Charles Bukowski and Joan Gannij in Hollywood

Framed photo of Charles Bukowski looks straight in the eyes of Joan Gannij in Laterna Magica cave in Helsinki. Warm summer rain outside. It is August 1997. Helsinki Festival is to begin. Bukowski was dead three years ago. This is a cathedral, says Joan, could be shown as an exhibition called Tabula Rasa - with no exhibition. There are signs on cellar wall of dropping water coming from a car park above.

When I think of myself dead

I think of automobiles parked in a
parking lot

when I think of myself dead
I think of frying pans
. . .
( Citate from Chales Bukowski: Love Is a Dog from Hell,
Black Sparrow Press 1977)

Joan Gannij met Charles Bukowski in Hollywood 1975 while making an interview for Rolling Stone Magazine. He became her mentor in writing and collaborator in photography and book cover design. The Man Behind the Myth portfolio is a touching writer portrait. But the other side lives as well. In Hank and Georgia serie - or more precisely in pictures of that serie which escaped Los Angeles earth quake - Joan shows the myth which still to day is better known than the man behind it. See Bukowski in Helsinki Night of Arts.

Joan Gannij´s next exhibition in Helsinki will be dedicated to her mother, Hollywood photographer Adele Gannij. Something you never knew about Glamour.

Read more about Joan Gannij:

PRESS RELEASE HELSINKI 26.08.1997

Joan Gannij began her career in America in 1973 as a writer/photographer, rock and roll disc jockey and creator of two syndicated radio talk shows. Born in New York, raised in Hollywood, she worked on both coasts before relocating to Amsterdam in 1987. She has published two chapbooks of poetry, with a third to be published later this year, "Wounds of Change".

"My mother Adele was a photographer in Hollywood in the 50s, which certainly influenced me as a child who preferred to hang around her darkroom reading Life Magazine and Popular Photography than playing kid´s games. When I was eight I put out my own newspaper (circulation of 10!) the Sunset Boulevard Gazette, so I have always divided my time between writing and shooting pictures. I just changed my equipment slightly over the years.

Though she continues to still shoot the occasional portrait, Joan Gannij has chosen to focus on her writing since 1984, and is currently working on "Going Dutch", a novel in progress, and two children`s books. "After the fateful demise of my "Frigid Air" project (A Book of Famous People and Their Refrigators) in 1976.

"I got burnt out on the celebrity scene in L.A., which is why shooting literary figures like Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller, and later, my reportage on a homeless woman was so gratifying. There was something deep and soulful behind their eyes that camera picked up. An integrity of spirit which I also wanted to reinforce in my own life as well as in my work --- which ultimately motivated me to leave America for Europe."

"In these ´found´ portraits of Charles Bukowski, which I only rediscovered and printed for the first time following his death two years ago, one sees the humanity behind the formidable myth of the ´dirty old man with a bottle in his hand´ which he cultivated so slyly. It´s like Picasso told Gertrude Stein, when she professed to hate his portrait of her: ´Just wait twenty years.´" Indeed, twenty years later, these portraits show you the many faces of Charles Bukowski, the man behind the myth.