Posts by Miss Rosen

Harry Gruyaert: East/West

Posted on January 24, 2018

Las Vegas downtown motel, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, 1982. © Harry Gruyaert Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.

“Higher emotions cannot be communicated in color,” American photographer Paul Strand claimed – revealing the power of irrational beliefs to take root in the mind and spread like a virus through those who fear to question ideology in search of the truth.

The decision to invite Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert (b. 1941) to join Magnum Photos in 1982 caused dissent among the ranks. At that time Gruyaert had been working in color for two decades, but the powers that be “didn’t see color,” so to speak. Photography was still a fledgling medium in the art world, and those who were desperate to join the ranks revealed a powerful insecurity that fed simple-minded biases and false hierarchies designed to exclude innovative thinkers who worked outside the narrow frame of the status quo.

Gruyaert, however, was undeterred. His commitment remained consistent throughout his remarkable career. In 1981, Geo photo editor Alice Rose George commissioned Gruyaert to photograph Las Vegas. Rather than provide his take on the tired tropes of the Strip, Gruyaert ventured off the beaten path ton the Vegas where residents lived. The result was entirely too realistic; Vegas was not the place of fantasies and spectacle – it was a world where people eked out their existence on the margins.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Moscow, Russia, 1989. © Harry Gruyaert Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style

Posted on January 22, 2018

Tony Vaccaro, Georgia O’Keefe with “Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow” and the desert, 1960. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Courtesy of Tony Vaccaro studio.

Georgia O’Keeffe is an American original, who created the life she wanted to live on her own terms, liberated from the constraints and constructs imposed on women during the first half of the 20th century. For over seven decades, O’Keeffe cultivated her public persona, challenging all aspects of the status quo, in order to live her truth in the eyes of the world.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style is the first exhibition to examine the relationship between the artist’s lifestyle and her work. Curated by Wanda M. Corn and assisted by coordinating curator Austen Barron Bailly, the exhibition features a selection of never-before-seen garments designed and created by O’Keeffe that became part of her signature look, along with iconic artworks and photographs by her husband Alfred Stieglitz, Cecil Beaton, Bruce Weber, Todd Webb, Arnold Newman, John Loengard, and Tony Vaccaro, among others.

“Georgia O’Keeffe was never afraid of standing out,” Barron Bailly observes. “She had a certain fearlessness and a conviction of who she was and what she needed to do to make the art she was called to make. This show demonstrates her identity as an independent, as someone who did not worry about fitting into a mainstream conception of what a woman should look like and how a woman should dress, of what and how a woman should paint.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Georgia O’Keeffe, Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills (Ram’s Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico), 1935. Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal, 1992.11.28. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Women

Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful

Posted on January 22, 2018

Untitled (Naturally ’68 photo shoot in the Apollo Theater featuring Grandassa models and founding AJASS members Kwame Brathwaite, Frank Adu, Elombe Brath, and Ernest Baxter 1968, printed 2016. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs) 1968, printed 2017. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

On the evening of January 28, 1962, a massive crowd gathered outside Harlem’s Purple Manor, eager to gain entrance to Naturally 62 – the landmark event that introduced the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement to the world.

The brainchild of photographer Kwame Brathwaite (born in 1938) and his older brother Elombe Brath (now deceased), Naturally 62 presented Blackness in its natural state through a powerful combination of fashion, music, and politics. The brothers, who were born in Brooklyn to a politically active family, had embraced Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement and co-founded the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS), a collective of artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and fashion designers. “Our mission was to reach the folks so that they could see their own work,” Brathwaite reveals. “It was a time when people were trying to organize and improve the community, to get themselves in order so that they would not be the low man on the totem pole.”

The brothers worked on two fronts, supporting the African independence movement while embracing Black business at home, producing jazz concerts at legendary locales including Club 845 in the Bronx and Small’s Paradise in Harlem. But it was a local beauty contest that gave the brothers the inspiration for Naturally 62. A year earlier, while attending the annual Marcus Garvey Day Celebration, they watched ‘The Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest’, wherein models came to the stage without make-up, their hair free from heat press.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Untitled (Self Portrait) 1964, printed 2017. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

Categories: 1960s, Africa, AnOther, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Calvin Reid: View from the Hilltop

Posted on January 21, 2018

Calvin Reid

When I began my career as a book publicist, Calvin Reid was the first journalist I met in person. His warmth and wit, his disarming charm, and his knowledge of the book publishing industry cannot be underestimated. As Senior News Editor of Publishers Weekly, the premier trade publication, Mr. Reid has been at the forefront of the major changes in book publishing for the past thirty years.

More than a reporter, Mr. Reid is a businessman. He understands the nature of the medium to the point that he has been a central figure in the rise and success of graphic novels as a genre of publishing. Here, he shares his experiences as an artist and journalist over the past five decades.

Calvin Reid: “I was a curious kind of kid, always reading books, newspapers, and comics (comics obsess me to this day) and sports. I still love comics and sports to this day. I was always a reader. As a kid I realized that if you read a lot you had an edge on people particularly adults, especially if you read the newspaper and remarked on a story. I remember thinking that they liked that. I read endlessly.

I always loved books as a kid. As a job, it was a pure accident. They used to call book publishing, ‘The Accidental Profession.’ A lot of people entered the profession from very disparate fields. Often they started in business, and couldn’t bear it any longer. They made career turns and lucked into publishing. I came about it the same way.

My background is as an artist. I have a BFA in Art Education with a minor in Photography from Howard University, and an MFA in Printmaking from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. I also wrote for The Hilltop, the Howard University student newspaper, and was the newspaper’s photo editor. We had a big budget, I think about $80-90K per year, and all the editors were paid a stipend. I wrote about jazz and art in The Hilltop and supported myself as a freelance photographer covering a regular schedule of writers’ conferences held at Howard.

While I was there, I photographed people like James Baldwin, C.L.R. James, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and musicians from Archie Shepp to Sonny Rollins. I also attended FESTAC 77 in Lagos, Nigeria. It was an Olympics of African Diasporan culture. It was held for one month, every four years and attracted artists, intellectuals and academics of African descent from around the globe. I covered the whole event as a photographer along with another reporter from The Hilltop. Probably one of the most incredible experiences of my college years.

“One of my great friends from Howard of that time is the journalist/critic and musician Greg Tate. He was an all around Afro-Futuristic icon even then. When I came up in Washington, D.C. during the 70s everyone was publishing their own little magazines at the time. We were all helping each other do our own magazines. It was an interesting time to be at Howard as it was a time of transition from the black power movement to more assimilationist black cultural politics that followed. The art department in particular was very focused on black nationalist sensibility and activism and very concerned with the role of the black artist. That really prepared me for the rise of multiple viewpoints, parallel art worlds, market factions, and commercial critiques.

Calvin Reid

I came to New York to be an artist. I arrived June 7, 1981. I continued to produce etchings and lithographs as well as drawings after I moved to New York and I have exhibited widely in New York and in shows around the country. Moving to New York and meeting and marrying my wife were the two best decisions of my life.

New York is the central marketplace for art and after grade school (and a short stay in Pittsburgh) I had moved to the East Village/Lower East Side of New York just as the East Village art scene started to buzz in the 1980s. I was making prints at the historic Printmaking Workshop, under the late Bob Blackburn. A little later my roommates (shout out to Patty Harris and Janet Gillespie!) and I started a zine called 108 East Village Review, named after the building number of the loft we were living in. We reviewed the shows and artists on the gallery scene that blew up after FUN Gallery opened in the East Village. We reviewed shows, went to parties, rode that wave.

The East Village was having a moment, and I said, ‘Hey we should write about this!’ The artists were doing it themselves. We weren’t waiting to be picked out of a crowd. It was a very cool time to be in New York. You could show your work in a gallery, or an abandoned building. You could meet editors, collectors, curators, and publishers directly. Writing about art got me into shows. The early East Village Galleries, artist-run galleries, that were showing their friends before it all evolved into a more professional gallery scene. I eventually went on to write about contemporary art for the old Arts magazine, Art in America and other art magazines.

My plan was to find a way to work and to do the artist thing. I got a job as a temp; I was a ‘Kelly Girl’ (Laughs). I worked for Kelly Services in different places including Matthew Bender, which is a legal publisher. Later I switched jobs and became a typist at Library Journal, which eventually led to me becoming a journalist. At Library Journal I typed up the book reviews that librarians wrote on little sheets of paper, each about 300 words long. They were mailed in from all over the country and even from Europe where we had our far-flung correspondents. I typed them into the Atex system; this was back in the early days of digital layout and electronic production.

This was a great job to have as an artist. I showed up, typed, and was out by 5:01 p.m. I was surrounded by books. Books were always magic to me. They take you away from where you are, they make you think, and they enable you to connect with other people even though no one is around. Books provide entertainment and education.

While I was at Library Journal, I moved over to Publishers Weekly to be the Assistant to the News Editor in 1986. In a weird way it is almost the same job as I have now—except everything has changed. PW is a multi-faceted publication that is updated hour-by-hour. I am not only a Senior News Editor at PW, I am also the co-editor of PW Comics World, with my colleague and co-editor Heidi MacDonald. My obsession with comics has evolved into a department in the magazine. I first began reviewing graphic novels at PW in the late 1980s before eventually launching regular news coverage of comics publishing and later, with Heidi, PW Comics World, a now-twice a month newsletter on comics and graphic novel publishing.

Comics in this country have traditionally been part of the magazine industry. But thanks partly to the role of PW and our coverage (as well as the changing attitudes of librarians and teachers), comics and graphic novels are now established as a category in the book industry. Book-format comics were originally an afterthought in the comics industry. That was transformed when graphic novels became a significant and growing niche in publishing proper. The big New York houses now all have imprints or editors that acquire comics titles for their lists. PW has become a pulpit to bring comics to the book market. It has proven itself indispensable.

Publishing has been transformed by the digital world. The challenge now is covering an industry that doesn’t look anything like it once did. I feel like I live in the future. I don’t even remember how I was able to do my job in the old days. “

Categories: Art, Books

Alex Prager at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong

Posted on January 18, 2018

Shopping Plaza 1, 2015. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Applause, 2016. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Everyday life is filled with fleeting moments of grandeur, when the mundane suddenly becomes majestic and you feel the overwhelming glory of being alive. American photographer and filmmaker Alex Prager understands this perfectly. “I can see drama in everything, the comedy and the tragedy, even where there is none,” Prager reveals. “My interest is with the emotional and psychological components in a frame. The technical, the narrative, and the process – all of that is secondary to the mood. This is what makes art timeless for me.”

The Los-Angeles based artist got her start after seeing a William Eggleston exhibition at the turn of the millennium. “When I first discovered photography I looked at the great street photographers and tried to make pictures like them,” Prager explains. “I’m still obsessed with street photography and it finds its way into everything I make.”

But Prager strayed from the documentary path, preferring to create staged photographs that embrace the cinematic elements of the medium. Imbuing each image with a theatricality that is at once visceral and spiritual, Prager finds the balance between fiction and fact by grounding her practice in truth.

This winter, Prager will be showing a selection of her signature photographs and films, along with her first exhibited sculpture at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong. Here, we speak about the influence of life in Los Angeles, the freedom of the staged photograph, the porous boundary between reality and imagination, and magic of playing with perception.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Hawkins Street, 2017. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Categories: AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Debi Cornwall: Welcome to Camp America

Posted on January 17, 2018

Photo; Poolside. © Debi Cornwall

After 12 years working as a civil rights lawyer working with innocent DNA exonerees, Debi Cornwall made a major career change. Still invested in the lives of those wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, Cornwall put down the legal pad and picked up the camera in order to address the issue from a different perspective.

While having dinner with a friend who represented Guantánamo detainees, Cornwall realised striking similarities between the prison and military industrial complexes. “The question of resilience after trauma and systemic abuses of power is something I have been fascinated by my entire life,” Cornwall explains.

“When I first started trying to contact them, I got zero response. Because who was I? No one wanted to take the risk on me at that point. On a whim, I decided I should try to figure out if I could get permission to photograph at Guantánamo to make a different kind of picture that will invite us to look again.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Photo; Marble Head Lanes. © Debi Cornwall

Photo: Mourad, French Algerian (France). Muslim Youth Counselor. Held: 2 years, 8 months, 1 day. Transferred: July 26, 2005. Charges: never filed in the U.S. French conviction reversed on appeal. © Debi Cornwall

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

Posted on January 16, 2018

Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, 1973. Collection of Ronay and Richard Menschel. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Peter Hujar (1934–1987) is your favourite photographer’s photographer – a man who lived independently, crafting a life in downtown Manhattan that flourished between the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Inside his East Village loft, Hujar mastered his craft, pursuing the art without the burdens of commerce. Liberated from the strictures of the market, Hujar created a body of work that is as broad in subject matter as it is refined in technique and as original in perspective.

A new exhibition, Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, looks at the work the legend left behind, three decades after his death. The show presents 140 photographs drawn from the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, the most comprehensive public collection of the artist’s work. Curated by Joel Smith, the exhibition adopts the traditional retrospective format while staying true to Hujar’s vision.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Ethyl Eichelberger as Minnie the Maid, 1981. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Christopher Street Pier, 1976. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Vince Aletti: Curator, Collector, Writer Extraordinaire

Posted on January 15, 2018

Vince Aletti has a way with words, an ability to cast an image in your mind’s eye as he describes a moment caught forevermore, with the photographic precision of the medium about which he writes. Equal parts critic, reporter, and curator, Aletti’s prose is poetic, perceptive, and always a pleasure to read, beautifully complementing the experience of the photograph itself.

The photograph has had a special place in Aletti’s life dating back to his childhood. He recalls, “My father was a camera club photographer, so I grew up with a darkroom in the house. I remember being with my father in the darkroom, watching photographs appear. It was like magic. It had a profound effect on me.

“My dad died when I was young and he left his archive of US Camera Annuals. On rainy days, I’d spend hours looking through those photo anthologies, going back again and again to images that fascinated me, like Irving Penn‘s “Summer Sleep,” and Avedon‘s portrait of Anna Magnani, and George Rodger‘s picture of naked Nuba wrestlers. Those books introduced me to photographs and photographers that still move me today. They gave me a deep background.”

Winner of the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for writing in 2005, Aletti is currently a photography critic for The New Yorker and Photograph. He was also the art editor of the Village Voice from 1994-2005. But for the first twenty years of his career, Aletti was a music critic. He was the first person to write about the emerging disco scene for Rolling Stone in 1973. Aletti’s book, The Disco Files 1973-78: New York’s Underground Week by Week (Djhistory.com) chronicles his famed column in Record World magazine; the book, first published in 2009, is now out of print and sells for over $100 on Amazon and is considered essential reading on this chapter in music history.

Yet his love of photography never left him. When offered the opportunity to begin reviewing photography shows for the Village Voice, he took it. Aletti remembers, “It was a break from the usual descriptions of club music. It gave me a good chance to expand. At the time, I was close friends with Peter Hujar. Spending a lot of time with him, seeing him at work, affected my thinking and writing about photography. I saw it not as an exalted undertaking, but as a way to for someone to make a living and express themselves at the same time in a very real way. For Peter, it was like putting life and feelings down in a picture, which is not what most people care to do these days. I’ve always been most excited by people whose work was soulful and based in their lives and feelings.

“After a few years of doing brief exhibition reviews, one of the first things I started to write at the Voice was profiles of photographers, one-page critical essays on people I was curious about, like Dawoud Bey. I wrote about new and emerging photographers–Andrea Modica, Sally Mann, Marco Breuer, Barbara Ess, Fazal Sheikh–and why they did what they did. Personally, I’m very drawn to portraiture, and work that resonates in our lives, from Nan Goldin to Ryan McGinley. But I am also a huge fan of people who work with process and abstraction, like Adam Fuss and Mariah Robertson. I couldn’t be writing about nearly every show in town if I had narrow interests.

“When it comes to portraiture, a photograph records what is in front of the camera in a way that can be very revealing. Although they are only dealing with the surface, if a photographer is really looking and has a desire to connect with the other person, they can get at something beneath that surface. Nothing is quite so direct, confrontational, and revealing as the photograph.”

Aletti has also contributed essays to photography books including Avedon Fashion 1944-2000 (Abrams), Peter Hujar: Love & Lust (Fraenkel Gallery), Hedi Slimane: Rock Diary (JRP/Ringier), and A Respect for Light: The Latin American Photographs 1974-2008 by Mario Algaze (Glitterati Incorporated).

Most significantly, Aletti contributed to Andrew Roth’s The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (PPP Editions/Roth Horowitz), a tremendous undertaking. Aletti recalls, “I wrote half the descriptive texts. It was an education for me. Many of the books I had never seen before, or even knew about. Roth had a rigorous approach and he set strict criterion. The book had to be conceived as a unit, it had to be unique. I was conscious of the sequencing, scale of the photograph on the page, the typography, the quality of the reproductions, the binding of the book. It made me aware of how important all these thing were to the experience of the book. That got me deep into photography books and what makes them work.

As a form, the photography book is over one hundred years old. It has a quality of permanence that sets it apart from all else. As Aletti observes, “The book is lasting. It preserves an exhibition for a much longer period of time. I love exhibitions because you can see the photograph in actual size and get a real sense of its presence–an experience of the physicality of the object. You won’t get that in a book. But a book lasts longer and can cover a whole large project better. Plus, I like the permanence of a book.

“So many photographers can do their best work in books. It’s many photographer’s first choice as a way of putting their work into the world. An exhibition can be more of a compromise. But if an artist has control over a book, it’s more expressive. The explosion in self-publishing has affected publishing in general. Young photographers can make books and have total control. That’s so important and energizing. I go to Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair every year. It’s encouraging that there are so many young and self-published photographers looking at the quality of books in a different way. There’s more attention to books generated by the photographers themselves. Alec Soth is one of those photographers who is really book oriented. He gets into and works through interesting projects, and the end result is a book. It can also be a show, but it won’t include all the quirky elements that he can fit into a book.”

Indeed, it is the distinctiveness of the form that makes the book unlike any other object, except, perhaps, the magazine. As a collector, Aletti observes, “I’m always picking up things at flea markets. I don’t think I’ve ever been so immersed in photography as I have been over the last few years. Being a curator, a collector, a writer connects so many parts of my life. I’m living with it in a very real way with pictures on my wall. Most of my collections are of vernacular material, things that I’ve been able to afford from small photo sales. But much more of my collection is magazines and books. I have a huge collection of fashion magazines, full of pictures by Avedon, Penn, Beaton, Blumenfeld, Helmut Newton. That collection is more important than the photographs that I own. It allows me to access a much larger world in my own apartment.”

All photos courtesy of Jason Schmidt, first published in Document Journal.

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Dianne Brill

Posted on January 12, 2018

Photo: Space Bride on The Mugler runway, 1990. Photography Marc Baptiste.

Photographed by everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe, Steven Klein, and Mario Testino to Annie Leibovitz, Michel Comte, and Bill King, to name just a few, Dianne Brill was at the very heart and soul of the New York scene in the 1980s and 90s as a creative coterie of artists, musicians, and writers forever changed the world of pop culture. As Andy Warhol wisely observed, “If you were at a party and Dianne Brill was there, you knew you were at the right party!”

Brill’s star rose in the club world but it didn’t end there. Whether serving as a muse for Warhol and Keith Haring, working with fashion designers Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Vivienne Westwood, designing clothes for rock stars and actors, or penning a bestselling self-help book, Brill was at the top of the game.

Now the art world pays tribute to the Queen of the Night in the new exhibition, To the Future Through the Past, which will be on view at PHOTO 18 in Zurich, through January 12-16, 2018. Featuring hundreds of images of Brill at her best, the exhibition celebrates her roles as It Girl, model, designer, and the bon vivant of your dreams.

Here Brill shares the secrets of her success, revealing how you can spin your social life into stellar opportunities.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Pony girl, The Roxy, NYC, 1988. Photo from the estate of Dianne Brill.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat at an Outlaw party in NYC 1986 – was set up in an abandoned subway station, which was totally illegal and so fun. The party lasted 20 minutes before it was closed down. Photo from the estate of Dianne Brill.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Dazed, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Allan Tannenbaum: New York in the 1970s

Posted on January 11, 2018

Photo: Girls will be girls – and boys will be boys – at a pre-opening Construction Party at John Addison’s Bond’s mega-disco in Times Square. Penthouse Pet Anneka and friend, 1980. © Allan Tannenbaum from ‘New York in the 1970s’

The 1970s were the height of personal liberation. Prior to the advent of Aids, sex was a space for experimentation by a new generation coming of age, reaping the freedoms of the sexual revolution and the women’s and gay liberation movements. Powered by a profound desire for pleasure, self-expression, and the need to connect, sexuality became an open space for men and women free from the heavy-handed social control of the 1950s – and the results were amazing.

Nightclubs became the go-to place to live out fantasies, find a partner to hook up with, and for a brief, shining moment there was no ‘walk of shame’ in the morning. Everyone was encouraged to let it all hang out. Performers and patrons alike led decadent lives of pure, unadulterated fun. There were sex clubs as well as sex-themed parties, and sometimes people just felt the vibe. Sometimes it seems like everyone was naked just because – something virtually unimaginable now.

As a former chief photographer of the SoHo Weekly News, Allan Tannenbaum covered New York in the 1970s like no one else. Whether visiting sex clubs like Plato’s Retreat and the Hellfire Club on assignment or covering sex-themed parties and art happenings, Tannenbaum captured the most hedonistic period in the city’s history in glorious black and white photographs.

The author of four books, including New York in the 1970s (Overlook Press) and Grit and Glamour (Insight Editions), Tannenbaum gives us a taste of the libertines living the life, as comfortable with their bodies as they were with their lust. Here, at the intersection of gender and sexuality, it was a time when anything goes. Tannenbaum looks back at an era unlike any other, reflecting on the power of youth culture to change the way we relate to each other – and to ourselves.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Two models wear designs based on bicycle parts by Karl Lagerfeld at the “Fashion as Fantasy” exhibition at the Rizzoli Bookstore, 1975© Allan Tannenbaum from ‘New York in the 1970s’

Categories: 1970s, Art, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Myriam Abdelaziz: After the Revolution Comes

Posted on January 10, 2018

A French photographer of Egyptian origins, Myriam Abdelaziz was born in Cairo, a city that would later be home to the Revolution of 25 of January in 2011. The Revolution was a diverse movement of demonstrations, marches, plaza occupations, riots, non-violent civil resistance, acts of civil disobedience, and labor strikes, with millions of protesters from all walks of life demanding the overthrow of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

As of 2014, when this interview was done, control of Egypt has gone back and forth between different groups; most recently on 3 July 2012, a coup d’Etat lead by Minister of Defense General Abdel Fattah El-Sissi reinstated power to a government of military rule. Under the military, many things have changed, not the least of which is life a palpable paranoia of photographers and journalists.

For Abdelaziz, life was no longer the same. She speaks about what it wass like to be a woman—and a photographer—on the streets of Cairo following the revolution.

Myriam Abdelaziz: “The experience of the street in Egypt is a different experience for women than anywhere else. Sometimes I feel like the street is a jungle with wild animals, some of which are nice—and some are not. As a woman, you can be a target for sexual harassment and male aggression, especially if you do not blend in.

I really like to walk on the street for pleasure, but I cannot do it here. It is out of the question. I even think twice about something as simple as running an errand.

It is a painful experience as a woman to be on the street. I make physical and mental preparations. I have to think of how to dress. I ask myself what to wear so that I become transparent, invisible. I never have the right answer. It takes a lot of energy. I won’t wear the veil. That is my right. But veil or no veil, a woman on the street will be harassed.

Egyptians people feel they have the right to address you, based on how you dress and how you walk. They feel they have the right to interfere, with words, with touch, or with looks. It has always been like that, but it has become more so ever since the Revolution. Without police, people have less shame to sexually harass a woman. This behavior gets taught from generation to generation, as I see young boys learn it from teenagers and adult men.

Men have a totally different experience of the street. No one looks at them. No one talks to them. No one cares. But for a woman, having to go out is a task. It is not joyful. I cannot simply “go for a walk” as I do in New York. When you are on the street, you want to get into a car as fast as you can. Cairo is not a city to walk in. Its sidewalks are in bad shape and are becoming the territory of various vendors taking the supposedly pedestrian space. It is so hectic that you take a car, and then there is tons of traffic…

When I am on the street, I look serious. I do not smile. I avoid eye contact. I try to make myself transparent. I walk fast like if I am on a mission, avoid interacting unless I have to. My body language is closed so people don’t notice me. I just try to blend in as much as I can.

As a woman documenting the street, you are subject to another kind of harassment. People will question you, ask you who you are, why you are taking photographs, what you are going to do with them. It’s a constant stream of questions, and soon you are surrounded by ten people questioning you, almost always men. They won’t give up until they get the answer they are looking for.

People were very happy about the coverage of the Revolution in the beginning of 2011. But events have changed, and now journalists are getting arrested. After the Al Jazeera scandal, the state TV started saying that the foreign media lies.

My experience in Egypt as a woman photographer shooting the streets, shooting anything and everything, has had an effect on me personally: it has turned me off the streets. Emotionally and practically, it’s just too complicated and too hectic. I can no longer photograph what I want. I can’t produce what I want to produce.

After the Revolution, I started photographing graffiti instead of people. Graffiti was new, and also photographing it, I had less interaction with other people and less questions were raised. But recently I was in Alexandria working on a project, and I wanted to take a photograph of a poster including Marilyn Monroe on the street. Immediately, I was spotted by two police officers who demanded I prove to them that I am not a journalist. How can I prove that? They were really scaring me. I thought they were going to arrest me but they let me go.

In terms of creativity, working in a stressful environment is not the kind of spirit for me. It has slowly turned me off the street. I have a lot of respect for the women who still do it. Photographing what is happening on the streets should be a pleasure, but it isn’t for me anymore.”

Categories: Africa, Art, Photography