Book of the Day > Penny Wolin: Guest Register
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“Penny Wolin from Cheyenne, Wyoming flies into Hollywood on the wings of inspiration and intuition and lands at the St. Francis Hotel. There, in three short weeks as a tenant, Penny creates a body of photographs and text comparable to those of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century, only to be hidden in the photographer’s archive for nearly fifty years – until now.”
— Norman Mauskopf, Photographer
When Penny Wolin created Guest Register in 1975, she was twenty-one and a recent transplant to Hollywood from Cheyenne, Wyoming. You can see the residents of the St. Francis Hotel as people who could not fit in elsewhere, or you can see them, as Wolin does, as people whose dreams are bigger than their rooms. She moved into the 1920s hotel, a five-story pay-by-the week building on Hollywood Boulevard and began photographing her neighbors. She could see at once it was a “milieu of dreamers,” both those who “had not yet realized their dreams” and those who “had left them behind.” Wolin suspended judgement. She was not categorizing the residents as she made her rounds, and her project was not intended to fix anything. This generosity of spirit is the defining quality of Guest Register. The book is arranged as a tour, one image per spread, with residents identified by their room number and an insightful caption. The tour begins on the ground floor in room 105, vacated by the death of a former stuntman, and rises to a barbell aficionado in the penthouse, before returning to earth by way of an artisan welder in the basement, who seems to have lit his cigarette with a flaming torch. Guest Register is a both a culmination and a relaunch for an endeavor that is about the possibility of a second chance for all of us.
