Legacy Portraits: Annette Del Zoppo

Annette Del Zoppo’s archive is stored in a series of narrow aisles, the kind that require you to turn sideways as you move through them. Halfway in, the light drops off, and a flashlight becomes necessary. Each box has a detailed label. There are slides, thousands of them, along with projectors, film canisters, drawings, and correspondence.

Annette’s longtime partner in work and in life, Jim Simmons, maintains the archive. It was he who first led me into the aisles, where the accumulation begins to resolve into a portrait⁠—less linear than layered, like a set of overlapping exposures: design and film, architecture and advocacy, Los Angeles in several distinct moods. The archives are so vast and extensive that they lead one to wonder, when did she sleep?

Annette spent nearly a decade at the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, arriving in 1962 and staying until 1971. The office was organized not around titles but around problems. A project might begin as a question, expand into research and travel, and return as a mountain of material that needed shaping into an exhibition, a film, or a multi-image presentation calibrated to hold an audience’s attention. Of the Eames Office, Charles often said, “Everyone doubles in brass.” The phrase comes out of show business⁠—circus and vaudeville culture⁠—where you weren’t hired to do one thing; you did your job, and when the parade band formed up, you picked up a brass instrument and played.

Annette assisted in all phases of film and exhibition production, in the office and on location, traveling across the United States and Europe. She had arrived with a background that made that fluidity natural. Born in Hollywood in 1936, she spent part of her childhood working in the film industry as an extra and stand-in. She studied architecture at the University of Southern California, then transferred to UCLA to study filmmaking, where she later said she came to appreciate how much of any finished work depends on people whose names are not foregrounded.

Before joining the Eames Office, she had worked in architecture firms in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, in departments focused on color and materials. While at USC, she took a job in the design department of A.C. Martin. Because she didn’t like drafting, she began photographing architectural models with a camera⁠—an approach that aligned with the Eameses’ commitment to photography and film as tools for thinking as much as for presentation.

While she was at the Eames Office, Annette began building a second body of work that ran parallel to her studio responsibilities. In 1963, working nights and weekends, she began photographing architect Paolo Soleri’s drawings, models, and built environments at Cosanti, and later at Arcosanti, both in Arizona. She photographed not only finished structures but also the surrounding ecosystems: scrolls of drawings, models in various stages, the bell foundry, the construction sites, the gatherings that formed around the project, among many other things.

Annette returned often, sometimes several times a year, over more than a decade. The resulting record is large: more than ten thousand 35-millimeter slides, along with film footage and printed material. She also produced multiscreen presentations and exhibitions, translating Soleri’s work into formats that could travel. At one point, she introduced Soleri to Charles Eames and drafted the letter that Charles would send in support of Soleri’s membership in the American Institute of Architects. Charles, who admired Soleri’s notebooks⁠—long, continuous scrolls of writing and drawing⁠—called them “One of the few honest to God notebooks kept by an architect today,” and proposed that the AIA sponsor a film about them.

After leaving the Office, she was given assignments by Herman Miller, a major client and longtime partner of the Eameses. Annette is the only former Eames Office staff member to have maintained that kind of ongoing relationship with Herman Miller, a distinction that speaks not just to the quality of her work, but to the trust and confidence Ray and Charles placed in her.

Her range of clients expanded, including Environmental Communications, an image bank focused on art, architecture, and design, and several Hollywood studios, for whom she shot stills on film sets. In 1973, she conceived and produced L.A. Flash, a five-screen installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, built from her own photographs and those of four other photographers. The subject was how people dressed in Los Angeles⁠—street fashion treated not as ornament but as evidence. For the show Annette followed the young into rock concerts, prom ballrooms, gay bars, and antique clothing shops. Annette told a Los Angeles Times reporter that the next fashion trend would be named “Mode O’ Day.”

Jehane Burns, another longtime member of the Eames Office, wrote of her experience there, “If there’s a trait that has rubbed off on almost every Eames alumnus, it’s the need to record.” Annette embodied that instinct fully.

Some of Annette’s projects were commissioned, but others she took on simply because she believed the work needed to be seen and the designer’s process understood⁠—often without pay. One such project was the Ukrainian Easter egg sculpture in Vegreville, Alberta, created in collaboration with computer graphics pioneer Ron Resch, which she ultimately turned into a booklet and short film.

Annette drew on three methods she learned from Ray and Charles Eames: short films, richly designed historical timelines that provide context for events, and multiscreen slide presentations set to music. She used these approaches across a range of clients⁠—creating films for Herman Miller to introduce its Co-Struc line of hospital furniture, for the Federal Aviation Administration on the expansion of Los Angeles International Airport, and for USC’s Information Sciences Institute on ARPANET, an early precursor to the internet. She also transformed a history wall she created for a real estate firm⁠—mapping the early decades of Venice, California through images and timelines⁠—into a pictorial history book, Venice, CA 1900–1930, which she dedicated to Ray and Charles.

Around this time, her life intersected with other currents of Los Angeles culture. She collected vintage clothing and helped run a store called Ephemera, first in Venice and later in West Hollywood. She photographed rock bands for early music magazines, including the band Sweetwater, co-founded by her brother, contributing to the group’s visual identity, sourcing clothing, and producing photographs and album covers.

In 1970, she met Simmons while both were photographing in the Venice canals. He was then a student; she was already assembling what would become a long list of clients. He began working with her part-time, initially as an assistant. The work expanded⁠—photography, drawing, design, production⁠—along with his introduction to the architecture and design communities that formed much of her professional world. Their partnership continued for decades, and persists, in a way, in the archive he now maintains.

From the 1980s through 2001, the two worked under the name Del Zoppo/Simmons, producing photography, films, and presentations for architects, developers, institutions, and large public events, including the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles and the 1994 World Cup. By the early 1990s, architectural photography had become the core of the practice.

Annette learned more than techniques at the Eames Office⁠—she absorbed something deeper. She embodied two of the Eameses’s core tenets. Charles often advised people to “take your pleasures seriously,” and believed that the surest path to meaningful work was to do only the work you truly care about. That she was able to take on so many projects was because she worked on what mattered to her.

In her later years, Annette’s attention shifted toward tenant activism within her community. She attended City Council and Rent Control Board meetings, sometimes arriving with slide presentations documenting the mistreatment of tenants by landlords. She volunteered for a renters’ hotline, volunteered at legal-aid clinics, observed court proceedings, and drove disabled clients to hearings. She coordinated election volunteers, at times working through the night.

Before passing away in Los Angeles in 2001, Annette lived through a defining era of architecture and design, leaving behind an encyclopedic record of the projects and influences that captured her attention. Her tombstone reads, “She enriched us all, she enriches us still.” Annette’s Soleri archives are now with the Organic Architecture + Design Archives. The Del Zoppo/Simmons documentation of the 1984 Olympics resides with the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. Many of Annette’s photographs, files, films, and graphic designs are held in the collections of the Eames Institute, and selections from that archive accompany this article. ❤

Daniel Ostroff is the Chief Scholar of the Eames Institute and the editor of An Eames Anthology (Yale University Press). Ostroff was a consultant to the Eames Office from 2006 to 2025, and has been an advisor to Herman Miller, Vitra, and museums globally.