By JOLIE GORCHOV
Staff Reporter
Photographer Gary Leonard likes to show people his 1969 class picture as an example of what can happen when you break the rules.
There are actually two images of Leonard in that group shot. His senior class at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys was so big that a panoramic camera was needed to take the picture. As the camera pivoted slowly from left to right, Leonard ran from one end of the group to the other, fast enough so that the camera caught him in two different places.
“I was spanked for that,” he says. “It still hurts.”
Leonard is perhaps the most prolific photographic chronicler of life in L.A., best known for his weekly feature “Take My Picture Gary Leonard” in New Times Los Angeles.
He has taken pictures of everything from Mayor Richard Riordan gamely posing with a not-very-flattering Robbie Conal portrait of the mayor, to a Playa Vista protester dressed as Kermit the frog.
Other classic shots have captured naked and hirsute bums, flamboyant drag queens and O.J. Simpson outside his home in Brentwood.
Charles Gerencser, publisher of New Times, is one of Leonard’s biggest fans.
“He is a really amazing guy,” Gerencser says. “He’s loosely considered a bit of an L.A. fanatic where there aren’t that many fans of the city. (His pictures are) not about the car crash or the fire or the fireman who saved the baby, but the guy selling ice cream cones on the corner where the fire is happening.”
Leonard is particularly hot right now. He’s had two books published in the past 18 months, and the L.A. Public Library has commissioned him to document downtown and Echo Park for its collection.
Things have not always been so good. In 1989, Leonard was on welfare and without a home of his own after being evicted. At his lowest point, he pawned his cameras to buy food.
His problems actually began 10 years earlier, when the UCLA motion picture and TV production graduate was working for a building supply company in Encino. He was married with a 2-year-old son and his favorite pastime was combing the city, taking photographs of anything and everything.
That’s when he discovered the punk scene.
“I saw a counterculture there that excited me,” he says. “I thought, there’s something going on here that’s unique to Los Angeles.”
After Leonard quit his job to document the punk scene, his wife left him, taking their son with her. He took his share of the money from the sale of their house and moved to Echo Park, a mecca for artists. He bought another small home and started fixing it up without knowing that it would become an all-consuming art project.
Calling himself “a weaver of solid waste,” Leonard constructed a fence using recycled objects like TV sets, tires, car grills, fans, car parts, mattress springs, lamps, chairs, tables, dolls, even a dog house.
“I was a repository for other people’s stuff,” he recalls.
Meanwhile, he ran into problems paying child support, so he took out a high-interest private loan and prepaid 10 years worth of support. It was then that Leonard pawned his cameras and went on welfare.
“I went as low as you can possibly go,” he recalls. “I used to go down and eat at the mission in anticipation of what the worst could be. I finally got to the point where I became the subject of other photographers taking my picture there.”
At the time, documentary filmmaker Anne Stein was doing a project about “outsider art” and heard about Leonard’s growing fence assemblage. She began following him around.
It was also during that time that Leonard was evicted because, he says, the high interest on his child-support loan kept him from making mortgage payments. Luckily Stein gave him a place to stay and the two began a continuing relationship.
After a few years with Stein, Leonard decided he wanted to take pictures again. He took a photo class at Glendale Community College and hates to admit that he got a failing grade. He says he never showed up for class because he just enrolled for the darkroom privileges.
