Posts from the “1960s” Category

How Danny Lyon Became the Defining Photographer of America’s Outsiders

Posted on May 10, 2024

Few artists are willing to risk it all, except those who know no other way to exist. Photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon inherited the spirit of rebellion and resistance from his mother, who regaled him with heroic tales of her brothers’ fearless crusade against the Tsar in the Russian and Bolshevik Revolutions of the early 20th century. As a young boy growing up in Queens, New York, Lyon would lie in bed at night and dream of seeing the world – never knowing his destiny was inextricably bound to history, art, and film.

Now 82, Lyon charts his extraordinary journey in the new book, This is My Life I’m Talking About (Damiani), a picaresque memoir that reveals his natural gifts for storytelling. Like his photographs, Lyon’s prose is electric, poetic, and filled with explosive details, bringing readers into the middle of the action before roaring off to the next episode. The stories move with the same intense pace with which he worked, crisscrossing the country on his red Triumph motorcycle during the 1960s.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Danny Lyon. Susan Measles and Nancy Weiss.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

Guns, Drugs and Rock & Roll: The Tumultuous Life of Jim Marshall

Posted on October 29, 2021

*John Coltrane, in his backyard in Queens New York at sunset, 1963 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

American photographer Jim Marshall died peacefully in his sleep in 2010 at the age of 74 — probably the least likely end to a tumultuous life fueled by guns, drugs, and rock & roll. A natural born provocateur, Marshall understood the power of art to transform our lives. In his hands, the camera became a tool for activism, a recorder of history, and a means to salvation.

Whether photographing Johnny Cash during his historic San Quentin and Folsom prison concerts during the 1960s or traveling with Joan Baez on voter registration drives through the South during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Marshall was anchored in his work. Photography gave him purpose, put him in community, and was a way to show love — things that sometimes slipped away when he found himself alone.

In those moments, Marshall looked for ways to escape, his efforts to self-medicate often snowballing into catastrophic acts of self-harm. “A lot of creative people get really stuck in addiction because they are so sensitive,” says photographer Amelia Davis, Marshall’s longtime assistant and sole beneficiary of Marshall’s estate. “They connect with people on such a human level that they want to numb themselves out because it is overwhelming, especially when you are doing it 24/7 like Jim. Photography was his life so when there was downtime, he started feeling all these things and it was too much for him.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Jimi Hendrix filming Janis Joplin backstage, Winterland San Francisco, 1968 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

*Monk Family, NYC, 1963 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Music, Photography

Helmut Newton: Legacy

Posted on October 25, 2021

*Helmut Newton. Thierry Mugler Fashion, US Vogue, Monte Carlo, 1995*.

“One’s period is when one is very young,” wrote fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland in her 1984 memoir D.V., a pertinent observation about the ways in which our aesthetic sensibilities are imprinted during our earliest years. For Helmut Newton, whose childhood was spent in Weimar, Germany, the luminous drama of noir and glamour cast a powerful imprint upon his style, one that he brought to bear throughout his revolutionary fashion photography career.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1920, Helmut Neustädter fell in love with photography at a young age. At 12, he started photographing the Funkturm (Radio Tower), a sleek, chic symbol of the emerging modern age and a motif to which he would return. Surrounded by artists, intellectuals and innovators who made Berlin one of the most avant-garde cities of the time, young Helmut came of age in a culture ripe with pleasure, provocation, and decadence.

“It sounds quite promising as one thinks of the liberalism of the Weimar Republic and the Roaring Twenties, of alcoholic and erotic debauchery,” says Dr Matthias Harder, Director and Curator, in advance of the opening of Helmut Newton: Legacy at the Helmut Newton Foundation on 31 October. “Helmut’s mother, an elegant woman with a strong sense of fashion, influenced him early on. In 1936, aged 16, Helmut began a two-year apprenticeship with then-famous photographer Yva, who published her sophisticated and, for the time, sometimes erotically-charged fashion photographs and portraits in many magazines.”

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Helmut Newton. Prada, Monte Carlo, 1984.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, i-D, Photography

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite

Posted on October 21, 2021

*wame Brathwaite, Grandassa Models at the Merton Simpson Gallery, New York, ca. 1967.*

While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used nonviolence to push for Civil Rights and Malcolm X embraced the ethos of Black Nationalism to fight injustice in the United States, Brooklyn-born photographer Kwame Brathwaite turned to the teachings ofPan-Africanism and Marcus Garvey to introduce the “Black Is Beautiful” movement in the 1960s.

Rejecting the standards imposed by Western cultural hegemony, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath embraced African aesthetics, creating Grandassa Models in Harlem and Naturally 62, a fashion show that set the groundwork for a global revolution in fashion and beauty. With the introduction of “Black Is Beautiful,” the brothers helped to popularize natural hair, a full range of skin tones, and African styles across the diaspora.

“I have been called ‘The Keeper of Images,’” Brathwaite writes in Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, selections from which are currently on view in a major museum tour across the United States. “My task has been to document creative powers throughout the diaspora—not only in our Black artists musicians, athletes, dancers, models, and designers, but in all of us….I have often been asked how I was granted so much access as a photographer. It was the fact that people trusted me to get it right, to tell the truth in my work.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Kwame Brathwaite, Marcus Garvey Day Parade, Harlem, ca. 1967*

*Man smoking in a ballroom, Harlem, ca. 1962.*

Categories: 1960s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs

Posted on October 20, 2021

*Gianfranco Gorgoni, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970, 2013*.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the avant-garde turned its back on the “ruthless commercialization” of art in America, understanding that the commodification of the object was driven by business above all. Determined to make work that could defy the system while simultaneously offering a space for cultural critique, the land art movement was born. Artists including Christo and Jeanne Claude, Robert Smithson,Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, and Michael Heizer transformed the natural landscape into extraordinary spectacles that combined elements of installation, sculpture, and architecture.

In 1970, 29-year-old Italian photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni (1941–2019) ventured into the Utah desert alongside Robert Smithson, embarking on what would become his career as a “roadie, stuntman, and documentarian” as an art critic once quipped.

“For me, seeing these expanses of desert where Heizer, Smithson, and De Maria were realizing large works was an almost mystic experience,” said Gorgoni, whose documentation of the movement is chronicled in the new book and exhibition Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs. “Getting lost in those parched, sandy stretches, there were incredible places; more than the work itself, the place where the work was situated mattered.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Gianfranco Gorgoni, Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains, near Jean Dry Lake, Nevada, 2016*.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Bruce Davidson: In Color

Posted on September 14, 2021

*Central Park, 1991 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

As a teen coming of age, Bruce Davidson can remember his sense of color taking root in 1949. While working at a local camera store during his senior year of high school, Davidson was introduced to Al Cox Jr., a commercial photographer working in the town of Oak Park, Illinois. Cox invited Davidson to assist him with various tasks, including the painstaking process of making color prints in the darkroom. “It left an indelible impression on me at the age of seventeen,” Davidson wrote in Bruce Davidson: In Color, just re-released for the first time in five years.

After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Davidson enrolled in the Design Department at Yale University in the 1950s where he met artist and educator Josef Albers, one of the foremost color theorists of the twentieth century. “His demonstrations had an impact on me at the time but I was not yet committed to color as a way of life,” Davidson wrote.

After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, Davidson returned to New York in 1957 to resume his photography practice. Drawn to the Old World atmosphere of the Lower East Side, Davidson discovered among the pushcart vendors, tailors, and merchants a feeling of connection and community among people like his grandfather, a Polish émigré who arrived in the United States at the age of 14. Here he began making color photographs of the city as it was then — a world of immigrants who brought their culture to the streets of New York.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Chicago, 1989 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Manhattan, Photography

John Benton Harris: Walking London 1965-1988

Posted on September 6, 2021

Hailing from the South Bronx, John Benton-Harris dreamed of being a pilot or a Method actor – then he discovered photography at age 14 and found his calling.

Now 81, the photographer traces his foundation to Edward Steichen’s seminal photography exhibition, Family of Man, which he saw at Museum of Modern Art in 1955. “It motivated me to focus on the human condition and to try to explain men to men, and to myself, at the same time,” he says.

In 1962, Benton-Harris “sort of gate-crashed” art director Alexey Brodovitch’s evening classes at the New York Institute of Photography. “He was criticizing everyone’s work,” Benton-Harris remembers. “He picked up my work and said, ‘He understood what this project was about.’ Then he looked up to say, ‘Who the hell are you?’”

Read the Story at Huck

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Ernest C. Withers: I’ll Take You There

Posted on August 30, 2021

*Double Exposure of a Nighttime March © The Ernest C. Withers Family Trust; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles*

Working at a time when mainstream American publications rarely hired Black photographers,Dr. Ernest C. Withers, Sr. (1922 – 2007) made a way. His work, on view in the exhibition “I’ll Take You There” and new book The Revolution in Black and White: Photographs of the Civil Rights Era by Ernest C. Withers (CityFiles Press) provides a look at Black life in the American South during the height of Civil Rights Movement.

Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, Williams became one of the first nine Black police officers to join the force in 1948 after serving in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Although Withers was given a uniform, patrol car, and gun, he was forbidden to patrol white communities or arrest white folks. His power was proscribed strictly within the confines of Black Memphis, during the height of segregation.

Off duty, Withers photographed the same community, documenting the fabled Beale Street music scene, the birthplace of Memphis Blues icons like B. B. King. After getting caught selling liquor illegally, Withers left the force to work as a freelance photographer. He shot for the Tri-State Defender, the Memphis offshoot of Chicago’s famed Black newspaper and legendary photo magazines Ebony and Jet, while also working as Stax Records’ official photographer for 20 years.

Withers’ business cards bore the slogan “Pictures Tell The Story” — a philosophy he used over the course of six decades to create more than one million images. But it wasn’t until years after his death that the bombshell dropped — documents revealed Withers worked as a paid FBI informant.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Ernest Withers’s Beal Street Studio © The Ernest C. Withers Family Trust; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Hiro, Celebrated Fashion Photographer, Dies at 90

Posted on August 20, 2021

Yasuhiro Wakabayashi, the Japanese-born American photographer known as Hiro died August 15, 2021, at the age of 90 in his country home in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. Best known for his fashion and still life work, Hiro’s surreal vision of glamour established him among giants of the industry including his mentor Richard Avedon.

“Hiro is no ordinary man,” Avedon said. “He is one of the few artists in the history of photography. He is able to bring his fear, his isolation, his darkness, his splendid light to film.” Avedon’s words are a testament to Hiro’s extraordinary life, one turned upside down as a child born in Shanghai on November 3, 1930, just one year before Japan invaded Manchuria. One of five children of a Japanese linguist who may have been involved in espionage, Hiro lived a protected life during the better part of World War II, until the battles in the Pacific Theater came to an end.

After being interned for five months in Peking (now Beijing), the family was repatriated to occupied Japan in 1946. A stranger among his own people, Hiro became intrigued by elements of American pop culture in postwar Japan. While paging through glossy fashion magazines at hotels, Hiro discovered the work of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, and soon acquired a camera of his own. In the ruins of imperial Japan, Hiro realized a vision all his own — one that brought the luxurious and quotidian together to create a phantasmagoric spectacle of opulence.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Marisa Berenson, Hat by Halston, Harper’s Bazaar, February 1966, cover © HIRO*

Categories: 1960s, 1980s, Art, Blind, Books, Fashion, Photography

Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake

Posted on August 15, 2021

*Hannah Wilke with Ponder-r-rosa 4, 1975*

Long before the selfie came into vogue, American artist Hannah Wilke (1940–1993) understood the importance of harnessing the power of self-representation through photography. At the tender age of 14, the native New Yorker donned her mother’s mink stole, white pumps, and nothing else to pose for a self-portrait in front of a wall bearing her birth name, Arlene H. Butler — lest anyone not know exactly who she was.

“I become my art, my art becomes me…. My heart is hard to handle, my art is too,” Wilke wrote in a letter published in the 1975 book, Art: A Woman’s Sensibility(California Institute of the Arts). With the understanding that a woman laying claim to her own body was a transgressive act, Wilke rose to prominence doing just that. Working as a photographer, sculptor, video artist, and performance artist who turned the female gaze on herself, Wilke’s art acted as a Rorschach Test — admiration and criticism revealing more about the viewer than the art itself.

Emblematic of the revolutionary times in which she lived, Wilke emerged from the 1960s with a practice that reshaped the conversation about the relationship between feminism, art, and the role of women in society just as the Women’s Liberation Movement took off. She used her work to establish an iconography that centers the female body and pleasure at a time when such topics were taboo and largely excluded from the male-dominated provenance of art history.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Hannah Wilke: Intercourse with… audio installation cover, 1975*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography

David Hurn: Isle of Wight Festival 1969

Posted on August 11, 2021

Now age 87, Magnum Photos member David Hurn remembers the fateful day in February 1954 that first brought photography into his life. While on break, the young army cadet training at Sandhurst Military Academy was paging a copy of Picture Post magazine and stumbled upon a photograph of a Russian army officer buying his wife a hat in a Moscow department store.

“I started to cry – not something one normally did in the officers mess,” says Hurn, who describes how the picture triggered a memory of his father who he hardly saw during World War II. “One of the first acts he did at the war’s end was to take my mother, me in tow, to Howells, a department store in Cardiff, to buy her a hat: my first recollection of their love for each other.”

Suddenly understanding the power of the photography, Hurn decided in that moment to become a photographer despite knowing nothing about the medium. “Thinking back, I have no recollection of ever having taken any pictures,” he says. “To give up a firm profession for a total abstract one was reckless.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Huck, Music, Photography