soon to be a book.
The Fairoaks Project almost wasn’t. Frank Melleno’s collection of photographs documenting life at San Francisco’s short-lived Fairoaks Hotel was consigned to a shoe box for almost three decades and would have remained there to this day had Melleno not shown them to his friend Gary Freeman. Freeman, a photo restorer and gallery owner, was immediately struck by their beauty and historical significance. Out of that meeting in 2007 grew the Fairoaks Project, the aim of which was the restoration, digitization, production and exhibition of Melleno’s work. The Fairoaks Project includes the selection of fifty-one restored images that were exhibited under the same name in June of 2010 at the drkrm/gallery in downtown Los Angeles. To a casual viewer, this slim volume of candid, provocative, often sexually explicit images might come across as some sort of soft core fluff. It is not. To crack the spine, leaf through its pages, and examine its images is to open a portal onto a secret place lost long ago.
photo courtesy~ frank melleno
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