Home. The mystic qualities of the bathing experience.

"Leonard Koren is slender, soft of voice and remarkably poised for his 26 years. He is also rare among the new photographers who show their work to Home's editors. He has something to say in his pictures. Koren grew up in Los Angeles, entered UCLA as a philosophy major, but found himself drawn to painting. Eventually, with other painters who wanted to take their work out of the studio and gallery and into the street, he founded the L.A. Fine Arts Squad. This was the team that left its mark on the exteriors of previously mundane structures. They executed major murals, including one for the Climax Club on La Cienega; another, representing an earthquake-fractured freeway, is on Butler Avenue. On the strength of this work, in 1971 Ko-ren and the others accepted an invitation to execute a mural in Paris, but found little encouragement in Europe and so returned to Los Angeles. Then Koren built a tea house at his parents' home, and an underground sauna. This introduced him to the fascinations of solving problems of space and prompted him to enter UCLA's School of Architecture and Urban Design. Meanwhile he began using the camera as a tool to study environments and found it involved him much more deeply. Now it all came together. "With a camera, I could express myself fully," he explains. "It was a liberation." Last summer he came to Home with some photographs he'd taken for a graduate thesis in architecture. We liked them immediately and this issue of Home is the final result."--From page 7.