Silhouettes by the Sea
An hour before sunset with Ileana Landon
In 2013, a documentary film called “Finding Vivian Maier” was released, about a woman who lived from 1926 to 2009 and for most of that time found employment as a nanny. On her days off, however, she took photographs, hundreds, thousands of photographs, but she rarely if ever showed them to other people, and it was only after her death that they came to light at an auction for items held in storage.
The film resonated with Ileana Landon, who lives in Redondo Beach.
“When I saw it, I thought, How sad. She lived this very creative life and never got to share it with somebody.”
Vivian Maier spent the majority of her later life in Chicago, which was also home to Henry Darger, another lone individual whose artwork, and writings, came to light only after his death.
“I’ve been taking photographs since I was 12,” Landon says. “I was on the school newspaper, yearbook staff, and I took four years of photography in high school and four years in college.” But has she been pushing it into the public realm? Well, no, and maybe that’s why seeing what befell Vivian Maier made such an impression on her.
“I thought, gee, I don’t want to be that person. It’s not that I would ever compare myself to her work, but [the idea of someone who suppressed their creativity] stayed with me and I started taking these photos, going up into Palos Verdes, and then Redondo Beach, at sunset. I started seeing patterns of things that were very appealing to me and out of it the series was born.”
A passion re-ignited
Speaking of birth, Ileana Landon was born in El Paso, raised in Mexico, and has lived in California for nearly 30 years with the last 13 and a half in the South Bay.
“I’ve always been in some sort of creative capacity,” she says. “In Hollywood I worked on a lot of Arnold Schwarzenegger films.” No, that didn’t make her want to be on the big screen. “I’ve never really been comfortable in front of a camera; I’ve always been more comfortable behind the scenes and making things happen in the background.”
So who else or what else gave her a friendly shove and the motivation to show her work to other people? Well, her oldest son, as it turns out. He kept insisting that she submit work to the Torrance Art Museum’s “South Bay Focus 2016” exhibition, which remains on view through tomorrow. Guest curator and noted art critic Peter Frank selected one of her pictures, and that’s going to look good on her résumé.
While her son may have encouraged her, Landon’s many years of photographic training and expertise were both on hold while she was raising him and his brother. But with both of her sons now grown and out of the house, guess what?
“I found myself with extra time. I’m not dropping them off at school, not picking them up, and not doing all that stuff that you do on a daily basis–and so I was able to get back into the creative process of photography. I’m kind of falling in love with it all over again.”
Camera towards the sun
The series that Landon has been developing is called “South Bay Strangers,” and essentially it’s comprised of silhouettes of men and women near the shoreline as the day draws to a close. Most of the backgrounds are blue or bluish-green, but this varies, and we see some yellow hues as well. This part of the setup is of course furnished by Mother Nature.
“The profiles are the most important part of the photo for me,” Landon says, “and the silhouettes that they create. I just randomly select people that have either a strong body language or a stance or a movement that speaks to me, and the whole premise is that you can’t really recognize who it is. My goal is to provoke people to say, Is that me? Could that be me?”
One of her favorite images shows a lone runner, which prompts this writer to think of the title of Alan Sillitoe’s short story, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” Another compelling image, which Landon says is her absolute favorite, is called “The Evolution of Exercise.” It’s reminiscent of those montages that show a monkey on the far left and a man with a briefcase on the far right, with a slew of apelike creatures in between, each one presumably more evolved than the last.
“I go around to different parts of [the South Bay] and try to find interesting silhouettes like that,” she notes. “I pretty much take them all an hour before sunset, so it’s a very specific kind of lighting where it’s still bright enough that you can see them, yet dark enough where you can’t recognize who they are.”
Occasionally, there are patches of sunlight or some exquisite detail that glimmers like an unexpected jewel.
Landon hopes to take her camera up and down the coast and to expand “South Bay Strangers” with further series, such as “Malibu Strangers” or “Venice Strangers.” Maybe there’s even a photography book or two at the end of it. Also, when grouped by tonality, they become suites within the series.
Vivian Maier, who kept her photographs and photographic negatives all to herself, could never have guessed that a few years after her death she’d be inspiring another photographer, all the way on the West Coast, to gather up her confidence and to do what she, Vivian Maier, did not do, which was to share her pictures.
“It feels good to get the work out,” Landon says. “That’s what’s drawing me, to actually stop being afraid of showing people… and to start showing people.” ER
