Posts from the “1980s” Category

Patrick D. Pagnano: Empire Roller Disco

Posted on February 5, 2018

Photography © Patrick D. Pagnano // Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery, NYC

Photography © Patrick D. Pagnano // Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery, NYC

Deep in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, back in 1941, the Empire Roller Skating Center opened its doors to the world. Located across the street from Ebbets Field, back when the Dodgers were the hometown team, the Empire brought the joys of rollerskating to countless generations in its massive 36,000 square-foot space.

By the 1970s, a new style had arrived: roller disco, which brought the uptempo dance music of the nightclubs to the rink. Sound systems were upgraded and DJ booths were installed, while skaters brought their moves, creating a new craze that took the nation by storm.

And, by 1980, the media was entranced. That February, Forbes magazine commissioned street photographer Patrick D. Pagnano to document the scene. “It was the first time I had been to Crown Heights,” he remembers. ”Once I entered the rink I was transported to another world and was in my element.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Photography © Patrick D. Pagnano // Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery, NYC

Categories: 1980s, Art, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989): Boy Next Door (Beautiful but Dumb)

Posted on February 1, 2018

“Blow Both Of Us”, (1978/1986). Image: © Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection) at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Blow Both of Us, Gail Thacker and Me, Summer, 1978/1986, Vintage chromogenic print (negative sandwich), Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

At the tender age of 30, American artist Mark Morrisroe died from complications due to Aids. The year was 1989 and by then the virus had claimed over 27,400 lives in its first decade. The loss was irreplaceable.

Morrisroe was the unofficial leader of The Boston School, a group of artists including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tabboo!, and Gail Thacker who attended either the School of the Museum of Fine Arts or Massachusetts College of Art between 1971 and 1984. Here, he helped kindle the nascent punk scene while also acting as a catalyst in bringing autobiographical photography to the forefront of the art world.

Morrisroe was an enigmatic figure whose diaristic artwork was fuelled by his notoriously radical persona. A teenage prostitute raised by an alcoholic mother, he walked with a cane and a pronounced limp due to a bullet lodged deep within his chest, a wound inflicted while in high school when he was shot by a john. The artist turned to photography to mediate his experiences of life. Working in Polaroids, he embraced the immediacy of the moment transformed into an object that could be manipulated at will. Morrisroe forsook the sanctity of the print in favour of engaging with a mixed-media approach, presciently prefiguring so much of the digital culture in which we currently live.

Yet his premature death has relegated his work to the shadows, making him one of the least-known figures of his time. For more than a decade, gallerist Brian Clamp has exhibited Morrisroe’s art, working tirelessly to restore his rightful place in the art world. In conjunction with the February 1 opening of Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989): Boy Next Door (Beautiful but Dumb) at ClampArt, New York, Clamp shares the details of Morrisroe’s spectacular life and the ways in which his personal experiences fuelled the creation of his art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

“Hello From Bertha”, (1983). Image: © Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection) at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Hello From Bertha, 1983, Vintage chromogenic print (negative sandwich) retouched with ink, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

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

Harry Gruyaert: East/West

Posted on January 24, 2018

Las Vegas downtown motel, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, 1982. © Harry Gruyaert Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.

“Higher emotions cannot be communicated in color,” American photographer Paul Strand claimed – revealing the power of irrational beliefs to take root in the mind and spread like a virus through those who fear to question ideology in search of the truth.

The decision to invite Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert (b. 1941) to join Magnum Photos in 1982 caused dissent among the ranks. At that time Gruyaert had been working in color for two decades, but the powers that be “didn’t see color,” so to speak. Photography was still a fledgling medium in the art world, and those who were desperate to join the ranks revealed a powerful insecurity that fed simple-minded biases and false hierarchies designed to exclude innovative thinkers who worked outside the narrow frame of the status quo.

Gruyaert, however, was undeterred. His commitment remained consistent throughout his remarkable career. In 1981, Geo photo editor Alice Rose George commissioned Gruyaert to photograph Las Vegas. Rather than provide his take on the tired tropes of the Strip, Gruyaert ventured off the beaten path ton the Vegas where residents lived. The result was entirely too realistic; Vegas was not the place of fantasies and spectacle – it was a world where people eked out their existence on the margins.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Moscow, Russia, 1989. © Harry Gruyaert Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.

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

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

Posted on January 16, 2018

Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, 1973. Collection of Ronay and Richard Menschel. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Peter Hujar (1934–1987) is your favourite photographer’s photographer – a man who lived independently, crafting a life in downtown Manhattan that flourished between the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Inside his East Village loft, Hujar mastered his craft, pursuing the art without the burdens of commerce. Liberated from the strictures of the market, Hujar created a body of work that is as broad in subject matter as it is refined in technique and as original in perspective.

A new exhibition, Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, looks at the work the legend left behind, three decades after his death. The show presents 140 photographs drawn from the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, the most comprehensive public collection of the artist’s work. Curated by Joel Smith, the exhibition adopts the traditional retrospective format while staying true to Hujar’s vision.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Ethyl Eichelberger as Minnie the Maid, 1981. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Christopher Street Pier, 1976. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

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

Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Dianne Brill

Posted on January 12, 2018

Photo: Space Bride on The Mugler runway, 1990. Photography Marc Baptiste.

Photographed by everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe, Steven Klein, and Mario Testino to Annie Leibovitz, Michel Comte, and Bill King, to name just a few, Dianne Brill was at the very heart and soul of the New York scene in the 1980s and 90s as a creative coterie of artists, musicians, and writers forever changed the world of pop culture. As Andy Warhol wisely observed, “If you were at a party and Dianne Brill was there, you knew you were at the right party!”

Brill’s star rose in the club world but it didn’t end there. Whether serving as a muse for Warhol and Keith Haring, working with fashion designers Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Vivienne Westwood, designing clothes for rock stars and actors, or penning a bestselling self-help book, Brill was at the top of the game.

Now the art world pays tribute to the Queen of the Night in the new exhibition, To the Future Through the Past, which will be on view at PHOTO 18 in Zurich, through January 12-16, 2018. Featuring hundreds of images of Brill at her best, the exhibition celebrates her roles as It Girl, model, designer, and the bon vivant of your dreams.

Here Brill shares the secrets of her success, revealing how you can spin your social life into stellar opportunities.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Pony girl, The Roxy, NYC, 1988. Photo from the estate of Dianne Brill.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat at an Outlaw party in NYC 1986 – was set up in an abandoned subway station, which was totally illegal and so fun. The party lasted 20 minutes before it was closed down. Photo from the estate of Dianne Brill.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Dazed, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Teresa Engle: An Afternoon in Arles with Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff

Posted on January 10, 2018

Photography Teresa Engle, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art

When you think of Robert Mapplethorpe, powerful images come to mind: the purity of his nudes and flowers, the precise lighting and printing of his work and, perhaps most recognisably, the transgression of boundaries that he boldly took. You may remember Mapplethorpe as a beautiful young man whose brief existence on Earth forever changed the way we think about the spaces where art, photography, and pornography intersect and unfold.

While many know his work, few knew the man himself, the person behind the bullwhip. Teresa Engle is one of those who had the chance to spend private time with Mapplethorpe as his career reached stratospheric heights in the art world. In July 1981, Engle was fresh out of college, just getting her bearings in the world, completing a year-long darkroom internship with Lucien Clergue in Arles, France. Although she had studied photography, was coming to realise her true calling was that of a printer.

Mapplethorpe has come to town to show his work at the annual Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. Engle first met him when he dropped by the Clergue studio, but the forces of fate had them cross paths once more, while Mapplethorpe was lunching at Place du Forum. This chance encounter led to an unexpected connection of a most profound kind, one that resulted in the opportunity for Engle to photograph Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff, his benefactor, before they left Arles.

Engle’s portraits from this encounter will be on view in An Afternoon in Arles: Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, (January 11 – February 24, 2018). Here, she remembers the hope and inspiration that Mapplethorpe provided her in the formative years of her career, and what it’s like to photograph one of the world’s top photographers.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photography Teresa Engle, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art

Categories: 1980s, Art, Photography

Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma: Amsterdam Polaroids

Posted on January 9, 2018

Bar girl Nettie at Cafe Mascotte. Photography © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma.

Fifi, the French bar girl at the Mexican Saloon. Photography © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma.

In spring 1979, Bettie Ringma and Marc H. Miller moved from New York’s Lower East Side to Amsterdam. The newly arrived couple had already become known on New York’s downtown art scene, taking “Paparazzi Self-Portraits” with the new Polaroid SX-70 instamatic camera, and giving the world a taste for instant gratification.

In search of a way to support themselves in a new city, they remembered a photographer hustling Polaroid portraits at Coney Island and decided to test the waters. “We tried first at Zandvoort Beach but it was too much work,” Miller recalls. “The sand was potentially deadly for the camera so we moved to the nightclubs and it clicked right away.

”For next two years, they made the rounds five or six nights a week, shooting anywhere from 30 to 100 portraits a night of locals at old-school bruin cafés, Turkish cafés, soccer bars, gay bars, discos, red-light district bars, and tourist traps. They describe the portraits as “tronies,” comparing them to 17th-century tavern paintings by artists like Adriaen Brouwer who painted typological portraits very similar in spirit.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

At the Turkish bar Cascade. Photography © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma.

Bar girl with live snake at Chez Tony. Photography © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma.

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

Stephen Shore at the Museum of Modern Art

Posted on December 20, 2017

American photographer Stephen Shore, now 70, began his career as a child prodigy, getting his start at just 14 years old when Edward Steichen, then the director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired his work. Three years later, in 1965, he walked into Andy Warhol’s famed silver Factory and spent the next two years fully immersed and documenting the scene, thinking about how artists worked and applying those lessons to his career.

By the age of 24, Shore had fully arrived, with his first solo photography exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ushering in a new era of photography. By this time, Shore was working in colour – which, hard to imagine now, was an extremely radical move. Using a wide array of photographic formats and mediums, he created monumental scenes from everyday life. Shore’s America is a portrait of the grandeur that lies in the most mundane of moments.

As a result of the inscrutable nature of his work due to its level of detachment, Shore’s work has been largely misunderstood, for in his seeming objectivity he captures the enigmatic qualities of the vernacular world. Curator Quentin Bajac makes sense of it all in the new exhibition Stephen Shore, currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art through May 28, 2018.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo

Posted on December 12, 2017

Photo: Still Kicking, a Polaroid of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat taken shortly before his death from a heroin overdose in 1988.Taken from Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo

Weed. Acid. Coke. Opium. Erotica. The Occult. There are many paths to achieve an altered state where mind and body blast off, leaving behind the mind-numbing banality of everday life. Fascinated by the possibilities of achieving transcendence on earth, Julio Santo Domingo (1957-2009) amassed the greatest private collection of sex, drugs, rock, and magic in the world – featuring some 100,000 books and objects by luminaries from Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, and the Marquis de Sade to Charles Baudelaire, The Rolling Stones, and Aleister Crowley to name just a few.

Writer Peter Watts teamed up with designer Yolanda Cuomo to create Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo (Anthology Editions), the definitive book drawn from the collection, which now resides at Harvard University. Here, alongside a preview of images from the book, which has just been released, Watts tells us about Santo Domingo’s passion for enchantments of all sorts.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Office wall in Geneva illustrating both Julio Santo Domingo’s eclectic, unorthodox hanging style and the wide range of material in the library. Note the stone phallus in the center of the pictureTaken from Altered States: The Library of Julio Santo Domingo

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Painting, Photography

Magnum Contact Sheets

Posted on December 11, 2017

We would like to believe that photographs convey an element of truth, that in the fraction of a second recorded for posterity, we have captured something that lies beyond mere celluloid of digital technology – something we can gaze upon and discover verifiable facts, unearth an ineffable aspect of reality that lies beneath the surface.

Perhaps this is possible, in as much as we wish to believe it so, but when we consider that the single frame lies in a larger body of work can we be absolutely sure that we’re not being guided by the aesthetic power of the form. Are we not sentient beings whose powers and perceptions of sight heavily influenced by the perfection of the art?

It may be the best way to know is to consider the context, in as much as it is available to us: the circumstances of the moment, the players, the photographer themselves. And, if we are to consider the artist, where does this image fall, not only within their oeuvre but more specifically in project from which it is drawn? This is where the contact sheet comes in.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

Avram Finkelstein: After Silence – A History of AIDS Through Its Images

Posted on December 11, 2017

Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Gran Fury, 1989–1990, For Art Against AIDS On The Road.

During the early years of the AIDS crisis, when an HIV positive diagnosis meant certain and gruesome death, Avram Finkelstein became a pivotal figure in ACT UP, the direct action advocacy group that worked tirelessly to combat U.S. government silence around the disease.

“Power structures count on our silence, but that doesn’t mean we’re obliged to give it to them,” Finkelstein remembers. “Raising your voice is a tremendous threat, and it’s the only threat you ever have to make.”

As co-founder of the collective Silence = Death and member of the art group Gran Fury, Finkelstein worked tirelessly to raise awareness and fight the power through a powerful combination of art and activism. “When words and images are combined, their power increases exponentially,” Finkelstein explains. “We thought: Why not just sell political agency the same way everything else is sold to us?”

During his years in the trenches, Finkelstein kept a journal documenting his work, which became the basis for After Silence: A History of AIDS Through Its Images (University of California Press). “I wrote After Silence so activists in the middle of the 21st century might be able to reinvigorate the political lessons these images contain, and see them as acts of strategic resistance that relate to struggles we have yet to imagine,” Finkelstein reveals.

Here, Finkelstein shares tips for artist-activists working today to fight the power.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Artwork: Silence = Death, The Silence = Death Project, 1987, poster, offset lithography.

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