent graffiti that’s happened to the wall?
Yeah, it was really surprising. I mean, driving around the city, you see things get tagged all the time, but you’d think that a memorial would be respected. What probably happened is that someone tagged it small—I mean, I have no idea what really happened—and maybe some guy showed up to claim his territory back.
It just didn’t make any sense, except in a juvenile kind of way.
I mean, there’s no rhyme or reason to a 14-year-old with a can of spray paint, but…there was so much writing on that wall, and with graffiti, some of it is art, and some of it is just “get the fuck out of my neighborhood.” It was really touching that people came to the wall after he died, that they began writing on it.
The funny thing is that the recent tag itself is so large that people are starting to write graffiti over the tag itself.
It would be nice to just repaint the whole wall and start over, but it would be so disheartening for people to pitch in and fix it and then have it just get tagged again. I’m not really sure what they could do, so I imagine it’ll just stay up as it is.
“Elliott Smith” is on shelves now. If you're so inclined, you can follow other Angelenos in paying your respects on the Solutions wall next to Malo on Sunset. Leave a note or just stroll through his old neighborhoods on the Eastside. Word has it he loved the Roost, and the Silverlake Lounge, as do we.
George Ducker is contributing editor for Metromix Los Angeles.
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