Posts from the “1980s” Category

Nan Goldin: The Beautiful Smile

Posted on April 13, 2018

Nan Goldin’s photographs are filled with spirits and ghosts, becoming vestiges of lives lived, loved, and lost. They are evidence of we who once were and no longer are, here today, gone tomorrow – were it not for her art.

Over the past five decades, Goldin has created a body of work so iconoclastic and powerful that she has spawned generations of artists who follow in her footsteps, from Juergen Teller to Wolfgang Tillmans and Corinne Day. Goldin first picked up the camera in 1968 at the age of 15, using photography as a means to deal with life following her older sister Barbara’s suicide just four years earlier.

By 1973, she had her first solo exhibition in Boston, wherein she showed the world her travels through the city’s gay and transsexual communities in a series of black and white photographs that are stunningly timeless – yet prescient, as Goldin always is.

“My desire was to show them as a third gender, as another sexual option, a gender option,” Goldin told Stephen Westfall in a 2015 interview for BOMB magazine. “And to show them with a lot of respect and love, to kind of glorify them because I really admire people who can recreate themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly. I think it’s brave.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

George Rodriguez: Double Vision

Posted on April 11, 2018

L: Los Angeles, 1992. R: Eazy-E, Burbank, 1980s. “He was a cute little guy but was real solid. He looked very powerful. The times I saw him he was always with a different pretty girl. Whenever N.W.A. would come to my studio in Burbank, across from NBC, they’d come by way of Taco Bell.” © George Rodriguez

There are many sides to LA. But few people travel between the realms that were separated during the first half of the 20th century when the Great Migration and post-war Mexican immigration changed the face of the city.

Photographer George Rodriguez is the rare artist who has thrived between Hollywood and Chicano LA for more than half a century. Born in 1937 to a Mexican immigrant father and a Mexican-American mother, Rodriguez has spent his life creating a body of work that captures the many facets of life in LA—from the glittering stars of music, TV, and film to the leaders and activists of the Civil Rights, United Farm Workers, and Chicano movements.

From an archive that includes everyone from Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the Brown Berets to Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, and N.W.A., Rodriguez has partnered with author Josh Kun to publish his first career retrospective Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez (Hat & Beard Press, April 10). An exhibition of photographs from Double Vision will open at The Lodge in Los Angeles on May 26. I spoke with Rodriguez about creating art of the fabled city during some of its most incendiary years.

Read the Full Story at Vice Online

L: Lincoln Heights, 1969. R: Cesar Chavez , Delano, 1969. © George Rodriguez

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

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick: Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex

Posted on April 9, 2018

Chandra McCormick. YOUNG MAN, ANGOLA STATE PENITENTIARY, 2013. © Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun

At 7,300 hectares, the Louisiana State Penitentiary – the largest maximum-security prison in the United States – is home to 6,300 prisoners. The inmates are forced to work the land under the 13th Amendment of the constitution, which legalises slavery in the case of incarceration.

The penitentiary is one of the most prominent examples of how slavery has evolved in the United States, a nation that leads the world in profiting off the prison industrial complex. With more than 2.2 million people living behind bars, America accounts for 25 per cent of the prisoners on earth, despite having just 5 per cent of the world’s population.

Commonly known as “Angola,” the penitentiary took its name after the country of origin for countless men, women, and children who were brutally enslaved and brought against their will to work on the pre-Civil War plantation where the prison now sits. The prison has another nickname, just as evocative: it is called “The Farm” to describe the labour inmates are forced to work, generating as much as 1,814 metric tons of cash crops every year.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Chandra McCormick. MEN GOING TO WORK IN THE FIELDS OF ANGOLA, 2004. © Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun

Keith Calhoun. OUR CHILDREN ENDANGERED, THE NEW PREY FOR PRISON BEDS, NEW ORLEANS, 1982. © Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

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

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

Ed Templeton: Hairdos of Defiance

Posted on March 23, 2018

Californian photographer Ed Templeton gives us a preview of his upcoming exhibition featuring 20 years worth of photos of the Mohawk

Hailing from southern California, Ed Templeton got into the punk and skateboard scene in 1985. At that time, the aesthetics of rebellion were becoming codified as politics and style become strongly intertwined. Perhaps the most visible symbol of rebellion was Mohawk, a hairstyle that took its name and style from an Iroquois tribe residing in Quebec and New York.

Composed of a series of carefully crafted spikes of hair running down the center of a shaved head, often dyed bright colors like orange, blue, and green, the Mohawk brazenly respectability politics and polite society. By radically altering their appearances to signify displeasure, disgust, and rejection of the status quo, punks firmly drew a line in the sand, one that squares found intolerable and rude.

Templeton, however, understood that Mohawks were a message about authenticity in a fake world. In celebration, Roberts Projects in Culver City, CA, presents Hairdos of Defiance, an exhibition of 42 photos made in the U.S. and Europe over the past 20 years accompanied by a book from Deadbeat Club. Like his 1999 book and exhibition Teenage Smokers (Alleged Press), Templeton looks at the ways that kids revel in acts of disobedience to establish their independence and refusal to conform. Here, Templeton speaks about how the Mohawk has become a symbol of opposition, integrity, and self-determination for more than forty years.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Books, Exhibitions, 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

Charlie Ahearn: The Wild Style 35th Anniversary

Posted on March 16, 2018

In 1983, Wild Style debuted in Times Square and Tokyo, introducing the world to what would soon be called hip hop like the rush of an oncoming subway. Breakdancing, graffiti, and rap—this was the youth culture of the Bronx captured in a semi-scripted feature by a Manhattan filmmaker named Charlie Ahearn.

Wild Style introduced Fab Five Freddy, the Cold Crush Brothers, and graffiti legends like Lee Quinones. It went on to become a sacred text for graffiti writers and aspiring DJs, inspiring art and music from Banksy and the Beastie Boys to Nas and Missy Elliott. “As soon as I began to work with Fred on the film,” Ahearn says, “I felt certain that it was going to go out around the world to represent this new culture.”

On the film’s 35th Anniversary, an occasion marked by a screening at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., we talked to the director about the movie that put hip hop on the map.

Read the Full Story at Ceros Originals

Categories: 1980s, Art, Bronx, Graffiti, Music