Posts from the “1980s” Category

Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood

Posted on March 24, 2021

*Emine Dressed Up for Republic Day, Trabzon, Turkey, 1965 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

“I didn’t have the happiest home life or childhood, so I think that gave me a feeling of justice and passion for people that don’t have all the breaks,” Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) said in 2010 on KOBRA SVT, Swedish National Television.

“I think it was important to me to be free and wander the world and not have a family,” Mary Ellen Marks added. “I think if you don’t come from a happy home, maybe you don’t want to tie yourself down. I always wanted to be completely free. Even from the time that I was like eight years, seven years old, I remember walking home from grade school thinking, When am I going to get out of here? I’ve got to be free. So the freedom was always a major thought for me, a major plan.”

That desire for freedom became the driving force in the artist’s life. Having no children of her own, Mark was able to dedicate herself wholly to the creation of an extraordinary archive of work, selections from which were recently published in the three-volume monograph, The Book of Everything (Steidl), published at the end of last year and edited by film director Martin Bell, Mark’s husband and collaborate for 30 years.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Amanda and her cousin Amy. Valdese, North Carolina, 1990 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

*Brooke and Billy at Gibbs Senior High School prom. St. Petersburg, Florida, 1986 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

David Goldblatt: Strange Instrument

Posted on March 16, 2021

*David Goldblatt, Richard and Marina Maponya, Dube, Soweto, 1972.*

As a Jewish man born in South Africa, David Goldblatt (1930-2018) was an insider and an outsider at the same time. Born to parents who fled Lithuania to escape persecution, Goldblatt was possessed with a profound sensitivity to the exploited and oppressed. He took up photography as a teenager and began working full time in 1963 after selling the family store following the death of his father to document South Africa at the height of apartheid.

“David Goldblatt was a very political person and believed strongly in documenting the injustices that he saw around him. But he didn’t think of what he was doing as activism and he certainly didn’t want it to be propaganda,” says Pace Gallery curator Oliver Schultz.

Reflecting on what he describes as Goldblatt’s “compassion and dispassion”, Schultz discussed how the photographer’s matter of fact approach maintains its own profound emotional force. Although straightforward in its presentation, Goldblatt’s images can be unpacked like Russian nesting dolls, offering layers of meaning aligned with the viewer’s proximity to the subject of his work.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*David Goldblatt, Couple at The Wilds. Johannesburg., 1975.*

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

Jim Goldberg: Fingerprint

Posted on March 11, 2021

*Jim Goldberg. Wea, Near Hollywood Boulevard. Los Angeles, California. USA. 1988-1994. © Jim Goldberg | Magnum Photos*

From 1985-1995, Jim Goldberg worked on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco getting to know a number of homeless teens, building the relationships that would come to form the basis of Raised by Wolves, the groundbreaking monograph that redefined commonly held notions of documentary work. Weaving together photographs, handwritten notes, drawings, snapshots, found objects, and ephemera into a majestic tapestry, Goldberg crafted a brutally compelling portrait of troubled youth struggling to survive.

Through the stories of protagonists Tweeky Dave and Echo, Goldberg provided visibility, and a voice, to at-risk teens at a time when they were alternatively vilified and marginalized, or erased from most peoples’ awareness, allowing the subjects to control the narrative.

The dazzling sunshine of Southern California and noirish shadows it cast made the perfect visual backdrop for a tale of adolescent antiheroes driven from their homes, fending for themselves on the streets. “The stories that they created about themselves were based on Hollywood, rock and roll, and love stories. Their family on the street was a movie in itself. They were in Hollywood and San Francisco, too. They would flow back and forth and be the new James Deans or Johnny Rottens.”

Read the Full Story at Magnum Photos

*Jim Goldberg. Schemer and Cupcake, Near Hollywood Boulevard. Los Angeles, California. USA. 1988-1994. © Jim Goldberg | Magnum Photos*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Magnum Photos, Photography

Ebony: Covering Black America

Posted on March 5, 2021

Throughout the twentieth century, most mainstream U.S. publications were reticent to bring more than one — if any — Black photographers on staff, resulting a biased depiction of the issues facing the Black America. Understanding the truth in journalist H. L. Mencken’s dictum, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one,” businessman John Harold Johnson founded the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago in 1942 to provide Black America with media made by, for, and about the community.

In 1945, the Johnson Publishing Company launched Ebony, which quickly became Black America’s answer to LIFE magazine. Rather than appropriate white culture, Ebonyoffered an inside view into a striving Black bourgeois through a series of photo essays and features on celebrities and current events. For 75 years, Ebony was the forerunner of Black American culture, chronicling the times, and offering a visual history of the nation from segregation through Civil Rights, and beyond.

“As one of the few individuals who know of a world before Ebony, let me tell you, John Johnson’s magazine was a game-changer, and remains one to this day,” retired educator Hazel S. Red says in Lavaille Lavette’s sumptuous new book Ebony: Covering Black America (Rizzoli New York). “It has been a vehicle by which we have maintained our dignity and sanity through our efforts to achieve true justice and equality for all.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Music, Photography

Michael Grecco: Punk, Post Punk, New Wave – Onstage, Backstage, In Your Face, 1978-1991,

Posted on March 5, 2021

Bow Wow Wow #2, Boston, Massachusetts, 1981 © Michael Grecco

“Punk, in a strange way, saved my life,” musician Lizzie Borden says in Punk, Post Punk, New Wave: Onstage, Backstage, In Your Face, 1978-1991, a breathtaking collection of 162 photographs by Michael Grecco accompanied by essays by Fred Schneider of The B-52sand music journalist Jim Sullivan.

By the age of 13, Borden — who shares her birth name a woman who allegedly killed her family with an axe — was rocking at CBGB, the epicenter of New York’s burgeoning punk scene. “It was filthy, it was raw. It was sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, and the bathrooms were disgusting,” she told Sullivan. “It was a group of people that not everyone wanted to join, but once you were in you were family….We would be up all night. Drugs, no sleep, more drugs. We lived in the streets. We squatted in Alphabet City. We lived punk rock.”

With “Do It Yourself” as the guiding ethos, punk encouraged all comers to make art without catering to careerist ambitions, commercial markets, or capitalist pretense. Stripped down to its bare essentials, punk was loud, angry, and raw — capturing the angst of adolescence and the disdain for the privileged politic of hippie ideology. With punk, anyone possessed with the audacity of youth could grab a guitar, jump on stage, thrash three chords, and howl at the moon.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Poison Ivy, The Cramps, Boston, Massachusetts, 1980 © Michael Grecco*

*Siouxsie and the Banshees, Boston, Massachusetts, 1980 © Michael Grecco*

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

Philip Wolmuth: Notting Hill

Posted on March 2, 2021

Socially concerned photography, which dates back to the work ofJacob Riis and Lewis Hine, has the power to change lives by shining a light on how the other half lives. In the 1970s, Philip Wolmuth, then in his 20s, began using photography to document the Horniman’s Adventure Playground in North Kensington where he worked, and got involved with community activism in North Paddington.

“Philip was interested in documenting the society we live in and the way people live and work, and felt very comfortable behind the camera,” says his partner Jane Matheson, and their children Anna and Eva Wolmuth.

“Philip has a strong sense of social justice and has always been strongly anti-establishment. He sought to document the reality of people’s lives in an unjust society, including community struggles, housing problems, low paid work, cuts to public services.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Philip Wolmuth. 1983: Young bikers on the first skateboard bowl in Meanwhile Gardens, a community-run park next to the Grand Union canal in North Paddington. The bowl was replaced by a new, state-of-the-art design in 2002.

*Philip Wolmuth. 1975: demolition of shops and houses in Kensal Road, North Kensington.*

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

Mariette Pathy Allen: Transformations

Posted on February 23, 2021

*Mariette Pathy Allen. “Christine Jorgensen at Home, Near LA,” 1984.*

“I seem to operate on flukes,” says American photographer Mariette Pathy Allen, who began documenting the transgender community after finding herself drawn to a group in the dining room of her New Orleans hotel during Mardi Gras in 1978.

“I always felt there was something wrong with society’s rules that said men are supposed to be one way and women are supposed to be another,” Allen says. “I was always thinking about big issues like, ‘How do we determine who we are?’ Then I met these wonderful people and I felt like they were living the questions that I was asking myself.”

From that serendipitous encounter in the lobby, a bond was formed, one that empowered Allen to document trans communities in the United States, Cuba, Burma, Thailand, and Mexico. In the new exhibition, Transformations, Allen revisits portraits made between 1978 and 1989 when the trans and gender-variant community was still very much underground.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Mariette Pathy Allen. “Vicky West Dancing the Cancan with My Daughters, Cori and Julia, Bridgehampton, NY,” 1982.*

*Mariette Pathy Allen. “Beth and Her Husband, Rita, Boston, MA,” 1983.*

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

Asmaa Walton: Black Art Library

Posted on February 23, 2021

We learn to read by looking at pictures. Our earliest books are filled with spellbinding images of the world, stories that teach us about who we are. But as we grow older we are taught to put such “childish” things aside despite the insights reading images can provide. In time, many grow turned off by books, due in no small part to the parochial texts foist upon us in school. Few rediscover the meditative pleasures of picture books; the high price point and niche subject matter rendering countless art books into obscurity every year. But with the creation of the Black Art Library, art educator Asmaa Walton is making illustrated books accessible to a generation raised on the internet.

Acknowledging her short attention span made it difficult to read long texts, Walton was drawn to the beautiful images that drew her in, keeping her focused and engaged with texts for longer periods of time. After sharing her Amazon wish list with close friends, Walton’s art book collection began to take shape. In December 2019, the Black Art Library emerged as Walton began to share some of her favourite books on Instagram.

“I always think about ways I can share the knowledge I have on Black Art and make it interesting,” Walton says. As the new HBO documentary,Black Art: In the Absence of Light, reveals, the art world has excluded Black artists from the canon for hundreds of years. For every Gordon Parks, Jacob Lawrence, or Romare Bearden, far too many others have gone unrecognised, their contributions relegated to a footnote or wholly erased from the conversation. It is only since the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2016 US Presidential election that a Black Art Moment began to take shape as museums and galleries scrambled to fill the voids in their collections.

With the new exhibition, The Black Art Library, Walton fills an important void, sourcing landmark monographs, exhibition catalogues, and rare research materials that the public can peruse at their leisure in her hometown of Detroit. In a time of social isolation, the book can create an intimate connection with someone you may otherwise never meet. Here, Walton shares her thoughts on just a handful of the books included in the Black Art Library.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

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

Donna Ferrato: Holy

Posted on February 12, 2021

American photographer Donna Ferrato is a force of nature, determined and unafraid to call out the injustice against women, break down taboos, and celebrate femininity in its many forms. In her new book Holy (powerHouse Books), Ferrato takes us on a journey in the fight for women’s liberation over the past half-century.

In the book, which is organised into sections honouring the Mother, the Daughter, and the Other, Ferrato reclaims the sacred while taking shots at the patriarchy – a position she adopted as a young girl. Ferrato remembers the confusion, frustration, and anger she felt taking catechism class in Catholic school. The Holy Trinity confounded her. “It didn’t make any sense that there was a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost,” she says.

Faced with erasure, Ferrato challenged authority, asking questions no one would or could explain. “It seems like mankind is too satisfied with getting some fairytale to explain the great mysteries in life. But I don’t want to accept any of that, and I want to give credit where credit is due. This is what Holy is about.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Roy Mehta: Revival – London 1989-1993

Posted on January 26, 2021

In the 1960s, Roy Mehta’s family emigrated from India to the Kenton section of Brent, the most diverse district in London. Home to long-established Afro-Caribbean and Asian populations, the borough also includes significant Somali, Brazilian, Chinese, Irish, Italian, and Romanian communities.

As the only member of his family born in London, Mehta holds a unique perspective of the world, one honed by time spent in nearby Harlesden where his father worked as a GP, and at the Wembley Market, where he spent time with his mother and sister.

In 1989, while attending art school in Surrey, Mehta embarked on a project documenting life on the streets of Brent to make work that spoke to this family connection. Over the next five years, Mehta would create an intimate portrait of everyday life, photographing people on the streets, in their homes, and attending places of worship where they could freely express themselves.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Stephen Frailey: Looking at Photography

Posted on January 25, 2021

*Pink Powder, Lilly Donaldson wearing John Galliano, 2008 © NICK KNIGHT.*

We see before we think or speak, often relying upon pictures to learn words themselves. Our first books contain pictures, showing us how to translate the visual world into a verbal one, and in turn teaching us that images contain a language all their own.

It has been said, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” suggesting a single image can contain vast stores of information and ideas, as well as be a singular experience unto themselves, evoking a visceral response. In a world filled with images, visual literacy is an underutilized tool to help people navigate contemporary life.

Recognizing this, John Szarkowski, then Director of Photography at MoMA, penned the seminal 1973 book, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, an accessible history of photography for seeking to learn how to become proficient at reading pictures.

Nearly half a century later, the world has become deluged by stores of images flooding our daily lives by virtue of the explosion of digital technology and our reliance upon it. Yet the subject of visual literacy goes largely unaddressed, and it is for this reason that photographer and educator Stephen Frailey’s new book, Looking at Photography (Damiani) is a much-needed contribution to the discourse.

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*Poster, Koriyama City, 1990 © DAIDO MORIYAMA.*

*Bester V, Mayotte, 2015 ZANELE MUHOLI.*

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