These photos take us inside LA’s notorious Chateau Marmont hotel (2025)

Hotels are sexy. They are lieux des intrigues. And few hotels have a sexier or more intriguing history than the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles – a place inextricably bound in the self-mythologising history of Hollywood. Since it was first conjured from the dust at the junction of Marmont Lane and Sunset Boulevard in 1929, its sheets have been soiled by some of history’s most alluring film stars, writers and musicians. Eve Babitz – who had many encounters in this this faux-French gothic edifice –described it as a home for the city’s “furies and ghosts”, Jim Morrison fell out of a window losing “one of his nine lives”, Lindsay Lohan was evicted after racking up a $46,000 bill, Sofia Coppola held her star-studded 22nd birthday there, Helmut Newton died there, Keanu Reeves lived in a suite for years during the 1990s and 2000s.

Amanda Charchian’s photo book A Very Bad Man brings together her pictures taken on location at the Chateau Marmont. Shot in and around the famed hotel, the book invites us into its sequestered rooms and bungalows. “It’s a portrait of the city through one of its most iconic and psychologically-charged locations,” the LA-born, Paris-based photographer tells Dazed. “The photographs capture creative close friends inside the hotel during the daylight hours, often in vulnerable, transitional states. The images are about intimacy, disillusionment, and the surreal overlap between fantasy and reality in LA.” As well as being a locus sanctus for the city’s highlife (and lowlife), the Chateau occupies a particular place in Charchian’s own history. “Los Angeles doesn’t have a centre, but for a particular community of creatives, [the hotel] becomes the town square. I’ve been going there since I was a teenager, often referring to it as a kind of school cafeteria.”

Los Angeles exists more as a phenomenological atmosphere than a cohesive geography. It’s a city in constant rehearsal, where the distinction between the real and the represented isn’t just blurred – it’s irrelevant – Amanda Charchian

Charchian also has a psychogeographical interest in the hotel and its density of cultural history, as well as the cultural and emotional geography of the city at large, which functions for her as a kind of performance or self-perpetuating, self-reflexive mirror game. “For me, Los Angeles exists more as a phenomenological atmosphere than a cohesive geography. It’s a city in constant rehearsal, where the distinction between the real and the represented isn’t just blurred – it’s irrelevant. In many ways, it’s Baudrillard’s simulacrum incarnate: an endless loop of mediated images, fantasies lived in real-time, and architecture functioning as prosthetic memory.”

If place itself or the materiality of a building has the capacity to hold spectral memory, then the Chateau Marmont is thronged with ghosts. But Charchian believes LA operates differently. “Los Angeles is a city that initiates you into illusion as a survival mechanism,” she says. “Unlike older cities, LA doesn’t hold memory. It disintegrates history and recycles it as fantasy. That absence of continuity creates space for radical reinvention, which is both exhilarating and disorienting.”

While providing a kind of focal point in LA’s confusing geography, the Chateau is, ultimately, transitory. And it’s this impermanence – and their possibilities of privacy and anonymity – which makes hotels more alluring. Charchian tells us, “Hotels in general are erotic spaces — not just physically, but emotionally. They’re liminal, transient, full of projection. You’re anonymous but exposed. That ambiguity creates a particular kind of intimacy – with yourself, with others, with the architecture. You’re suspended between the personal and the anonymous – the room is both yours and not yours. That psychological ambiguity creates space for fantasy, roleplay, surrender, and sometimes deep loneliness.” Charchian adds, “What draws me to it most is the tension it holds – between discretion and exhibition, history and amnesia, secrecy and spectacle. You feel that everything there is charged with subtext. I am deeply interested in spatial psychology and the way environments act as extensions of the self.”

Hotels in general are erotic spaces... They’re liminal, transient, full of projection. You’re anonymous but exposed – Amanda Charchian

There’s a tactile, experiential aspect to the book. Alongside a limited edition boxset with blinds you can pull back to reveal an image, A Very Bad Man also includes contributions from nine LA-based artists, Jonas Wood, Alvaro Barrington, Louise Bonnet, Delfin Finley, Claire Tabouret, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Matt Copson, and Freeman/Lowe, who each created an original work on the hotel’s stationery. Charchian also set up a functioning phone number –the Who Disappointed You Today? hotline – where readers can call and leave a message. “The idea was to open up a channel between the viewer and the work, creating a space for personal expression and catharsis,” she says. “It’s a subtle nod to the emotional residue we leave behind in places like hotels.”

The week she finished the book, the devastating wildfires burned down the area of the city where the photographer grew up, and Charchian decided to dedicate proceeds to LA Wildfire Relief. In that sense, it’s a thank you and a goodbye. “Ultimately, the book became a farewell letter to Los Angeles – I moved to Paris shortly after finishing it,” she says. “From a distance, I could then reflect on the architecture of memory, the residue of power, and the emotional afterimage of a city built on projection.”

That same week, David Lynch died. His distinct cinematic vision of Los Angeles – so haunting and disturbing, yet also so romantic – continues to resonate deeply with Charchian. “Lynch sees the subconscious not just as a theme but as a location. In his world, desire always has a dark hallway attached to it. His characters often don’t understand what’s happening to them, but they feel it viscerally, like a memory that hasn’t happened yet. I think that emotional disorientation is very real in LA. It’s a city where identity is elastic, where time folds in on itself, where you can become a myth if you’re willing to be immortalised by imagery.” She concludes, “I’ve always returned to his quote, ‘I feel lucky to live in Los Angeles, the light here really thrills my soul. It's a light that's very different from other places – it's soft, and it's got a mood to it.” That light is a character in this book. It makes the ordinary feel cinematic.”

A Very Bad Man is available online here and in person at Librairie 7L in Paris. Proceeds go to LA Wildfire Relief.