The New Yorker:

Candy Clark’s Polaroid closeups of familiar faces—Steven Spielberg, Carrie Fisher, Jeff Bridges—evoke a looser, more freewheeling time in show business.

By Michael Schulman

Candy Clark came to Hollywood at the dawn of the seventies, a spunky twentysomething who’d fled her conservative Texas home town and taken up modelling in New York. Though she was indifferent to acting, she nabbed a part, as a boxer’s girlfriend, in the John Huston film “Fat City,” plus a movie-star beau—her co-star, Jeff Bridges. She settled into Bridges’s Malibu home but kept a bungalow off Fountain Avenue, close to auditions. She was cast in “American Graffiti,” George Lucas’s second film, about a group of sixties teens on the eve of adulthood, motoring around Modesto, California, on a late-summer night. Clark played Debbie Dunham, a bombshell in a platinum bouffant who hops in a Chevy with a dweeby admirer, looking for adventure. Her castmates included the young Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, and Ron Howard (billed as Ronny). Without knowing it—no one did, really—she’d landed square in the era that would become known, and much mythologized, as the New Hollywood. Wherever she went, she took her Polaroid camera.

A lifetime later, Clark has released “Tight Heads,” a collection of her Polaroids from the seventies and early eighties. She’d dug them up in a spare bedroom at her house in Los Angeles, at the behest of the writer Sam Sweet, who was interviewing Angelenos for his project All Night Menu and who became the book’s editor and publisher. “Hollywood is a history of men looking at women through cameras,” Sweet writes in his introduction. “Never had the lens been turned on them by the ingénue. Under Candy’s gaze, the swashbuckling icons of Hollywood legend become innocent.” Clark’s closeups of familiar faces—Steven Spielberg, Carrie Fisher, David Bowie—have the tossed-off intimacy of a more freewheeling time, when the parties (and the drugs) were plentiful, and everyone was “just kids.”

Go to link