Posts from the “1970s” Category

Picturing Resistance: Moments and Movements of Social Change from the 1960s to Today

Posted on October 22, 2020

*©Bob Adelman Estate. Mourner with sign at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial service, Memphis, Tennessee, 1968.*

Protest is the very foundation upon which the United States was built. In demanding the government answers to the people and not the other way around, it is vital to a functioning democracy and at the core of the First Amendment.

In 2020, protests feel particularly ubiquitous; spurred on by the Black Lives Matter Movement, which has since become one of the biggest global civil rights actions in the history of the world. The protest movement as we know it today began with the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till — his killers declared not guilty the very same day Breonna Taylor’s would some 65 years later.

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” activist Fannie Lou Hamer famously said in a 1971 speech. It is a principle at the heart of Picturing Resistance: Moments and Movements of Social Change from the 1960s to Today (Ten Speed Press), a new book by Melanie Light and Ken Light.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*©1976 Matt Herron. A white policeman rips an American flag away from a young Black child, having already confiscated his “No More Police Brutality” sign, Jackson, Mississippi, 1965.*

*©Michael Abramson. The Young Lords, New York City, 1970.*

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

Mimi Plumb: The White Sky

Posted on October 1, 2020

Growing up beneath the shadow of Mount Diablo in the 1960s, photographer Mimi Plumb witnessed the explosion of strip malls and tract homes with raw dirt yards lining treeless streets of Walnut Creek, a suburb of Berkeley, California.

“To me and my teenage friends, they were the blandest, saddest homes in the world,” Plumb recalls of the predominantly white middle-class hamlet set amid the rolling hills and valleys of Northern California. “The town had a mixture of conservative to liberal adults. My parents were progressive, but I often felt like we were outsiders – tolerated but not embraced by the community. I never understood why we lived there.”

With the Haight Ashbury counterculture scene flourishing less than 20 miles away, Plumb decamped for San Francisco in 1971 at the age of 17. “By then, the idealism of the early to mid-60s was eroding, particularly with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. There was no longer the belief within the youth movement that we could change the world.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio

Posted on September 30, 2020

*Richard Bernstein, Grace Jones photographs for On Your Knees, 1979. Eric Boman courtesy of The Estate of Richard Bernstein*

Hailing from Jamaica, Grace Jones is a true iconoclast: a rebellious pioneer who set the worlds of music, fashion, and film ablaze with aesthetics that defied categorisation, appropriation, or co-option by industries that have long cannibalised marginalised communities.

In the new exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio, curators Cédric Fauq and Olivia Aherne offer a multifaceted portrait of the renegade who turned the mainstream upside down with her refusal to be pigeonholed by any singular quality.

Featuring 100 works by some 50 artists including Anthony Barboza, Antonio Lopez, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jean-Paul Goode,Grace Before Jones is organized into 13 sections that explore her approaches to gender, sexuality, performance, race, and cybernetics throughout her career.

“The incredibly poignant thing about this exhibition is that everything she was doing in the 1970s, ‘80, and early ‘90s is still relevant today,” says Aherne. “It stills feel so fresh and experimental, even though Grace was thinking about things like Afrofuturism back in the ‘80s, at a time when these ideas were first being developed and hashed out.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Antonio Lopez, Personal Study, Angelo Colon, 1983 © The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Huck, Photography

Adger Cowans on the Spiritual Power of Photography

Posted on September 21, 2020

*Adger Cowans. Biggie Smalls, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1990s*

Photographer Adger Cowans, who turned 84-years-old earlier this month (September 19), was one of the few African American artists to work commercially during the mid-twentieth century. Before garnering widespread recognition for his experimental style of image-making, Cowans got his start assisting Gordon Parks – a groundbreaking figure in 20th-century photography – at Life magazine in the 1950s.

Cowans first reached out to Parks while he was pursuing a BFA in photography at Ohio State University. “I wrote Gordon a letter, and he wrote me back and told me to look him up when I got to New York,” explains Cowans. “That summer, I went to New York if Miles Davis was at the Vanguard or Thelonious Monk was at the Five Spot. One of those weekends, I called Gordon.”

“Gordon said (to me), ‘Get on the train and come and see me in White Plains.’ I got there and waited and I saw this powder blue Corvette; the top was down, all-white leather seats. I saw a guy smoking a pipe and he said, ‘Adger Cowans? Gordon Parks.’ I said, “I’m going to be a photographer! Oh boy, this is the deal!’”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Adger Cowans. Gloria Lynne, Newport Jazz, 1961.*

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

A Golden Age of NYC Nightlife: Nightclub Ephemera from the 1980s

Posted on September 17, 2020

*Xenon, Everybody Hates Punk Tad Shaffer, Poster, 1978*

*Club 57 at Irving Plaza, Lee Scratch Perry, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Card, 1981*

In the mid-1960s, Max’s Kansas City became the mecca of New York’s avant-garde, attracting a mix of artists, writers, musicians, and underground stars who made the famed backroom into the ultimate nightlife destination.

By the 1970s, Max’s began hosting performances for glam rock and punk icons, setting the tone for a new breed of nightclub culture that brought together the worlds of art, music, fashion, literature, and film into a carnivalesque environment.

Before the advent of the internet, promoters spread the word by creating innovative flyers to advertise their one-night-only affairs. These eye-catching pieces of ephemera became an integral part of the event, with denizens eager to get on the mailing lists and have an instant “in” to that night’s coolest scene.

Artists like Antonio Lopez, Keith Haring, David LaChapelle, and Jenny Holzer would collaborate on these flyer designs. Produced and distributed en masse, they have become a record of New York’s downtown scene. Once given away free of charge, they are now valued as works of art.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*AREA, Grace Jones & Christian Jones, Folded Card, 1986*

*AREA, Antonio Lopez, A Celebration for Kevin, Folded Card, 1984*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Fashion, Huck, Manhattan, Music

Christopher Makos: Dirty

Posted on September 11, 2020

*Christopher Makos. Hawaiian Shirt, 1976.*

At the outset of his artistic career in 1976, May Ray imparted upon American photographerChristopher Makos a simple ethos to make great work: “obey your instinct” – a directive that has served him well over the years.

Infused with a delectable mix of confidence, charisma, and striking beauty, Makos returned to New York ready to take the city by storm. The following year he published his first monograph, White Trash, a bold and beguiling collection of photos documenting the punk scene that effortlessly mixed high and low society with all the verve of a bright young thing.

Andy Warhol took notice and soon the two became friends and collaborators. When editor Bob Colacello departed Interview magazine in 1983, leaving his ‘Out’ column behind, Warhol suggested Makos start a column called ‘In’. Soon New York’s finest found their way to Makos’ studio, ready to bare it all.

“I remember at the time, if I had a model in front of me and if I didn’t ask him or her to undress they were so disappointed like, ‘Did I not make the grade?’” Makos tells AnOther. “When I look at some of these pictures now, I think about TikTok and Instagram, I was way ahead of the curve there because so many of these pictures of these sexy boys and girls; they’re of the moment now.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Christopher Makos. Keven Kendall Red Bikini Polaroid, 1986.*

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

Black Journal Returns

Posted on August 28, 2020

*Actress-singer Diahann Carroll Co-hosts Black Journal …This Evening, with Executive Producer Tony Brown.*

In 1966, Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power marked a collective shift in the Black Freedom Movement. As a new wave of youth activists came to the fore frustration and anger with the systems of oppression so long used to deny Black people their inalienable human rights was fomenting.

“This shift towards a more direct action agenda made it more difficult for the US government to ignore the demands of Black people in the US,” says Christine Acham, Ph.D, who co-curated the exhibit, Televising Black Politics in the Black Power Era: Black Journal and Soul!.

Recognizing Fredrick Douglass’s dictum, “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” a new generation understood it was time for Black people to tell their stories on their own terms.

In the wake of uprisings in more than 100 cities across the United States following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., National Educational Television (NET), the precursor to PBS, launched Black Journal, the groundbreaking national public affairs show produced for, about, and by Black Americans. Largely unseen since it first aired between 1968-1977, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting has brought all 59 episodes back to stream online.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Black Journal, WNET/Thirteen 1970, Lena Horne ©1970 Bob Fletcher*

*Sixth Period WNET (see CPB Report, May 31, 1976)*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Huck

Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah: Andy Sweet’s Summer Camp 1977

Posted on August 18, 2020

Back in 1968, Andy Sweet began spending summers at Camp Mountain Lake, a sleep away camp in Hendersonville, North Carolina. As time went on, the adolescent camper graduated to counselor, then photography instructor, teaching the next generation of secular Jews from South Florida the joys of making photographs.

In 1977 he returned with a mission for his work brought about by a course of study at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s MFA program. As a documentary photographer who had just crossed over to color, Sweet was inspired by the emerging photographers of the time: Robert Adams, Emmet Gowin, and Bill Owens.

“These three photographers all have something in common with the way I work,” Sweet is quoted as saying in the foreword of Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah: Andy Sweet’s Summer Camp 1977 (Letter 16 Press). ‘Their photographs are not the reason of their subject matter. The subject matter is the reason of their work. Belonging, knowing, and understanding, before picking up the camera, is the most determining factor.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1970s, Art, Feature Shoot, Photography

Debbie Harry: Punk’s Platinum Blonde Bombshell

Posted on August 12, 2020

*Richard McCaffrey. Debbie Harry of Blondie performs live at The Winterland Ballroom in 1977 in San Francisco, California.*

After learning she had been adopted, Debbie Harry would often dream her real mother was Marilyn Monroe, herself a foster child who became the quintessential Hollywood bombshell, radiating an intoxicating blend of vulnerability, seduction, and charm every time she looked at the camera.

“I felt that Marilyn was also playing a character, the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body, and that there was a lot of smarts behind the act,” Harry wrote in Face It: A Memoir. “My character in Blondie was partly a visual homage to Marilyn, and partly a statement about the good old double standard.”

At 14, Harry began dying her hair, going through a dozen colors but always returning to timeless glamour of platinum blonde. In 1965, Harry, then 20, moved to New York City and rented an apartment on St. Marks Place for a mere $67 a month. She worked as a go-go dancer, Playboy Bunny, and waitress at Max’s Kansas City before she found her true calling: rock star.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

*Gie Knaeps. Debbie Harry, Blondie, Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 21, 1977.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Fashion, Jacques Marie Mage, Music

Sergio Purtell: Love’s Labour

Posted on August 10, 2020

In 1973, at the tender age of 18, Sergio Purtell fled his hometown of Santiago, Chile, for the United States. The decision came after General Augusto Pinochet and Admiral José Merino lead a coup d’état, killing the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

Once situated in his new home, Purtell began studying photography, going on to receive a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MFA from Yale. “Photography had the ability to sustain time itself – it was to be discovered not constructed,” Purtell says. “One could use one’s intuition to drive one’s motivation. Suddenly the world started to make sense to me.”

In the summer of 1979, Purtell decided to make a pilgrimage to Europe to discover the birthplace of Western art, an annual practice he would continue well into the mid-’80s. He purchased a Eurail pass to travel the continent at length, staying in seedy motels, visiting local cafes, beaches and bars, and amassing a glorious archive of his adventures, just published in the new book Love’s Labour (Stanley/Barker).

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Stanley Stellar: Night, Life

Posted on July 21, 2020

As a young gay boy growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Stanley Stellar always felt alone. “I didn’t have any friends,” he tells AnOther. “I would go up to the roof of my building, sitting there by myself, and thinking about the future. My greatest joys were looking at stacks of magazines. Images became my friends.”

After studying graphic design at Parsons in the early 1960s, Stellar began his career as an editorial art director designing magazines and coffee-table books. “I’m a child of all media,” he says. “Inside my head are all the images of the second half of the 20th century. I was very aware of what was being done and who was doing it, along with the history of photography. After seeing so many other people’s work I wanted to take my own pictures.”

In 1976, Stellar got his first professional camera and set forth on a mission to document Manhattan’s West Village, which was flourishing during the early years of the Gay Liberation Movement. “When I came out, the gay world was on the street. If you were a young gay man you had very few choices as to what to do, how to meet people, have sex or friends. I found Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street; for so many years that was the spot,” Stellar says.

“I was invited to gay men’s apartments and seeing what their lives were like. It made a real impression on me; I needed to record us in ways that were not necessarily commercial. Images of men in society meant GQ or porn magazines on 42nd Street – that was it. I wanted to do what I had not seen.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

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