Apartamento - Leonard Koren
Although born in New York City, Leonard Koren was raised in Los Angeles and attended UCLA where he was awarded an undergraduate fellowship to pursue experiments in photographic process, in 1969 He decided to quit school temporarily to co-found the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a trompe l’oeil mural painting group that executed large-scale outdoor commissions in Los Angeles and Paris, tired of painting Leonard became interested in Architecture and went back to UCLA to graduate with a Master's Degree in Architecture and Urban Planning a few years later.
Koren is also the founder of the 70s-era cult magazine "WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing", this unusual subject matter combined with its distinctive layout and design made WET one of the most remarkable and interesting magazines of that era, some of WET's contributors included many promising young talents such as Matt Groening, Matthew Ralston, Ed Ruscha or April Greiman and it ran successfully until 1981, after some years living in Japan, where he kept writing and had a periodical column about cultural anthropology in the Japanese publication BRUTUS, He settled back in California and has since then published many more books like the recent Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts (2015) or the widely acclaimed “Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers.” a title that introduced the concept of Wabi-Sabi to the Western audience in 1994.
Photographed for Apartamento in Point Reyes, CA
