Henry Diltz was Laurel Canyon’s court photographer. Along with Baron Wolman and Jim Marshall, Henry essentially invented “rock photography” though he’d hardly planned on it. (He sold his first photo, of the Buffalo Springfield posing in front of a psychedelic mural, after impulsively accepting Stephen Stills’ invitation to join the band at a gig in Redondo Beach, California.)

A fine musician and founding member of the Modern Folk Quartert, Henry shot thousands of intimate photos of his friends and neighbors in the canyon like Joni Mitchell, Cass Elliot, David Crosby and the rest, some of which would become defining images of the ’60s.

Now 500 of Henry’s photos have been reproduced in CALIFORNIA DREAMING: MEMORIES AND VISIONS OF L.A. 1966-1975, an ultra-luxe, fancy-schmancy, 344-page large-format limited edition coffee-table monster with commentary from subjects like Mitchell, Graham Nash, Neil Young, Chris Hillman, Jackson Browne, Don Henley and the rest of the canyon mafia.

It’s available for $600 for the 2,000-copy limited edition and $1,350 for a deluxe version at the Taschen bookstore in Beverly Hills.
As it happens, Henry and I will appear together at Taschen Wednesday evening, November 14, to discuss the L.A. and Laurel Canyon music scenes and sign our respective books. (Taschen has laid in some of the last copies of the LAUREL CANYON hardcover for the event; if you’ve been pining for a signed hardcover edition, this may be your last chance.)

Those who’ve caught Henry and me at our previous gigs, from the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood to the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, know it’ll be a night rich with history, good humor and a chance to re-connect with one of L.A.’s most fertile artistic moments.

Why, that’s Barbara Hershey, circa 1967, at the very beginning of her career, at a Love In in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.

It’s one of more than 200 photos on display at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, where an outstanding career retrospective of photographer and former canyonite Henry Diltz is on display through June.

Henry and I rocked the house at the museum Saturday night at a reception where I signed something like 30 copies of LAUREL CANYON and Henry held forth with customary aplomb…

Next, we adjourned to an overflow crowd at the Goddard Theater. I rambled through an otherwise plausible talk concerning the importance of place in the creative process—and Laurel Canyon’s unique contribution therein—before Henry joined me for a multi-media presentation of his own Laurel Canyon canon.

Great crowd, great museum. Thanks to SMP’s Kevin Miller, his ultracool staff, Daytona’s Barnes & Noble for selling my book at the event, and especially the people of Daytona Beach who braved rain and the Milwaukee-made thunder of a thousand-fold Harleys invading for the city’s annual Biker Week.

Henry Diltz was a banjo player and singer in the Modern Folk Quartet in the mid-1960s when he took up photography as a hobby. As it happened, many of his subjects were his neighbors in Laurel Canyon who were at that moment writing and recording what would become some of rock and pop music’s most celebrated compositions but were still relatively unknown.

Henry’s intimate portraits of what would become the Laurel Canyon folk-rock elite—such as this iconographic photo of Joni Mitchell at her Lookout Mountain cottage in 1970 where she and Graham Nash cohabitated (and Nash wrote “Our House”)—are among the tens of thousands of photos he’s amassed over the years as one of the first “rock” photographers.

On Saturday, Henry launched the Los Angeles branch of the Morrison Hotel galleries—so named for his cover shot of the Doors 1968 album—already displaying his work in Soho and La Jolla, California with a packed reception (appropriately enough just down the block from the Hollywood Guitar Center).

The gallery also sells work of other leading rock photographers including San Francisco’s Jim Marshall, New York’s Bob Gruen, and L.A.’s Neal Preston, who was something of a court photographer for Led Zeppelin.

Morrison Hotel Fine Art Music Photography, 323-874-2068.

Those of who you have seen LAUREL CANYON and gotten a gander at the evocative photos within have Henry Diltz to thank for sharing from his vast archives. A former canyon resident whose neighbors and friends comprised the entire L.A. music scene in the ’60s and ’70s, Henry photographed, literally, everybody, from the Buffalo Springfield to the Monkees and was the official photographer of the Woodstock Festival.

Henry graciously allowed me, with his help and that of his two assistant, to plunder his meticulously maintained files. I was searching for images that captured the atmosphere of the canyon that I’d found in my interviews with Henry himself and others, and I wanted to avoid some of his most famous shots (though we couldn’t resist his iconographic portrait of Joni Mitchell grinning from the window of her Lookout Mountain cottage).

Henry remains a first-rate musician, a founding member of the Modern Folk Quartet, whose sophisticated four-part harmonies prefigured Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Click here to see a gallery of Henry’s work….