Posts from the “1970s” Category

Jim Marshall: Show Me the Picture – Images and Stories from a Photography Legend (Chronicle Books)

Posted on August 27, 2019

Jimi Hendrix filming Janis Joplin backstage at Winterland, San Francisco, 1968 © Jim Marshall

Throughout his illustrious career, American photographer Jim Marshall (1936-2010) defined the look of rock and roll. His images helped turned the genre into a revolutionary movement which went against the oppressive power structure of the status quo.

“Jim was a very complicated man and anybody who knew him either hated him or loved him,” says Amelia Davis, Marshall’s longtime assistant. She is also the editor of Jim Marshall: Show Me the Picture – Images and Stories from a Photography Legend (Chronicle Books), a masterful compendium of the photographer’s life designed to complement the documentary film, Show Me the Picture: The Story of Jim Marshall.

“He had a rough exterior,” she continues. “He was a drug-addicted, drinking, gun-toting guy. But when you look at these photographs you see humanity in Jim, because he wouldn’t be able to take those photos if he didn’t have that inside of him.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

John Coltrane at Ralph Gleason’s house in Berkeley, California, 1960 © Jim Marshall

Janis Joplin “happy” backstage at Winterland, San Francisco, 1968 © Jim Marshall

Categories: 1960s, 1970s

Rick McCloskey: Van Nuys Blvd. 1972

Posted on August 26, 2019

After World War II came to a close, a new phenomenon crept across the United States. As many adolescents no longer had to drop out of school and get a job to support their family, the era of the teenager began. Born of a potent combination of combination of leisure time, disposable cash, angst, boredom and rebellion, teens soon discovered true freedom came from owning or borrowing a set of wheels.

The car — perhaps the most potent symbol of American self-determination at the expense of the environment — became the vehicle to freedom of a sort: the ability to go cruising at night. From the late 1940s through well into the 1990s, cruising down the main streets, avenues, boulevards, and specially designated strips became the coolest thing a teen could do.

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California during the 1950s and ‘60s, American photographer Rick McCloskey spent his youth cruising Van Nuys Boulevard every Wednesday night. His family home, just one city block from “The Boulevard” was located a few blocks from the famed Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant, home of the All-American meal: burgers and milkshakes.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1970s, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park

Posted on August 22, 2019

Under the cover of darkness, Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki crept through Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama Parks during the 1970s, in search of an illicit world known to a select few. Moving like a hunter on the prowl, Yoshiyuki used infrared film and flash to capture public displays of sex between heterosexual and homosexual couples—and, perhaps more shockingly, the voyeurs who gathered to watch.

“One day I stumbled on the scene—and [an] incredible scene [Laughs]. That was when I was still an amateur,” Yoshiyuki tells Nobouyoshi Araki in a conversation titled “Tiptoeing into the Darkness…With Love,” featured in the new book Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park.

“I was shocked. They were actually fucking,” Yoshiyuki says. “When I saw them I knew this was something I had to photograph.”

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Document Journal, Japan, Photography

Vivian Maier: The Color Photographs

Posted on August 22, 2019

Chicago, April 1977 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

Self-Portrait, Chicagoland, October 1975 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

When legendary American photographer Vivian Maier died in 2009 at the age of 83, she left behind some 40,000 Ektachrome colour slides that had gone unseen and unpublished. Thankfully, a new exhibition and monograph – titled Vivian Maier: Colour Photographs – showcase the stunning works made by the artist, who worked in total seclusion throughout her life.

For more than 40 years, Maier work as a nanny on Chicago’s wealthy North Side. Her job gave her the ability to hit the streets with her camera and take portraits of modern life during the second half of the 20th century.

“Look closely art the many self-portraits Vivian Maier made, and you will see her disguises, her cloak of invisibility,” photographer Joel Meyerowitz writes in the book’s foreword. “She’s as plain as an old-fashioned school marm. She’s the wallflower, the spinster aunt, the ungainly tourist in the big city… except… she isn’t!”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Untitled, c. 1977 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

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

Wynn Miller: A Portrait of East LA in the 1970s

Posted on August 16, 2019

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Wynn Miller first visited the city’s Eastside in the 1970s, after an invitation from his brother-in-law to meet members of the Arizona Maravilla gang. “It was a foreign world to me; I was a surfer,” Miller remembers. “I didn’t know anything about the gangs.”

“I took a few pictures and when I got home I made a few prints in my own darkroom. I thought they were really cool so I decided to take a chance. I took pictures of their kids and that was my way into the gang life.”

Over the next year, Miller would spend his weekends in the area, creating a series of black and white environmental portraits. Recently on view in the exhibition On the Edge of Society, his photographs are an intimate look at the brotherhood in a disenfranchised community living on the margins of society.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1970s, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop

Posted on August 8, 2019

Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (male couple), n.d. (1975-1986)

In the brief window between the Stonewall Rebellion and the advent of AIDS, New York City became a wonderland for the sexually adventurous. As the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, the spirit of anarchy arose among the dilapidated ruins of the bustling metropolis. Raised on free love, a new gay underground emerged in the bars and clubs, as well as on Manhattan’s West Side Piers where encounters with rough trade in derelict warehouses flourished in broad daylight.

From 1975 to 1986, African-American artist and Bronx native Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) dedicated his life to documenting this little-known chapter of gay history, amassing a singular archive of work that preserves the era perfectly. At a time when the nearby Meatpacking District still ran red with fresh blood, Baltrop captured the grit, grime, and humanity that thrived in an enclave of illicit pleasures of the flesh.

Largely excluded from the art world during his life, Baltrop is finally receiving his due with a major exhibition, The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop, opening August 7 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The museum is home to the Baltrop Archive, a trove of personal documents, photographs, and ephemera that provides a first-hand account of the challenges he faced throughout his life.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (male portrait), n.d. (1975-1986)

Bottom: Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (sunbathing platform with Tava mural), n.d. (1975-1986)

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Document Journal, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

April Dawn Alison

Posted on August 8, 2019

“Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life,” the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez knowingly remarked, reminding us that what we see and what we believe is often just an illusion of sorts. Beneath it all, lays the true self, an identity we often keep hidden from the world — including ourselves.

But there are those who dare to delve into the person they are we no one else is there to witness it. These moments are a manifestation of something beyond the person others see: it is the self that exists within our deepest being. To record this, to document it, to create evidence of that which exists for no one else — this takes nerve. It is here our story of April Dawn Alison begins.

In 2017, a painter named Andrew Masulio donated an archive of over 8,000 Polaroids to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) — previously unseen self-portraits of April Dawn Alison, the female persona of Alan Schaefer (1941-2008), an Oakland-based photographer who lived in the world as a man. The archive reveals to us a fully-realized secret life beautifully revealed in the exquisite monograph, April Dawn Alison (MACK), selections from which are currently on view at SFMOMA through December 1, 2019.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Janette Beckman: Raw Punk Streets UK 1979-1982

Posted on August 5, 2019

Ladbroke Grove, London 1979 © Janette Beckman

In the mid-1970s, British photographer Janette Beckman tells VICE, she left her home in London to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. “I decided, ‘I’m leaving home. I’m going to be an artist and take drugs!’” she says with a laugh, sitting in the kitchen of her Manhattan loft.

She moved into a semi-squat in Streatham filled with art students and rented a floor for the impressive fee of £5 a week from an eccentric professor who taught at London University. “He was a spiritualist and was in touch with his dead wife,” Beckman reveals, before going on to recount summers spent at the professor’s nudist camp just outside the city, where they grew weed in the backyard.

Beckman completed her studies at the London College of Printing, then got a job teaching photography to teens at the Kingsway Princeton School for Further Education in 1976 just as punk exploded on the scene. Entranced by the raw energy taking aim at the establishment, Beckman found the perfect subject to launch her four-decade photography career.

With the publication of Raw Punk Streets UK 1979-1982 (Café Royal Press), Beckman delves deep into her archives, unearthing never-before-seen images of the UK punk scene in its formative years. We catch up with Beckman to discuss the D.I.Y. ethos that became the basis for punk—and her life’s work, which includes photographs of everyone from the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and X to Debbie Harry, Dee Dee Ramone, and Siouxsie Sioux.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Punk Girl, London 1979 © Janette Beckman

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Music, Photography, Vice

Shunk-Kender: Art Through the Eye of the Camera 1957–1983

Posted on July 30, 2019

Harry Alexander Shunk (1924-2006) and János Kender (1938-2009), Self-Portrait, Italy, 1956.

Between 1958 and 1973, German Harry Alexander Shunk (1924-2006) and his Hungarian partner János Kender (1938-2009) collaborated with nearly 300 European and American artists to document some of the most iconic moments in modern art.

Together, they produced some 190,000 images in collaboration with artists including Man Ray, Roy Lichtenstein, Lou Reed, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, William Klein, and Yayoi Kusama — many of which have become an integral part of the history of art, and works worthy of veneration themselves.

“In the history of photography, ‘documents for artists’ exist in the shade, with a few rare exceptions,” writes Florian Ebner in an essay that appears in the new book, Shunk-Kender: Art Through the Eye of the Camera 1957–1983 (Éditions Xavier Barral), which accompanies the first exhibition of their work, now on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through August 5, 2019.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Lee Stuart: Street Dreams – How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion

Posted on July 7, 2019

Jamel Shabazz. Young Boys, East Flatbush, Brooklyn, NYC 1981

“Rap is something you do! Hip hop is something you live!” KRS-One memorably said. Born in the Bronx in 1973, hip hop is not just music, dance, and art; it is a way of being in the world.

“I am a child of hip hop,” says Lee Stuart, Brand Director of Patta, a Dutch streetwear brand, who has curated the new exhibition Street Dreams: How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion. Organised chronologically, the exhibition presents the visual legacy of hip hop through a series of 30 songs and illustrates them with the art, fashion, and photography that defined the era.

“We’re not trying to be historians,” Stuart says. “We are trying to immerse people in these images, show them and make them part of this energy.”

To select the songs, Stuart did what all heads love: he gathered his team and debated the merits of each track. He then chose corresponding work by artists including Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley, Jamel Shabazz, Janette Beckman, Dana Lixenberg, Hank Willis Thomas, Kambui Olujimi, and Earlie Hudnall.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Earlie Hudnall, Gucci Brothers, 3rd Ward, Houston, TX, 1990 Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, Texas

Jamel Shabazz. Rude Boy, Brooklyn, NYC 1981.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Music, Photography

Zak Ové: Get Up, Stand Up Now

Posted on June 27, 2019

Armet Francis, ‘Fashion Shoot Brixton Market’, 1973.

Jenn Nkiru, ‘Still from Neneh Cherry, Kong’, 2018.

“I was raised by a village,” says artist Zak Ové of his upbringing in West London. “It was a very outspoken black and West Indian community, [and I was] understanding how assertive one had to be to be seen.”

As the son of an Irish Socialist mum and acclaimed black filmmaker Horace Ové, the artist was raised with strong ideals that have guided him throughout his career: “Politics within the arts has always been very integral from my father’s generation onwards. [It helps us] attain equality, honesty, and perspective towards our own history.”

Now, Ové is honouring those who laid these foundations in Get Up, Stand Up Now, a new landmark exhibition which celebrates 50 years of Black creativity in the UK. The exhibition features historic artworks, new commissions, and never-before-seen work by 100 artists working in art, film, photography, music, literature, design and fashion. This includes the Black Audio Film Collective, Chris Ofili, David Hammons, Ebony G. Patterson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lubaina Himid, Althea McNish, Steve McQueen, and Yinka Shonibare.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Ajamu, from ‘Circus Master Series’, 1997

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music, Painting, Photography