BY
PENNY WOLIN

In 1975, twenty-one-year-old, Wyoming-raised photographer Penny Wolin checked into a pay-by-the-week residential hotel on a faded stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, and began to make portraits of her neighbors.

Guest Register is not an inventory of transitory souls, but a benediction from them, “a permanent amulet,” as Wolin says, to keep the unfeeling at bay, and dreams close at hand.

 
 
 
 
 

All texts and photographs © 2022 Penny Wolin

“Staying for one night or thirty years, we were housed as one, possibly living next door to a future famous writer punching typewriter keys through the night, or perhaps a young honeymoon couple rocking their creaking bed to sleep against our shared wall.”
— Penny Wolin



Also available at these fine book stores:

  • OK Store, LA

  • Samy’s Camera, LA

  • Samy’s Camera, Pasadena

  • Arcana, Culver City

  • Book Soup, WEHO

  • ArtCenter Student Store

  • Argosy Book Store, NYC

  • Karma Books, NYC

  • Chaucer’s Books, Santa Barbara

  • Hennessey + Ingalls, DTLA

  • Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena

  • LACMA Store, Mid-Wilshire

  • ROSEGALLERY, Santa Monica

PRAISE

“Startling and poignant photographs. It’s good work.”
— Joel Meyerowitz, Photographer
“Guest Register provides a deeply insightful portrait of America; vulnerable, complicated and imperfect”
— Edward Goldman, Art Critic
“Through Penny’s eyes the people are memorable. I want to know what happened to them.”
— Jo Ann Callis, Artist

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Penny Wolin is the author of three photographic monographs. Her photographs are held in such collections as the Smithsonian American Art Museum; she is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities; she was a contract photographer with LIFE Magazine; studied photography at ArtCenter College of Design; film at the American Film Institute and visual anthropology at UCLA. She currently resides in the great city of Los Angeles and a small farm in the Redwoods of Northern California.