Tom O'Neal Photography

In the Vault Winter Season, 2007-2008

Born in Los Angeles as Tom Gundelfinger, O’Neal grew up riding his bike to school in Beverly Hills with Barry Diller. “We lived up the street from Lucille Ball and Jack Benny,” he says.

In the ’60s, O’Neal studied fine art at the University of Illinois and The Art Institute of Chicago, and then went to Paris to study painting at a small school.

“The background I had was not influenced by psychedelic poster artists,” he says. “I got the fundamental basics of painting and design from school.”

A friend from Paris invited O’Neal to visit him in his hometown of Pacific Grove when he returned to the States. O’Neal came for a visit and stayed, finding work at a physician’s office in Monterey taking before-and-after pictures of people who had plastic surgery. After work, O’Neal, then in his early twenties, was allowed to use the darkroom for his own photography. Inspired by a 1966 album cover of The Mamas and The Papas, O’Neal started tweaking photographs to reflect the evolving art of the times.

“At night I would experiment with photo illustration and hand paint on photographs,” he says.

In the summer of 1967, O’Neal read in the newspaper that record producer Lou Adler, musician John Phillips and producer Terry Melcher were coming to Monterey to promote the Monterey Pop Festival. He decided to find a way to show them his “different” take on photos. Read the whole story in Carmel Magazine