A Life Built on Noticing
What photographer Amy Neunsinger’s obsession with light can teach us about living more creatively.
Amy Neunsinger was six years old when she came home from a playdate and described the dappled light on the parquet floors instead of what she had for a snack.
“It was so pretty, kind of Rain Man-esque,” she told me over Zoom last month. “I would just find the beauty and describe what I saw to my Mom and how it made me feel.”
Fast forward 50 or so years, and the Los Angeles-based photographer, architect-trained creative, and founder of La Rouge candles has built a career around this single obsession: the way light makes us feel. Not the clean, easy kind — the kind that has to fight its way in. The kind that, when it finally arrives, you understand and maybe write a song about. (Cue Mumford and Sons’ “Lover of the Light.”)
“Light must struggle,” she says. “When it struggles, it feels emotional.”
If that sounds…esoteric, she explains further: “Think of New York City and the course light has to take to come in and dapple on your floor. It has to go through the atmosphere, it has to go through power lines, trees, leaves, dirt, soot, windows, all of it.”
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It’s a type of ‘noticing’ philosophy that started in a darkroom with her mother as a child (“It was like magic to me!”). It has run through decades of iconic editorial and commercial photography for the likes of Reese Witherspoon, Vanity Fair, and Crate & Barrel, the television show “Capturing Home” on HBO, and now — unexpectedly, perfectly — a candle company born in her Laurel Canyon guesthouse, which itself was featured in Architectural Digest.
“I wanted that same effect from a candle through the glass and crystal, because it’s faceted,” says the 58-year-old who was once told to ‘dim her light’ — as if she were too much. “Like they couldn’t handle me! I was too quick to see things, and I was like, ‘Dim my light? That’s what I bring! That’s my superpower.”
Hear, hear! I know this sounds like an L.A. cliche, but Amy’s light really does surround every room she walks into, out of, and through. In fact, it is not hyperbole to say light just trails her…even at dusk and even when the sun has set.
I felt gleams of it at her Laurel Canyon home when April Uchitel and I pulled up for a dinner party on a Monday night in early June. Sure, the views, nature, and outdoor table setting — with La Rouge candles, naturally — not to mention the 35 dinner guests, music, and extraordinary food were like a surround-sound warm embrace, but everything Amy touches is effusive and bright, and I’m glad to simply hover in her halo.
How did La Rouge come about, and is it ‘LA Rouge’ as in Los Angeles or ‘La Rouge’ as if it’s French?
The latter: La Rouge, as in the red wick. It’s the only signature. The heartstring. For a while, I didn’t have candles in my home. They're so bad for you and give me headaches. It's a dirty secret, but it's an unregulated industry. I missed the ritual of lighting a candle, though, the ceremony of it when I had people come over. So our main objective was that they had to be non-toxic. My business partner, Lucinda, is a breast cancer survivor, and she also removed all scented candles from her life. We started formulating and approaching it more like cooking; all the oils were natural, so they're going to react a little similarly, and 95% of them did not work.
Then, the ones that started working, we just iterated on. Like, we have rosemary, lemon, and black pepper — that's very clean, sharp, and fresh. And then, because our lab is in my guest house in Laurel Canyon, we did a laurel leaf, sweet basil, and mandarin. You feel like you're walking through a garden.
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