Posts from the “1970s” Category

Lukas Birk: Burmese Photographers

Posted on April 5, 2018

Actor Kyaw Thu. Taken by U Sann Aung, USA Photo Studio, Yangon 1989/1990

Calendar photographs taken by Har Si Yone, Bellay Photo Studio, Yangon 1970s

The Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar has long been shrouded in mystery and intrigue. Formerly known as Burma, the country sits on the Bay of Bengal where it lies nestled between India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, and China, and has been subject to invasions for the better part of the past millennia.

For the past six decades, it has been ruled by a military dictatorship that has worked to keep its borders closed. “We have this idea that the country was closed off from the world and to some extent it was – but certain things always come through,” Austrian photographer and archivist Lukas Birk reveals.

In 2013, Birk launched the Myanmar Photo Archive (MPA) to create a comprehensive archive of Burmese photographers working between 1890 and 1995. Featuring some 10,000 photographs, it provides an inside look at the nation through the eyes of its citizens. A selection of the work is showcased in the new book, Burmese Photographers (Goethe Institut Yangon), which includes fascinating chapters on youth culture between 1970 and 1990.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Calendar photographs taken by Har Si Yone, Bellay Photo Studio, Yangon 1970s

Actors Kyaw Thu & Moh Moh Myint Aung. Taken by U Sann Aung, USA Photo Studio, Yangon 1989/1990

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

Stranded in the Jungle: Jerry Nolan’s Wild Ride

Posted on April 4, 2018

L.A.M.F. cover sessions. Left to right: Billy Rath, Walter Lure, Jerry Nolan, Johnny Thunders, August 1977© Roberta Bayley

Hailing from Brooklyn, back when it was still a gang town, Jerry Nolan (1946-1992) was an indisputable force in shaping the look and sound of the city’s biggest glam and punk rock bands. As the drummer for The New York Dolls and The Heartbreakers, Nolan set the pace, crafting the face of hard rock during the 1970s – a distinctive combination that was at once raw, rough and rugged, yet highly dandified and charismatic.

“Jerry saw Elvis when he was really young, back in 1956. It reminded him of the gangs he saw in New York,” says Curt Weiss, author of Stranded in the Jungle: Jerry Nolan’s Wild Ride – a Tale of Drugs, Fashion, The New York Dolls, and Punk Rock (BackBeat Books), which released its Kindle edition yesterday. “For Jerry, gangs and rock and roll were interchangeable. It was a secondary family. He never had a dad; his mother kept divorcing, remarrying, and moving around. The only constant men in his life came through gangs or music.”

Nolan, who had learned to sew and cut hair, created what he described as a “profile,” which allowed him to stand above the crowd. “People thought he was in a band even when he wasn’t,” Weiss notes. But soon enough, he was. He joined The New York Dolls in 1972 after drummer Billy Murcia died of asphyxiation following efforts to revive him after a drug overdose while on tour in England.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Dolls “reunion” at Gem Spa, left to right, Johnny Thunders, Sylvain Sylvain, Jerry Nolan, Arthur Kane, David Johansen, August 1977© Roberta Bayley

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Books, Music

Marcia Resnick: Wild Women

Posted on April 3, 2018

Left: Joan Jett at the pool hall. Right: Laurie Anderson with her violin. © Marcia Resnick

Brooklyn-born photographer Marcia Resnick has documented New York City’s art communities for more than half a century. When she was in high school in the 1960s, she mingled with aging hippies at Greenwich Village clubs like Café Au Go Go and Café Wha? And in the 1970s, she shared a loft building in Tribeca with neighbors like Laurie Anderson.

During the 70s and the city’s wildest years, Resnick spent most nights at CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, and the Mudd Club. Around this time, she also started photographing the “bad boys” of the art scene. Resnick wanted to see how powerful men like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Iggy Pop, and William S. Burroughs reacted when the tables were turned and a woman was behind the camera, subjecting them to the female gaze.

Resnick was also enchanted by the gregarious women she lived, worked, and partied with who were simultaneously shaking up the scene. Though it’s less well-known than her Bad Boys series—which was later published as the book Punks, Poets and Provocateurs, NYC Bad Boys 1977-1982 (Insight Editions, 2015)—Resnick’s Wild Women series captures the revolutionary spirit and creative power of artists like Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, and Susan Sontag.

Wild Women is a rarely-seen body of work that embodies the DIY ethos of the era, and VICE recently sat down with Resnick to talk about what it was like documenting her peers and how Women’s Liberation shook up the 70s and 80s.

Read the Full Story at VICE

Pat Place with toy dragon. © Marcia Resnick

Lydia Lunch on all fours. © Marcia Resnick

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Manhattan, Photography, Vice, Women

The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand

Posted on March 27, 2018

Untitled, 1970s. © Garry Winogrand

“I photograph something to find out what it will look like photographed,” American street photographer Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) famously said, revealing the fundamental principle of his philosophy. Through his lens, life was rendered anew, giving us a fresh perspective and vantage point for seeing the world.

“The more interested you get in Winogrand the more eager you are to see stuff you have not seen,” British writer Geoff Dyer reveals about the hunger that drove him to create The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (University of Texas Press), a luxurious meditation on the many ways in which the photographer’s remarkable images work.

The book, which is modelled on John Szarkowski’s classic book Atget, presents a brilliantly curated selection of 100 photographs, including 18 previously unpublished colour works, from the Winogrand archive at the Centre for Creative Photography. Each image is accompanied by an essay, in which Dyer explores the relationship between the artist, his subject, and the photograph in a wholly original manner that is as insightful as it is engaging.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Central Park, New York, 1970. © Garry Winogrand

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

Steven Edson: Vintage New York City Street Scenes

Posted on March 25, 2018

Wedding couple NYC, 1973. © Steven Edson

Big car white shoes, 1973. © Steven Edson

Steven Edson was just eight years old when he was blinded in one eye by a pebble thrown by another child. While recovering, his neighbour, who was also an eye doctor, gave him a camera and he began to shoot. He quickly fell in love with photography – a passion he shared with his father, who always took pictures at various family occasions.

At home, he would page through picture magazines like LIFE and National Geographic, and came to admire the work of street photographers like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus.

Growing up in New York City during the ’50s and ’60s, Edson got to know the streets of his native town, which soon became the backdrop for a series of black and white street photographs and portraits. “New York was rough and unpolished,” Edson recalls. “It was filled with buses, taxis, and trucks all honking their horns, while the fumes of exhaust spilt out into the street, choking your breath. The subway was also extremely loud but offered the thrill of sending you barreling down the tracks through the darkened tunnels.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

NYC street scene. © Steven Edson

Man hugging woman, 1974. © Steven Edson

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

Nicole R. Fleetwood: Prison Nation

Posted on March 23, 2018

Jack Lueders-Booth, from the series Women Prisoners, MCI Framingham (Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Framingham), 1978–85. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

Slavery in the United States was never abolished – it simply changed shape, allowing the government, corporations, and individuals to continue to profit off the oppression and exploitation of men, women, and children since the 13th Amendment of the constitution was ratified in 1865.

The 13th Amendment, which legalises slavery in the case of incarceration, has spawned a massive prison industrial complex. Although the US is a mere 5 per cent of the world’s population, it accounts for 25 per cent of the prisoners in the world – with 2.2 million people behind bars today. Invariably, race plays a major factor in who is imprisoned, with the police, courts, and legal system working against American citizens of African and Latinx communities for the past 150 years.

While millions of families have been torn apart and destroyed, for millions of other Americans, the prison industrial complex can be summed up as: “Out of sight, out of mind”.

But photography has the power to change the way we see the world, enabling us to look directly at what is happening here and now. With its Spring issue, titled Prison Nation, Aperture Magazine takes on the issues at hand, examining the historical and contemporary implications of present-day slavery in the United States.

Co-edited by Aperture Magazine’s editor, Michael Famighetti and scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood, Prison Nation features work by Jamel Shabazz, Joseph Rodriguez, Lucas Foglia, Hank Willis Thomas, Pete Brook, Jack Lueders-Booth, and Bruce Jackson, and examines all sides of the crisis, looking at how photography can be used to create a visual record of the issues at hand. Prison Nation empowers readers to educate themselves so that they can begin to understand that the “land of the free and the home of the brave” is anything but.

Here, Fleetwood shares her insights into how we can work together to take on the abuses of the state, by changing the way we look at the system and those who are forced to live inside the belly of the beast.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Jamel Shabazz, Pretrial detainees all part of the “House Gang” (sanitation workforce) pose in the day room of their housing area, Rikers Island, 1986. Courtesy the artist.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Photography

Milton Glaser: Posters

Posted on March 19, 2018

Now 89, Milton Glaser is one of the foremost graphic designers in the United States, best known for his iconic series “I love NY”. Throughout his illustrious career, which includes solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Pompidou Centre among others, Glaser has elevated graphic design to an artform all its own.

And yet, of course, it’s not an art at all. “Design is one activity, art is another, and they have different objectives,” he explains from his office in New York. “Design is purposeful and intends to accomplish a goal, which is premeditated and defined at the beginning [whereas] what art does is guide you towards avoiding premeditation. It illuminates what is real and what is not real.”

Yet in the hands of a master, there is interplay between the commercial aims of design and the illuminative possibilities of art, and this can readily be seen in Glaser’s posters, of which he has made more than 450 since 1965. In celebration, Abrams will release Milton Glaser Posters on March 27, an incredible compendium of poster art at its best. Here Glaser shares insights into five of his favourite works.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

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

Janette Beckman for BUST Magazine

Posted on March 19, 2018

In my latest 8-page feature for BUST Magazine, Janette Beckman shares stories of a life in photography, starting in the squats of Streatham while a student at St. Martin’s back in the 70s all the way up to the present day, with big plans for 2018, just you wait and see. JB has been a fixture on the scene photographing the underground before the crossover came.

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

Duncan Hannah: Twentieth Century Boy

Posted on March 15, 2018

Duncan Hannah with his painting My Funny Valentine, 1981

When Duncan Hannah arrived in New York in 1971, he could have walked out of the pages of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. With big eyes and high cheekbones, Hannah’s androgynous beauty attracted the attention of the city’s prominent women and gay men, who didn’t let his resolute heterosexuality get in the way of their relentless pursuit.

As an aspiring artist coming of age during a mythical time when glam rock, punk, and new wave transformed the underground, Hannah found himself at the center of it all, feeding an insatiable appetite for the finer things in life: sex, drugs, alcohol, parties, and art. Whether partying with Television at CBGB, starring in Amos Poe’s underground film Unmade Beds, or serving as a muse to Patti Smith, Hannah was always in the mix.

Throughout it all, he kept a series of handwritten journals filled with cameos by everyone from David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, and Debbie Harry to Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Nico, and Lou Reed. Their pages, filled with gritty, evocative memories from the 70s, were collected and edited into Hannah’s new book, Twentieth Century Boy: Notebooks of the 1970s (Knopf, March 13).

VICE asked Hannah to take us on a tour of New York through its most debauched decade—an era when punk became a catalyst for cultural revolution.

Read the Full Story at Vice

The Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and Duncan Hannah (second from right) at The Factory. Photographed by Lance Loud, 1976

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Manhattan, Vice

Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself

Posted on March 9, 2018

At 80 years old, American photographer Joel Meyerowitz is still going strong, forging a singular path that has taken him around the globe several times over. Hailing from East Bronx, Meyerowitz began his career as a street photographer, capturing the curious, quirky moments that reveal themselves as quickly as they disappear.

Today, Meyerowitz now finds himself living on a farm in Tuscany, amassing an archive of 50,000 photographs in just about every genre imaginable. “How come I found myself here, living in Italy and making still lifes when I am a street photographer Jew form New York City? What am I doing here?” Meyerowitz laughs.

He set out to answer this question in Where I Find Myself (Laurence King), a career retrospective presented in reverse chronological order. Here, Meyerowitz takes us on a magical journey from the present into the past, guiding us through the many chapters of his well-lived life.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

A Portrait of Ming Smith, Pioneer Photographer & Model

Posted on March 6, 2018

Pioneers are often so far ahead of the curve that few know who they are and what they accomplished though we may all benefit from their work. Many simply live their destiny, leading quiet, humble lives, bearing the stripes and scars of the struggle while their legacy allows generations to succeed because they refused to fail.

In 1973, Ming Smith moved to New York. A recent graduate of Howard University, Smith took up modelling to support herself, working alongside Grace Jones, Bethann Hardison, Toukie Smith, Sherry Bronfman, and Barbara Smith – the first generation of African-American women to break through the colour barrier which had kept them out of the fashion and beauty industries.

Living in a studio apartment on Carmine Street in the West Village long before gentrification had set in, Smith invested all of her earnings into her true passion: photography. She carried her camera wherever she went, taking photographs while working in Paris and on assignment in Africa. Photography was a means to survive the challenges of daily life, providing a space where she could integrate with her authentic self, combining the profound power of the black experience with the universal beauty of humanity.

A woman of principle, poetry, and poise, Smith is a true pioneer in every sense of the word. The first woman member of Kamoinge, the African-American photography collective established in 1963, Smith is the first black woman to have work included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art – the very establishment that championed the transformation of photography from a vernacular activity into a fine art.

Despite her historic achievements, Smith never pushed herself into the public eye. It is only in 2017 that the world is catching up with her. Smith kicked things off with a solo exhibition at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York; is featured in the landmark exhibitions We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85; Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power; and Arthur Jafa’s recent show at Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London; and is wrapping things up with a big bow, as Karl Lagerfeld personally selected her photograph of Sun Ra for Paris Photo (Steidl).

Below, Smith shares her journey as an artist and model, reflecting on the challenges of breaking boundaries in fashion and art, and the importance of staying true to yourself while navigating this thing called life.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Africa, Art, Dazed, Photography