Riviera Summers
Lensmen Nik and Kerry Wheeler recently launched The Wheeler Collective, offering framed prints (from $250, through wheelercollective.com) of select works from their remarkable archive of fine lifestyle and travel photographs, including A La Playa (seen here), taken by Nik Wheeler in 1992.
A father and son capture the Luxe Life
Written by Lorie Dewhirst Porter | Photographs by Nik Wheeler and Kerry Wheeler
Santa Barbara’s resemblance to the European Riviera can’t be denied, because the visuals are so strikingly similar: ocean, beach, dramatic coastline, and beautiful people—which is why travel guides have dubbed the region the "American Riviera.” And like its European counterpart, our Riviera (and the lifestyle it embodies) is as much a state of mind as a geographic location, a duality of perception and reality.
La Piscina, 2022, Sayulita, Mexico, photographed by Kerry Wheeler.
From the 1950s onward, the public’s perception of the Riviera lifestyle was largely the creation of one man: American photographer Slim Aarons. His Technicolor images of the international café set living la dolce vita were splashed across glossy magazines like Town & Country and Life. His ability to access high society was key to his success; “I knew everyone” he told an interviewer several years before his death in 2006.Today, father-and-son photographers Nik and Kerry Wheeler offer a contemporary take on the Riviera lifestyle with The Wheeler Collective, an online platform for purchasing the duo’s custom-framed photographic images for the home. And there’s plenty to choose from: Their archive contains more than one million images from the 1960s onward, with subjects ranging from scenes of European leisure to celebrity pictures and photos of lost worlds. (A percentage of every sale goes to the World Land Trust.)
Like Aarons—who covered World War II as an army photographer—British-born Nik Wheeler began his career as a combat photographer. Initially based in Vietnam, he later covered conflicts in the Middle East for Newsweek and Time Magazine and eventually pivoted to travel photography. In 1999 he moved to Santa Barbara; since then, he has visited more than a hundred countries on assignment for National Geographic, Travel and Leisure, Islands, and others. He also produced several coffee-table travel books over the course of his career.
Nik’s son Kerry grew up in Santa Barbara. After attending USC, where he majored in global communication with a film minor, he spent several years in the entertainment industry. During a much-needed break, he traveled to Europe, taking photographs and posting them on Instagram, where the comments likened Kerry’s images to iconic images by—no surprise—Slim Aarons.
Given his upbringing, Kerry basically trained in photography from the time he could walk. The Wheeler family spent summers in Europe, based in a small village in the Languedoc region of France, where Nik had purchased a home in the 1970s. The family would take long road trips in an old BMW (affectionately known as the “red bomb”) for Nik’s travel-magazine assignments, and Kerry remembers his irritation with his father’s camera bag that “always had to be in the middle of the console by the stick shift, and it was so annoying because we were constantly stopping so he could get a shot.” (In true father-like-son form, Kerry continued the tradition with his own camera bag on his last European jaunt.)
But Kerry fondly recalls the exciting social environment the family enjoyed during those summer sojourns. Thanks to his father’s career renown, and the fame surrounding his glamorous mother, Pamela Bellwood (whose acting credits include a regular role in the wildly popular 1980s television series Dynasty), Kerry notes, “We were constantly engaging with very interesting people,” a group that included aristocrats, artists, writers, and journalists. In short, a world similar to what Slim Aarons documented decades earlier.
Santa Barbara’s resemblance to the European Riviera can’t be denied, because the visuals are so strikingly similar: ocean, beach, dramatic coastline, and beautiful people—which is why travel guides have dubbed the region the "American Riviera.”
Hammonds From Above, 2022, Santa Barbara, by Kerry Wheeler.
The Wheeler Collective emerged from a confluence of two disasters. The Wheelers’ Montecito home was inundated with mud from the 2018 debris flow, and Nik’s studio, containing 50 filing cabinets of slides—nearly the entirety of his oeuvre—was the first room to be hit. Kerry visited the site shortly after the disaster and vividly remembers having to inform his father that the file cabinets were likely destroyed. “It was pretty devastating,” Kerry recalls. “At the time we thought everything had been lost.” Fortunately, further inspection revealed the mud had been too thick to penetrate the filing cabinets, leaving the slides intact.
Two years later, when COVID took over the world, Kerry moved back home to Santa Barbara. Locked down and with time on their hands, Nik and Kerry began sorting through the trove of rescued slides, with Nik assuming he’d “digitize the good ones and throw the rest out.” But Kerry was intrigued by a batch of Nik’s lifestyle images. “I showed him a couple of his photos from Cannes,” Kerry says, and his father replied, “Why would anybody want a picture of an umbrella or somebody lounging on a lounge chair?”
Sunbathers at the Plage du Martinez Beach Club along the Croisette in Cannes, 1995, by Nik Wheeler.
They would soon find out. Kerry was contacted by an art collective seeking an iconic beach scene for a client, who selected one of Nik’s images (blown up to 9 by 13 feet) for the lobby of Florida’s Four Seasons Hotel and Residences Fort Lauderdale. And voilà, The Wheeler Collective was born.
