In Clubhouse Turn, photographer Michele Asselin documents the people and architecture of a lost (and soon to be transformed) Los Angeles landmark.
“This isn’t just a racetrack. This is an extraordinarily significant piece of property in Southern California, where so many unbelievable things happened.”
LOS ANGELES (Jan. 2020) – On Dec. 22, 2013, the world-famous Hollywood Park Race Track closed its doors forever. In 2014, demolition began, closing the stable door on seventy-five years of history, while at the same time making space for an entire new neighborhood to suddenly arise in the middle of the metropolis. Celebrated photographer Michele Asselin spent every day at Hollywood Park in the last two weeks before it closed, documenting its buildings, contents, employees, and patrons. Clubhouse Turn: The Twilight of Hollywood Park Race Track is the product of her efforts, and the story of old and new colliding in the middle of a rapidly evolving city.
Released Feb. 2020 by Angel City Press, Clubhouse Turn features nearly 300 of Asselin’s 25,000 images of the landmark racetrack, its staff and guests, including shots of track and building interiors as well as portraits of the hundreds of individuals who lived and worked there — from jockey to gambler, trainer to hot walker, café owner to trumpeter to security guard — alongside excerpts from interviews conducted during the 2013 photo shoots and a timeline of the track’s history.
“With each portrait sitting, I was consumed by the question of what would happen when the park closed. Where would each person go when they couldn’t go to Hollywood Park? Who would have a broken heart?” said Asselin. “With this book, my aim is not to provide a historical record, but to transmit a feeling of place, of existence, and of an ending. This book muses about a time that was, and an inevitable, foreclosing future, photographed during a rare period when the past, present, and future were all equally palpable.”
Asselin continued, “The resulting book of photographs contains no actual horses. Instead, it celebrates the existence of the track’s eclectic, harmonious community.”
In addition to Asselin’s lush photographs, Clubhouse Turn features essays by author, professor, and MacArthur fellow Josh Kun and Grammy-winning journalist and essayist Lynell George exploring what it means to love a city that’s always in motion. A building can have a historic landmark, but what about a culture, a community—a way of life? More than a book of photography or a book about a race track, Clubhouse Turn tells the story of living in a city: the faces that we never see until we look, the places we forget until they’re gone.
“In the over 25,000 photographs that Michele Asselin took of Hollywood Park – its track, grounds, betting posts, hallways, banquet halls, administrative offices, regulars, staff, and jockeys – it’s hard to see the hooray of Hollywood, but easy to see the extras in its shadows, the barmaids and the homely, the broke and broken down looking for a break. You can see them even when they are not there,” Kun writes. “Asselin shot the park in 2013, after it was announced that would be its final year and it would soon be razed to make room for a new football stadium. Her photographs of what she calls the park’s ‘environments’ cast it as a melancholic ghost town, the fresh ruins of a civilization of hope.”
On Sunday, Feb. 23, from 3 to 5 p.m., Angel City Press will celebrate the release of Clubhouse Turn with a reception and gallery showing of Asselin’s photographs at 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, Gallery 5, Los Angeles, California 90048.
For more information about Asselin’s work, visit micheleasselin.com.
To preorder Clubhouse Turn, visit angelcitypress.com/products/club.
Clubhouse Turn: The Twilight of Hollywood Park Racetrack
Photographs by Michele Asselin
Essays by Josh Kun and Lynell George
Released and edited by Angel City Press
ISBN 978-1-62640-065-8
192 pages, 300+ images
9”x12” / Hardcover
MSRP $50.00
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Michele Asselin’s photographs explore the impact of social constructs on human experience. She draws on editorial techniques to examine how people and places come to reflect the systems of which they are a part. Early in her career, she worked for the Associated Press in the Middle East while living in Jerusalem. Back in the US as an editorial photographer, she created memorable portraits of the people of our time. Her work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Esquire, and New York Magazine. Asselin has been an artist-in-residence at the National Domestic Workers Alliance and collaborated on projects with social organizations such as Street to Home in New York City and The Institute For Facial Paralysis in Los Angeles. In 2017, her work was included in the Orange County Museum of Art Pacific Triennial: Building as Ever, and in 2019, featured in a solo show at There-There Gallery. She has completed public art commissions in Los Angeles and Washington D.C., and is currently working on an installation for the City of Inglewood, slated for 2020. This is her first book.
Angel City Press was established in 1992 and is dedicated to the publication of high-quality nonfiction books. The award-winning books from Angel City Press are sold in fine gift and book stores, and on the Web. Drenched in nostalgia yet undeniably cool, each Angel City Press book is luxuriously illustrated and showcases the modern design concepts of California's top graphic artists. So it is with the entire treasury of Angel City Press books — each is forever readable, forever giftable. Angel City Press books are published with extraordinary attention to detail, in the finest tradition of the bound page.
By May of 1993 we had our first book, Hollywood du Jour, in the hands of hungry, nostalgic readers… but not for long; they were quite busy whipping up Sticky Orange Rolls from the Tick Tock Tea Room and swilling Moscow Mules from Cock 'n' Bull. In the ensuing two decades, we have learned that our readers' tastes and hungers go way beyond food, and have done our best to chronicle the cultural history of the West.
Katie Dunham