Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz for TIME Magazine in 1963.

Julian Wasser’s most notorious photo session on assignment for TIME Magazine was of groundbreaking Dada and conceptional artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked Eve Babitz at the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon Museum) in 1963. The exhibition, organized by Walter Hopps, then director of the museum, was Duchamp’s first landmark retrospective.

This comprehensive survey of Duchamp’s storied career began in 1911 at the legendary Armory show in New York. Duchamp, by this time, was the most influential artist in the world, having revolutionized the modern art world with his unconventional concepts. It was Duchamp who coined the phrase, “It is art because I say it is,” when he signed and dated a shovel he had purchased in a hardware store in 1913.

At the time of the retrospective, Wasser, whose keen insight into his subjects, learned that Duchamp had retired from being an artist to pursue his passion to become a professional chess player. So Wasser decided to set up a shot with Duchamp playing chess. He set up a chess board in front of Duchamp’s infamous artwork “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915-1923) which was being exhibited at the museum. In keeping with the theme of the “bride stripped bare,” Wasser enlisted 19-year old Eve Babitz, the mischievous daughter of a friend of the family, to pose nude playing chess with Duchamp.

Babitz, a child of the authentic lineage and cultural milieu of Los Angeles of the 1960’s, agreed to the photo shoot, in part, because it was interesting, but also, unbeknownst to others, she was having an affair with curator Walter Hopps and was not invited to the opening.

In the end, this photograph became a memoire of not only an iconic Marcel Duchamp, but also of a young Eve Babitz, who became a symbol of the sexual revolution of 1960’s Los Angeles, who went on to become a fleeting lover of celebrities such as Jim Morrison, Steve Martin and Harrison Ford. Today, Babitz is a celebrated author and often considered the West Coast Joan Didion.

For Julian Wasser, this photograph became THE seminal moment of his career.

Jayne Mansfield at the Whisky a Go-Go taken for LIFE Magazine in 1964.

In 1964, photographer Julian Wasser captured one of the most unforgettable nightlife images of Hollywood’s golden age: Jayne Mansfield dancing at the Whisky a Go-Go. Shot for Life magazine, the candid black-and-white photograph shows Mansfield in a curve-hugging dress on the dance floor of the Sunset Strip’s most legendary club. The Whisky a Go-Go was the epicenter of Los Angeles nightlife in the 1960s, drawing movie stars, musicians, and tastemakers, and this photograph perfectly freezes that glamorous, high-energy moment in time. Mansfield’s playful charisma and movie-star presence contrast beautifully with the raw, unposed energy of the scene, a hallmark of Wasser’s candid style. Today, this image stands as both a tribute to Mansfield’s enduring star power and to Wasser’s role in shaping the visual culture of Hollywood’s most iconic era.

1965

After serving in the Navy in San Diego, former AP copyboy Julian Wasser became a contract photographer for Time Magazine in Los Angeles, doing assignments for Time, Life, and Fortune. His photographs have appeared in and have been used as covers of Time, Newsweek and People magazines in the United States. Additionally, Wasser’s photos have also been used on cover assignments for The Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times in London.

Here, Julian Wasser brilliantly captures a moment of oration and eloquence delivered by American author James Baldwin. Baldwin was an ardent Civil Rights activist, using his affinity for language to write several essays and deliver speeches for the movement and push for racial equality. Baldwin did not shy away from expressing the harsh reality of existing as a black person in America, and his powerful stance captured in this photograph commands attention from the viewer. Civil Rights are human rights, and Humanity upholds this belief. Every single individual is composed of the same basic elements, and we all belong to the same family of homo sapiens. Our moral principles should always acknowledge and reflect this.

The Rolling Stones are pictured with their original bandleader Brian Jones and former manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham during the recording of “Can’t Buy Me Love”.

This photograph was taken at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on the night Elizabeth Taylor won her first Academy Award for her role in “Butterfield 8”. Soon after she left her then-husband and co-star Eddie Fisher for fifth husband, her Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton.

Keith Moon, English drummer from the rock band, the Who, shares a limo with a girl holding a bottle of Dom Perignon. Taken outside of the Whisky A G-Go.

Farrah Fawcett on the set of “Charlie’s Angels” getting her hair and makeup done.