California’s first Black architect and his work explored in new book by Sherman Oaks photographer
After Janna Ireland photographed her first home for what would become a longterm project documenting the architecture of Paul R. Williams, she got a surprise. As it turned out, the midcentury modern in View Park with details influenced by Chinese architecture wasn’t actually designed by Williams.
“It was designed by someone working in his office for people who were friends of Williams,” she explains by phone from her home in Sherman Oaks.
Even so, the photos she shot there were significant. “In a lot of ways, it set the tone for the rest of the project.”
“Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View,” published by Angel City Press, isn’t a typical review of an architect’s work. Instead, it’s Ireland’s impression of the structures designed by the trailblazing L.A. architect.
In it, she captures the curve of staircases and the corners of interiors and exteriors that might otherwise go unnoticed. It’s a book about the details, not a career overview. That, she says, is something that will take much more time as scholars continue to dig deeper into his career.
“The body of work is so enormous,” she says, “and, with his archives just going to the Getty and USC this year, there hasn’t been the opportunity to do the kind of scholarship that his work really demands.”
Williams, who was born in Los Angeles in 1894 and orphaned before he was five, became crucially important to the 20th-century development of the city. Over the course of a 50-year career, Ireland notes in the book, he worked on thousands of buildings, including two thousand Southern California homes. His projects also include the Theme Building at LAX, Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration and the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he designed the bungalows, its “Crescent Wing” and the hotel’s logo is written in his handwriting.
He was also the first Black certified architect in the western United States and the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects. He designed homes for everyone, from celebrity pads to housing projects.
Ironically, some of his work was in neighborhoods with racially restrictive covenants that would have prevented Williams from owning the homes that he was designing. No doubt, racism impacted his career. In the book, Ireland surmises that this may have resulted in his ability to design in so many different styles.
“Williams’s white contemporaries could find work by way of a signature style and the cult of personality,” she writes. “Williams had to work without ego, shifting to meet each client’s demands. The result is a body of work that demonstrates incredible dexterity.”
In 2016, when Ireland first embarked on the project, at the request of architect Barbara Bestor, she hadn’t seriously photographed architecture. “It was frightening, but also an exciting challenge to try to do something that I had never done and figure out my own way to do it,” she says. As she continued, Ireland learned more about the variety in Williams’ own body of work and about architecture.
One of her favorite shoots was capturing the Hillside Memorial Park Mausoleum. Typically, she photographed homes, which meant trying to stay out of the way of the residents and photographing around their own possessions. “This was an opportunity to be mostly looking at architecture and, to have so much of it, that was a really fantastic shoot day.”
In December of 2017, she showed her work from the Williams series for the first time at Woodbury University’s Hollywood gallery, WUHO. It was her first time exhibiting after finishing graduate school.
Concurrently with the Williams project, Ireland was working on a series called “Milk and Honey,” where she photographed her family and herself in stylized ways. More recently, she began a series of photographs documenting her young children at home during the pandemic. “We’re still pretty isolated, so I’ve been photographing them doing what they do around the house and in the backyard,” she says.
The varied projects have provided a creative balance for the photographer. “I’m so much happier when I’m doing something, even though I’m probably more distracted in some ways because I’m thinking so much about it,” she says.
Ireland completed the collection of photos that appear in the book in early 2020, but this isn’t the end of her documentation of Williams’ architecture. “As an artist, it’s been meaningful to stretch myself in this way,” she says. “I’m still working on it and still finding exciting new things in architecture. That’s been an artistic triumph.”
She did, however, take a pause at the start of the pandemic. “If that hadn’t happened, I would probably have been photographing them all through the spring and all through the summer,” she says. “Instead, there was this long break where I definitely wasn’t going into anyone else’s house. It was a big deal to start it again.”
Just a few weeks before this interview, Ireland returned to photographing Williams’ homes. “With the book coming out, I feel like it’s time for a new phase of the project to start, if I’m going to continue working on it, and I don’t know what that’s going to be,” she says.
Ireland’s work comes at a time where there is renewed interest in Williams’ career. In 2017, the American Institute of Architects awarded Williams, who died in 1980, their Gold Medal award. Earlier this year, PBS aired their documentary, “Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story.”
With her new book, Ireland is contributing to the preservation of Williams’ legacy for future generations. She says, “For kids growing up here now, to know that this Black man who was born in the 19th century was able to do all this work in the city, I think, would be really meaningful.”