Posts by Miss Rosen

Phil Knott: Didn’t Know You Cared

Posted on May 8, 2019

In the early 2000s, British photographer Phil Knott photographed Amy Winehouse at the very outset of her career, before the world discovered the majestic talent swaddled in the addiction and pain that fuelled her art — and the tabloids’ bloodthirst. Dead at the age of 27, Winehouse had become a symbol of the fallen woman, denied redemption for bearing her wounds and scars openly, without shame.

Years after her death in 2011, Knott rediscovered the photographs he made of Winehouse and organised an exhibition of 27 prints for Didn’t Know You Cared to honour the life and legacy of a singular talent whose light was extinguished far too soon. Knott’s encounters with Winehouse predate her rise and fall, giving us a glimpse of a pure, innocent soul bound for a tragic destiny.

Knott, who has photographed everyone from Aaliyah to A$AP Rocky over the past 30 years, almost named the exhibition “Amy, I Love You” – a sentiment that is infused in every one of his photos. With the images now on display at New York City’s MixdUse Gallery until June 9, Knott shares his encounters with Winehouse and provides a portrait of the artist as a young woman on the cusp of fame.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Warhol’s Women

Posted on May 7, 2019

Andy Warhol. Judy Garland (Multicolor), 1978. Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm) © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander

Andy Warhol turned appropriation into fine art, perhaps the most profoundly American aspect of his practice. Where Dada subverted the known, Warhol exalted it, creating a pantheon of iconography that charmed, rather than challenged, the status quo – while simultaneously being edgy enough to avoid becoming camp, corn, or schmaltz.

Warhol is America looking back at itself, with a nod and a wink, taking art in the age of mass reproduction to the next level when he began making silkscreens in August 1962. Marilyn Monroe’s tragic death sparked it off. She was his first, perhaps his greatest, and far from his last, as he transformed The Factory into an art world machine.

Andy’s Marilyn is a Mona Lisa of sorts — her many incarnations and moods a psychic x-ray into the person none of us ever knew. Using a publicity photography by Gene Korman for the 1953 film Niagara, Warhol took the manufactured image and remade it into something beautiful and grotesque.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Andy Warhol. Judy Garland (Multicolor), 1978 Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm) © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Camp: Notes on Fashion

Posted on May 7, 2019

Ensemble, Jeremy Scott (American, born 1975) for House of Moschino (Italian, founded 1983), spring/summer 2018; Courtesy of Moschino. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo © Johnny Dufort, 2019

Last night, in New York City, the likes of Billy Porter, Ezra Miller, and Janelle Monae brought it to the pink carpet, as the camp-themed 2019 Met Gala got underway.

On Thursday, the exhibition itself – Camp: Notes on Fashion – opens to the public at The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters in NYC. Bringing together four centuries of OTT fashion and art, the show uses Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay Notes on Camp to frame the ways designers have embraced camp’s tongue-in-cheek spirit in their métier.

If you have plans to be in the city before the end of September, Notes on Fashion is a must-see. And if you don’t, here are five reasons that needs to change.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Camp: Notes on Fashion. Photo courtesy of The Met

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Fashion

Lebohang Kganye: Ke Lefa Laka – Her-story (2012-2013)

Posted on May 3, 2019

South African artist Lebohang Kganye was just 20 years old when her mother died in 2010. A couple of years later, Kganye was looking through family photo albums in their Johannesburg home and realised that many of the clothes her mother wore in the pictures were still in her wardrobe.

Kganye became intrigued. Most of the snapshots were made before she was born in 1990, at her grandmother’s house and on the lawn. Up until then, Kganye explains, the photos and albums were never really all that significant. “I’d go to my grandmother’s house and we’d look at the photos every now and then, and laugh about how they’d aged, the different periods they had gone through,” she says. “We had never gone over individual photos, the history, and the narrative of each.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, Africa, Art, Huck, Photography, Women

Ming Smith: A Tribute to Linda Goode Bryant’s JAM Gallery

Posted on May 3, 2019

Ming Smith. Grace Jones at Studio 54, 1978, archival pigment print, 30 x 40 inches

Ming Smith. Sun Ra Space II, New York City, NY, 1978, archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches

In 1974, at the age of 23, Linda Goode Bryant opened Just Above Midtown (JAM), a non-profit New York arts organization dedicated to showing the work of artists of color in the heart of 57th Street, then the capital of the art world. Rent was a astonishing $300 per month, the 70% discount a testament to Goode Bryant’s negotiating prowess.

Like Goode Bryant, JAM was a revolution unto itself, with the intention to burn the art world down to the ground. JAM pioneered the works of now-renowned Black artists including Dawoud Bey, Norman Lewis, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Lorna Simposon, and Ming Smith — all of whom are being show at Frieze New York (May 2-5) as part of a special tribute to Linda Goode Bryant’s JAM Gallery from the 1970s.

The 2019 Frieze Stand Prize was awarded to Jenkins Johnson Gallery for their presentation of the work of photographer Ming Smith, whose contributions to the medium have recently come into clear focus. Hailing from Columbus, Ohio and educated at Howard University, Smith moved to New York in 1973 to live as an artist. To support herself, Smith joined the ranks of Grace Jones, Bethann Hardison, B. Smith, Sherry Bronfman, and Toukie Smith as the first generation of Black women to break the color barrier in the fashion and beauty industries,

“People would tell me, ‘You should be a model,’ but I never really thought about it. But when I came to New York I needed to make money, and then it was like $100 an hour,” Smith recalls. “I wasn’t really interested in modeling, but the money was good. Being a Black woman, I never saw that as an obstacle. I just knew I had to go.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Ming Smith, James Baldwin, archival pigment print, 20 x 24 inches

Ming Smith, Curiosities, Brooklyn, NY, 1976, archival pigment print, 30 x 40 inches

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Richard Corman: Basquiat – A Portrait

Posted on May 3, 2019

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 57 Great Jones Street, New York, June 1984 © Richard Corman

In June 1984, Jean-Michel Basquiat was flying high in his downtown studio at 57 Great Jones Street. He had just come off his first solo exhibition at Marry Boone and featured in the MoMA’s inaugural re-opening show, an international survey of the most important painters and sculptors of the moment.

Enter the then 30-year-old photographer Richard Corman, who had completed a two-year apprenticeship with Richard Avedon. On assignment for L’Uomo Vogue, Corman would spend an hour with Basquiat creating a series of incisive portraits of the artist as a young icon, just published in a new, limited edition book titled BASQUIAT: A PORTRAIT,

This was Corman’s first encounter with Basquiat, who started leasing the studio from Andy Warhol in 1983. “I hope it works out,” Warhol says in his diaries on August 26. “Jean Michel is trying to get on a regular painting schedule. If he doesn’t and he can‘t pay his rent it’ll be so hard to evict him. It’s always hard to get people out.”

Spoken like a true Factory owner.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 57 Great Jones Street, New York, June 1984 © Richard Corman

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Gavin Watson: Oh What Fun We Had!

Posted on May 1, 2019

By the time Gavin Watson had left school at the age of 16, he had already amassed more than 10,000 photographs of his friends, taken at a council estate in High Wycombe, during the time the second generation of British skinheads were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Watson first encounted the Two-tone movement – which fuses ska, punk, and new wave – when he was 14, when he caught Madness on TV in 1979. 40 years on, Watson has come full circle with his new book Oh! What Fun We Had (Damiani), which launches at Donlon Books tonight and features never-before-seen photographs chronicling the rough-hewn kids who transformed skinhead culture into a global phenomenon.

“What’s crazy to me is I took so many pictures,” Watson says on the phone from his London studio. “I couldn’t afford to do it. No one ever paid me to do it. No one ever saw the pictures. I just took them for no real reason, except that I enjoyed taking them.”

Watson’s images have stood the test of time, and reflect the truth of skinheads – one which contradicts the mainstream media’s conflation of the subculture with the National Front. Here, the photographer talks us through his new book, transporting us back to a time when a group of marginalised youth became a threat to Thatcherite Britain because they refused to kowtow to the status quo.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography

Builder Levy: Humanity in the Streets

Posted on April 30, 2019

Malcolm X Speaking, Labor union/civil rights rally in support of the New York City school boycott, Upper East Side, Manhattan, 1964 © Builder Levy

Builder Levy enrolled in Brooklyn College in 1959 with the dream of becoming an Abstract Expressionist, but the work didn’t resonate the way he hoped it would. Photography, however, made perfect sense. “It allowed me to get more involved with life,” Levy says.

Growing up in Bath Beach, a predominantly Jewish and Italian neighbourhood, Levy lived in a housing development built by Donald Trump’s father, Fred. Living through the Jim Crow 1950s, fraught with the spectres of McCarthy and the Cold War, Levy was sensitive to the struggle of people of colour and the working class, becoming politically aware and engaged at a young age.

“I started taking the camera with me to street demonstrations,’ Levy remembers, recognising the importance of amplifying the fight against oppression and injustice.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

The Dazed100: Stephen Isaac-Wilson

Posted on April 30, 2019

Still from a music video for Klein ft Kahlia Bakosi: With U

London-based filmmaker and artist Stephen Isaac-Wilson creates exquisite, intimate works that centre marginalised communities on screen. “I have a desire to reimagine and devise alternative realities for black and queer people, and also to subvert what and who we consider ‘cool’ and ‘beautiful’,” he says. His work has been shown at the Barbican, Serpentine, and the Tate Britain, where his film Day Dream, an intimate portrayal of love, desire, and intimacy, was created in response to, and screened at, the Queer British Art 1861-1967 exhibition.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Stephen Isaac-Wison

Categories: Art, Dazed

The Dazed100: Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Posted on April 30, 2019

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

The self-proclaimed love child of Missy Elliott and Romare Bearden, Philadelphia native Jonathan Lyndon Chase creates powerful pictures of queer black life, rendering intimate moments with extraordinary tenderness and nuance. In his hands, the canvas becomes the space to craft a new visual language to explore the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, in vivid, visceral, and raw works that combine painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

“combing my hair” (2017). Acrylic, oil stick, rhinestone, glitter, canon printer collage, marker, graphite on cotton sheet 30h x 30w in Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery

Categories: Art, Dazed

SF Eyes: The Continuing Story of Life, Loss, Tragedy, and Triumph in the City of San Francisco as Captured by the All-Seeing Lens of Hamburger Eyes Photography Magazine

Posted on April 25, 2019

Back in 2001, brothers Ray and David Potes were putting out photo zines the old fashioned way. Ray would edit and art direct while Dave ran copies while working in a college copy department. The one titled Hamburger Eyes really stood out — and began attracting photographers who wanted to share their work.

Ray, who was living in Hawaii at the start, moved to San Francisco where David was, and the city became home base for a vital street photography culture that recalled the glory of Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz.

Hamburger Eyes that quickly became a cult sensation in the photo underground, as the classic black and white format made the strange and mundane scenes of daily life all the more profound. In its back to basic approach, Hamburger Eyes elevated the photo zine into a work of art.

Over the years, Hamburger Eyes has gone on to publish 37 issues, as well as over 200 titles by artists, as well as two books — their latest SF Eyes: The Continuing Story of Life, Loss, Tragedy, and Triumph in the City of San Francisco as Captured by the All-Seeing Lens of Hamburger Eyes Photography Magazine just released by Hat & Beard Press in conjunction with a documentary film produced by Aaron Rose.

SF Eyes is a picture perfect postcard of San Francisco, when it was punk AF by crew members Jason Roberts Dobrin, Kappy, Dylan Maddux, Alex Martinez, Mark Murrmann, Ted Pushinsky, Andrea Sonnenberg, Stefan Simikich, and Tobin Yelland, among others.

Hamburger Eyes spent its formative years in San Francisco, becoming an integral part of the scene. With the sweeping changes to the city, and to photography as a whole, most of the crew have decamped, but the love for the town never grows old.

To celebrate two decades of San Francisco street photography, we have brought together some of the artists at the core to share the continuing story of Hamburger Eyes.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Photography