Posts from the “1960s” Category

“Made You Look” at The Photographers’ Gallery

Posted on August 10, 2016

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Sartorial style and splendor is synonymous with black culture. No matter where you go on this earth, rest assured the men and women of African descent have are freshly dressed, so much so others are quick to knock it off, as though copying was not a cardinal sin. Such are the perils of creativity: not everyone can be an originator or a pioneer. But for those who are, one thing is clear. The attention never stops. The heads will turn, the jaws will drop, and the tongues with clack because invariably style dominates.

The Photographers’ Gallery, London, understands this and present Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity now through September 25, 2016. Curated by Ekow Eshun, the exhibition features works from taken from artists working around the world over the course of the past century, Starting with a rare series of outdoor studio prints made in 1904 from the Larry Dunstam Archive, thought to be taken in Senegal. Taken more than a century ago, the young men are nattily dressed in the latest European clothes, belying a love for the three-piece suit and accessories.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Africa, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

William Eggleston Portraits

Posted on August 10, 2016

Photo: Untitled, 1974 (Karen Chatham, left, with the artist’s cousin Lesa Aldridge, in Memphis, Tennessee) by William Eggleston, 1974 Wilson Centre for Photography

American photographer William Eggleston (b. 1939) is deeply attuned to the poetry of life, to the spaces in between the words that bridge mind, body, and soul. His photographs are alive with great swaths of color and mood, of atmosphere and feeling that goes beyond words. They are fragments spun in the web of time, captured by Eggleston with a precision that belies his mastery of the medium.

In celebration, the National Portrait Gallery, London, presents William Eggleston Portraits, the first comprehensive museum exhibition of his work, on view now through October 23, 2016. Showcasing over 100 works, the show features portraits of Eggleston’s friends, musicians, actors and rarely seen images of his family, revealing for the first time the identities of many of the sitters who had previously been anonymous.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Into the Groove: The Jazz Portraits of Herman Leonard

Posted on August 5, 2016

Photo: Duke Ellington by Herman Leonard. Gelatin silver print, 1958. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution © Herman Leonard Photography, LLC.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit and laid to waste so many lives in the city of New Orleans. The home and studio of photographer Herman Leonard (1923–2010) was destroyed when the 17th Canal Levee broke near his home. The storm claimed 8,000 silver gelatin prints Leonard had made; fortunately, Herman’s crew had gathered the negatives and placed them in the care of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. But Leonard’s time in New Orleans had come to a close after nearly a quarter of a century on the local jazz and blues scene. Leonard relocated to Studio City, California, where he spent his final years re-establishing his business.

And what a business it was. Leonard recounted his early years in an interview with JazzWax, recalling, “I opened my first studio on Sullivan Street in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1948. I worked free-lance for magazines and spent my spare time at places like the Royal Roost and Birdland. I did this because I loved the music. I couldn’t wait to be with Lester Young at a club and hear him and photograph him playing his music. I hoped that on film I could preserve what I heard. It didn’t hurt that I got into the clubs for free. My photographs helped publicize the clubs, so owners let me in.”

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Photo: Billie Holiday by Herman Leonard. Gelatin silver print, 1949. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution © Herman Leonard Photography, LLC.
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/1017217-jazz-king-photographs-herman-leonard-national-portrait-gallery#tz6wkDjUMWC5zHPO.99

Categories: 1960s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Michael Gross: Focus

Posted on August 3, 2016

Richard Avedon © Adrian Panaro

Michael Gross has had his finger on the pulse of high society, documenting their luxurious lifestyles for more than three decades. With a chair in the front row of the fashion shows for a decade, Gross delved into the corners of the world that few had known with his seminal book, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (William Morrow, 1995), exposing the underbelly of the industry at the height of the supermodel craze.

The book had been Richard Avedon’s idea. Gross had a column in The New York Times and was writing long form pieces for New York magazine, including a cover story detailing the historic rivalry between Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Gross had been thinking of expanding the story into a book but Avedon, who had been a major source, thought no one cared about ancient beef between Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland. Instead, he suggested a book on the modeling industry, which no one had ever done before.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Fashion, Photography

Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition

Posted on July 26, 2016

Photo: Lolita, directed by Stanley Kubrick (GB/United States; 1960-62). Sue Lyon as Dolores “Lolita” Haze. © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

In one of those random moments that made up so much of 1999, R.A. The Rugged Man dropped a track called “Stanley Kubrick” on Soundbombing II. And, like everything that is Kubrick, it was an exquisite fit, though the song had nothing to do with him. It was about life out in Suffolk County where, “Cops frisk us, their handcuffs never fit us. Our wrists turn purple, that’s why we act vicious. Plus if we die tomorrow, won’t nobody miss us.” But the Capital the Crimelord track, the murky yet alluring baseline to the beat that R.A. rode with those lyrics, had a pure “Stanley Kubrick” feel.

And perhaps that is because the master understood. As Kubrick observed, “A film is—or should be—more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.”

Kubrick understood the power of impact, of heightening the senses with the precision of the conductor of an orchestra, soaring to operatic crescendos and crashing from precarious heights, taking us along for the ride. The layers of experience, insight, and understanding in a Kubrick film require multiple viewings, or should you be so inclined, additional materials by which to consider his work from multiple points of view.

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The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick (GB/United States; 1978-1980). Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) at the hotel bar. © Warner Bros. Ent.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Raphael Albert: Miss Black and Beautiful

Posted on July 19, 2016

Raphael Albert (1935-2009) archive 1960 -1980, including beauty pageants such as Miss Black and Beautiful and Miss West Indies in Great Britain; as well as documentary photographs and family portraits of the local community in West London.

Photo: (unidentified) Miss Black & Beautiful with fellow contestants, London, Hammersmith Palais, 1970s. From the portfolio “Black Beauty Pageants”. Courtesy of © Raphael Albert/Autograph ABP.

Hailing from the Caribbean island of Grenada, photographer Raphael Albert (1935–2009) moved to London in 1953 where he became a freelance photographer working for black British newspapers. One of his earliest assignments changed the shape of his destiny, as he covered the Miss Jamaica beauty pageant for West Indian World.

Inspired by the spirit of the times Raphael began hosting local beauty pageants for black women before packed crowds at the legendary Hammersmith Palais in West London, a tradition that continued for more than three decades, into the 1980s. With titles like Miss Black and Beautiful, Miss West Indies in Great Britain, and Miss Grenada, Albert cast aside the European standards of beauty in order to shine a spotlight on the inherent beauty of the African race, showcasing women of all skin tones, hair types, and facial features in the mix.

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Photo: Holley posing at Blythe Road, Hammersmith, London, early 1970s. From the portfolio “Black Beauty Pageants”. Courtesy of © Raphael Albert/Autograph ABP.

Photo: (unidentifed) Miss Black & Beautiful escorted by two men, Hammersmith Palais, London, 1970s. From the portfolio “Black Beauty Pageants”. Courtesy of © Raphael Albert/Autograph ABP.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Women and the Civil Rights Movement

Posted on July 8, 2016

Photo: Declan Haun (American, 1937−1994) Picketing the Courthouse, Monroe, North Carolina, August 26, 1961 Gelatin silver print (photograph) Museum purchase, in memory of Alice R. and Sol B. Frank, and with funds provided by Patricia L. Raymond, M.D.

“Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again,” Rosa Parks asked decades ago, reminding us that the fight for Civil Rights cuts through the flesh, down to the bone, and into the very marrow of the United States of America.

Rosa Parks’s words are all too prescient this week, all too knowing of the agonies faced by citizens at the hands of the state, as the extrajudicial executions continue day after day after day. The horror of the killings is further compounded by their intimacy. Consider the murder of Philando Castile, livestreamed by his girlfriend Diamond Lavish Reynolds; in maintaining her composure and her calm in the face of a panicked officer of the law who killed without warning or provocation, Reynolds not only saved the life of her daughter and herself, but she risked everything to broadcast evidence of the crime to the world.

Reynolds’s actions remind us that although black women are rarely given the credit they deserve by the media, the history books, or core curriculum—they have always been at the heart of the movement for truth and justice. In tribute, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, presents Women and the Civil Rights Movement, on view now through October 30, 2016.

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Categories: 1960s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Danny Lyon: Message to the Future

Posted on July 7, 2016

Artwork: Danny Lyon, “Tesca, Cartagena, Colombia,” 1966. Cibachrome, printed 2008. Image 25.7 × 25.7 cm (10 1/8 × 10 1/8 in.). Collection of the artist.

Danny Lyon does it like nobody else. Born in Brooklyn in 1942, he transformed photography into one of the most astounding arts of documentary possibilities. A self-described “dissenter in my own country,” Lyon took to the edges of American life to document the country from the inside out, removing the veils of appearance politics to reveal the truth about this country in black and white like no one before—or since.

A self-taught photographer, filmmaker, and writer, Lyon’s work exemplifies the best aspects of New Journalism. Forsaking the industry’s so-called “objectivity” in favor of using the media as a means to an ends greater than the story itself. Whether on the front lines of the Civil Rights movement or behind the bars of the Texas State Penitentiary, Lyon used photography to bear witness to causes, movements, and historical moments that were happening in the here and now.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Bruce Davidson: Magnum Legacy

Posted on June 20, 2016

Photo: Bruce Davidson USA. New York City. 1980. Subway. ©Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos, courtesy of Prestel.

“When I was a kid, I played baseball and you heard the sound the bat made when it really connected with the ball; you knew you had a great hit. It’s the same with photography: sometimes you hear that click of the shutter and you know you’ve caught something really special,” observes American photographer Bruce Davidson (b. 1933).

Davidson, a member of Magnum Photos since 1958, authored some of the most seminal monographs of the twentieth century including Brooklyn Gang, East 100 Street, and Subway. He is now the subject of a new book, Bruce Davidson: Magnum Legacy by Vicki Goldberg (Prestel), which explores the photographer’s life work in photography. Davidson speaks with Crave about his work and about the magic of photography that kept him hooked in a career that spans six decades.

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

Antonio López: Future Funk Fashion

Posted on June 17, 2016

Artwork: Antonio Lopez, Carol Labrie, NYC, 1969, Marker and color overlay, 18” x 24”, Courtesy of the Estate of Antonio Lopez & Juan Ramos.

Antonio López is a Nuyorican legend. Born in Utado, Puerto Rico in 1943, he was just two years old when he began to sketch dresses from fabric his mother had given him. At the age of seven, his family moved to New York City, Spanish Harlem to be exact. Back in the days, the neighborhood was riddled with gangs as brilliantly depicted in Piri Thomas’s memoir, Down These Mean Streets. To keep her son off the streets, López’s mother, a seamstress, asked him to draw flowers for her embroideries. He also helped his father, a mannequin maker, to apply make-up an stitch wigs on to figures.

Such home training portended beautifully, as López earned a scholarship to the prestigious Traphagen School of Fashion, which provided Saturday programming for children. From there he went on to attend the High School of Art and Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology. While at F.IT., he began an internship at Women’s Wear Daily, which lead to a position on staff. He left school, and that’s when everything began.

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Antonio Lopez, Dream Girls, American Vogue, 1977, Pencil & watercolor, 18” x 24”, Courtesy Estate of Antonio Lopez & Juan Ramos.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Latin America, Manhattan

Who I Am: Rediscovered Portraits from Apartheid South Africa

Posted on June 16, 2016

Photo: S. J. Moodley, [Boy with sunglasses in a chair], ca. 1978. Courtesy The Walther Collection.

South African photographer Singarum “Kitty” Jeevaruthnam Moodley was born into an Indian family in the province now known as KwaZulu-Natal in 1922. At the age of 35, he left his job working as a machinist in a shoe factory to establish Kitty’s Studio, a family-run photographic studio in the mid-sized city of Pietermaritzburg, which he ran for three decades, until his death in 1987.

After his death, many of the studio’s negatives were purchased by the Campbell Collections in Durban, now part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Those deemed incompatible with the historical collection were culled from the archive and some 1,400 negatives were ultimately acquired by Columbia University professor Dr. Steven C. Dubin—and thus a legacy has been cultivated and preserved.

Dr. Dubin has co-organized a new exhibition of work, Who I Am: Rediscovered Portraits from Apartheid South Africa, now on view at The Walther Collection Project Space, New York, through September 3, 2016. The portraits were taken between 1972 and 1984, offering a new look at the history of South Africa. A passionate community activist and fervent opponent of apartheid, Kitty’s photographs speak to the love and high regard he held for his fellow wo/man.

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S. J. Moodley, [Three men dancing in a line], 1975
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/996071-secret-histories-real-south-africa-seen-man-called-kitty#TEp93rt5prHJ3TQa.99. Courtesy The Walther Collection.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Africa, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography