Posts from the “1970s” 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

Tseng Kwong Chi: East Meets West (a.k.a. Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series)

Posted on November 3, 2021

*Tseng Kwong Chi, Monument Valley, Arizona, 1987. Gelatin silver print. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Courtesy of the Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi and Yancey Richardson, New York.*

In 1978, Chinese photographer Tseng Kwong Chi (1950–1990) donned a Zhongshan suit purchased at a Montreal thrift store and showed up to a dinner party his parents were hosting at Windows on the World, a posh restaurant located at the very top of the World Trade Center. His parents, Chinese Nationals who fled Hong Kong in the 1960s to escape the reign of Chairman Mao, were aghast — but as his sister Muna Tseng remembers, the maître d’ treated Kwong Chi like a foreign dignitary.

Recognising the potent impact of costume, class and the ‘exotic’ on the American psyche, Kwong Chi created the Ambiguous Ambassador, a persona he would adopt for East Meets West (a.k.a. Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series) — selections from which will be on view at Yancey Richardson during The Art Show 2021 in New York.

Beginning in 1979, and continuing until just months before his untimely death from AIDS in 1990, Kwong Chi donned the suit, dark glasses and an ID badge that read “visitor” or “slut for art” to construct a distinctive look that readily exposed reductive notions of the ‘other’. Like his contemporary Cindy Sherman, Kwong Chi combined elements of photography and performance to examine issues of identity, myth and representation with a decidedly camp sensibility.

Although China’s first president Sun Yat-sen introduced the suit in the early 20th century, Mao made a global fashion statement when he wore it to the historic 1972 meeting with President Richard Nixon. While Western sensibilities endowed it with prestige, Mao knew it was common-wear — adopting it to present himself as a “man of the people”. The irony was firmly lost on Americans, who often minimised this complex culture to a monolithic identity (whilst simultaneously claiming to embrace “diversity” and “inclusion”).

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Tseng Kwong Chi, Hollywood Hills, California, 1979. Gelatin silver print. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Courtesy of the Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi and Yancey Richardson, New York.*

*Tseng Kwong Chi, New York, New York, 1979. Gelatin silver print. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Courtesy of the Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi and Yancey Richardson, New York.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, i-D, 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

Larry Racioppo: Coney Island Baby

Posted on October 29, 2021

*Larry Racioppo. Palm Reading sign and the Thunderbolt rollercoaster, 1978.*

With its beach, boardwalk, and amusement park, Coney Island has long been the perfect escape from the stress of everyday life. South Brooklyn native Larry Racioppo and his extended family reveled in the pleasures of “America’s Playground” during his youth and teen years.

In the late 1960s, Racioppo enrolled in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and traveled to rural California, where he served two and a half years. He returned home in November 1970, with the dream of becoming a photographer.

In early 1971, Racioppo and a friend drove out to Coney Island to revisit his childhood stomping grounds — only to discover “Electric Eden” was on the brink of collapse. The once bustling boardwalk empire had become a ghost town. Abandoned buildings, burned out lots, neglect, disrepair, and white supremacist graffiti had brought seaside paradise to a standstill.

“Seeing the physical decline in my neighborhood and the city in general saddened me,” says Racioppo. “When I went to Coney Island I was struck by its emptiness. I saw that some attractions like the Tilyou Theater were closed not for the winter but for good.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Larry Racioppo. Young Boy in the Arcade, 1979.*

*Larry Racioppo. Stauch’s Baths with WARRIORS graffiti, 1979.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Huck, Photography

Larry Racioppo: Bowery Street

Posted on October 27, 2021

Girl with cotton candy, Fourth Avenue, 1974 © Larry Racioppo

While working as a cab driver, cameraman, waiter, photographer’s assistant, bartender, and carpenter, Brooklyn native Larry Racioppo traveled around the city in the 1970s making photos of New York as it teetered along the edge of bankruptcy. Despite — or perhaps because of — the lack of basic government services, the people found a way to make the best of their circumstances through creativity.

“The 1970s were a tough time for all New York City,” says Racioppo. “Government services were being cut back and unemployment was relatively high — but the working class people I knew and lived among were familiar with hard times. Volunteers from block associations, local churches, and fraternal orders like the Veterans of Foreign Wars created and staffed community events regularly. Most of these activities were focused on helping kids have fun.”

It’s a way of life that only exists in tiny, ungentrified pockets scattered across the five boroughs today. In the new exhibition, Bowery Street, Racioppo explores one of the last remaining vestiges of old New York: an undeveloped three-block section of Coney Island’s amusement area that is still home family-owned booths and concessions offering games of chance and skill.

“Here are games with regulation size basketballs and narrow rims, games with water pistols and darts, rings to toss and bbs for shooting zombies. Because they remind the 1970s street fair games I played years ago, I really enjoy photographing them,” says Racioppo, who received a 2021 New York City Artist Corps grant to document this little corner of Brooklyn that echoes a way of life Racioppo photographed at the very dawn of his career.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Girl and boy on circular car ride, 13th Street, 1976 © Larry Racioppo*

*Ticket booth and empty ride, Fourth Avenue, 1974 © Larry Racioppo*

Categories: 1970s, Art, Blind, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, 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

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

Chas Gerretsen: Apocalypse Now: The Lost Photo Archive

Posted on October 20, 2021

*Chas Gerretsen. Pestering the Prisoner Children on top of bamboo cage. Martin Sheen as prisoner and Marlon Brando, Kurtz Compound.*

Growing up, Dutch photographer Chas Gerretsen noticed a glaring discrepancy between the stories his father told him about World War II and the Hollywood movies he saw. “To find answers about what war is really like, I had to go there and experience it,” he says.

In the 1960s, Gerretsen traveled to Vietnam, realized the benefit of having a press card, and secured a job a cameraman for UPI television news. A month later he went freelance, selling film stories to ABC. After finding a Browning 9mm pistol in the field after a firefight, Gerretsen traded it with UPI photographer Dana Stone for a Nikon F camera with a 105mm lens.

Gerretsen documented the war across Vietnam until 1969, when the fighting began to slow down. After returning home, people asked him what war was like. “When I told them what I’d seen and experienced, they would not believe me, because they’d read the newspaper or saw on television the propaganda of the day and that was the ‘truth’ for them.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Chas Gerretsen. Blowing Bubbles Amidst Enemy Kia. Behind the scenes: Kurtz Compound.*

*Chas Gerretsen. Mr. Clean with MG0 Machine Gun. Laurence Fishburne Do Lung Bridge.*

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Huck

Arlene Goffried: Clandestine – The Photo Collection of Pedro Slim

Posted on October 15, 2021

*Arlene Gottfried. Pituka at Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, 1977. Pedro Slim Collection. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York.*

“New York from the 1980s was crazy,” says photographer and photography collector Pedro Slim as he thinks back to his early days buying art. “I did terrible things economically.” Driven by passion and pleasure in equal part, Pedro has been blessed with a discerning eye that effortlessly distils the exquisite nuances of the human body, whether clothed or nude.

“I never thought of myself as having a collection,” he says. “I just bought pieces I liked, mainly nudes, by photographers like Peter Hujar and Allen Frame, who has been so important in my life.” Then one day, someone asked to borrow the collection, and everything became clear.

With images dating back to the turn of the 20th century, Pedro’s collection chronicles photography’s longstanding love affair with the human form. Whether embracing the classical glamour of George Platt Lynes’ homoerotic works made in the 40s, when depictions of male full-frontal nudity was illegal, or gazing upon Merry Alpern’s gritty images of sex workers in the backroom of a 90s Manhattan strip club, Pedro has amassed a breathtaking collection of black-and-white photographs that are sexy, cinematic and tender.

Over the past four decades, Pedro’s collection has grown to include works by luminaries likeLarry Clark, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus,Helmut Newton, Man Ray, Horst P. Horst andNan Goldin, to name just a few. A new exhibition, Clandestine: The Photo Collection of Pedro Slim, takes us on a whirlwind tour through some of Pedro’s most captivating works. From an Anthony Friedkin portrait of Divine sitting backstage at San Francisco’s Palace Theatre in 1972 to Mary Ellen Mark‘s 1994 photograph of a bearded lady reclining in the bathtub, each image offers a timeless take on the beauty, joy and wonder of the body.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Arlene Gottfried. Miguel Pinero and Friend, 1980. Pedro Slim Collection. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York.*

*Arlene Gottfried. Two Young Men With Afros, late 80 ́s. Pedro Slim Collection. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York*

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

Andy Warhol: Photo Factory

Posted on October 15, 2021

*Dolly Parton © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.*

Andy Warhol was a master diarist, a man who understood that the foundations of art, history, and culture are built on the shared experience of daily life. Under the banner of Pop Art, Warhol elevated consumer products and celebrities into the realm of fine art. With his time capsules, Warhol preserved the mundane for posterity — much in the same way his daily calls to Pat Hackett detailing his comings and goings about town became the basis of The Andy Warhol Diaries, which was published after his untimely death in 1987.

But perhaps Warhol’s penchant for chronicling mid-century life could best be seen in his enduring, albeit lesser known, photography practice. Between the early 1970s and his death, Warhol had produced some 130,000 black and white 35mm photographs and 20,000 Polaroids. No matter where he went, Warhol took a camera along — his “date” as he fondly described his Polaroid camera.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Keith Haring and Juan Dubose, 1983 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Blind, 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