Photographer Nancy Baron Featured on Vine Street Billboard

Hancock Park resident and photographer Nancy Baron’s photo “Lee’s Gone, Liberace’s Palm Springs Estate” is featured on a billboard on Vine Street and Romaine as part of the 4th annual Billboard Creative 2016 show. The Billboard Creative is a public art initiative, that seeks to offer a visual alternative to LA’s billboard landscape: art replacing advertising, for an entire month, at some of the busiest intersections throughout Los Angeles. According to its website, Billboard Creative curator Mona Kuhn’s main curatorial focus is to STOP TRAFFIC WITH ART. 

Baron’s billboard photo will be on display through January 1, 2017.  The photo is from her first book, “The Good Life, Palm Springs,” which describes how she got the shot:

“I gained access to the house (named The Cloisters) when it was open to the public for one weekend only in 2010 for an estate sale. Rumor has it that 6,000 people passed through the house that weekend and that it sold during that time. Liberace requested in his trust that the house be used as a museum, but the city wouldn’t allow that in a residential neighborhood. This was Liberace’s favorite home and the one in which he died. The next owners stripped it down to its original white Spanish interior.”

Baron has recently published a second book, “Palm Springs, The Good Life Goes On.”   In it, Baron writes:

“I pick up where I left off in my series The Good Life, Palm Springs (Kehrer 2014), documenting, with a positive bias, my ongoing and endless discoveries of my second home and its community of mid-century modern enthusiasts. This large and tight-knit group of self-proclaimed modernists are committed to the mid-century modern life style and the preservation of its architecture. Their homes, cars, and clothes pay homage to this carefree post-World War II time in US history that glows warmly in their vintage rear view mirrors. Many of these Modernists weren’t born yet in the 1950s and 1960s, but they find comfort in this reenactment of gentler times.

These informal images casually document the carefree Palm Springs lifestyle as though captured in passing, in the seemingly effortless way that most things happen in Palm Springs.

Baron has also contributed her work to Buzz features including one on Frank Gehry.