Posts from the “1980s” Category

Mike Abrahams: Toxteth 1979-1982

Posted on January 22, 2021

*Mike Abrahams. Young men on Granby Street, Toxteth. Liverpool 8. 1982*

The Toxteth section of Liverpool is the oldest Black community in England, dating back to the American Revolution of 1776. Over the centuries, it has been home to a bustling mix of West Indian, African, Chinese, Irish, and Welsh immigrants.

But that didn’t stop racism from infiltrating the area: after World War I, white Britons blamed Black people for unemployment and housing insecurity. Their rage erupted into riots in 1919, when thousands ran amok for days. Their rampage resulted in the destruction of Black-owned properties and the death of 24-year-old Bermudan Charles Wootton, who was chased into the River Mersey by a mob, as police looked on. Police officers listed drowning as the cause of the Bermudian’s death; no one was held accountable.

The underlying bigotry continued to fester, creating tensions that resulted in a Black-led rebellion on July 3, 1981. A large crowd had gathered after word got out that an unidentified young Black man had been arrested and placed in the back of a police van.

Among those in attendance was Leroy Cooper, a 21-year-old photography student, who was violently arrested in front of the crowd, sparking nine days of civil unrest that resulted in the death of a disabled man, David Moore, 500 arrests, and the destruction of 70 buildings. The subsequent Scarman Report, which focused largely on the Brixton uprising of the same year, acknowledged that systemic issues facing Black communities in the UK were the root cause of the protests.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Mike Abrahams. Protesting against the police racist and oppressive tactics in Toxteth during the riots of 1981*

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

Jim Goldberg: Fingerprints

Posted on January 18, 2021

*Untitled Polaroid from Raised By Wolves © Jim Goldberg*

A century after photographer Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, a harrowing portrait of urban poverty, Jim Goldberg took to the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco where he met a cadre of homeless children fending for themselves. From 1985–1995, Goldberg bore witness to chaotic reality of street life to create Raised by Wolves, a collection of photographs, snippets of conversation, handwritten notes, drawings, snapshots, and the detritus of daily life, which the Washington Post called, “A heartbreaking novel with pictures.”

The protagonists, Tweaky Dave and Echo, were charismatic but troubled youth, whose personalities, histories, and dreams leap from the page and grab you by the throat. With Raised by Wolves, Goldberg found a way inside a band of outsiders whose existence has been alternately vilified, marginalized, or erased, and restored to them a humanity that had been stripped by addiction, violence, and abuse.

The book transformed the role that photography could play as it collapsed the space between documentary and narrative fiction, revealing the endless interplay between myth, history, and identity. The people were real, their circumstances harrowing, but their stories contained half-truths and falsehoods constructed to reflect what they want or need to believe. Tweeky Dave described his devout Christian parents as a junkie slut and a biker from Hell; while untrue the slanderous depictions seemed befitting for a couple who later turned their back on their dying son.

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

Gilles Peterson: Cuba: Music and Revolution – Original Album Cover Art of Cuban Music: The Record Sleeve Designs of Revolutionary Cuba 1960–85

Posted on January 15, 2021

From rhumba to salsa, mambo to jazz, the music of Cuba has set the world aflame. Seamlessly fusing the melodies of Spanish guitar with complex African drum patterns to create an endless variety of intoxicating styles, it has become one of the most influential sounds of our times.

After the Cuban Revolution, the state launched its official record company, Egrem, which stands for ‘Empresa de Grabaciones y Ediciones Musicales’ (‘Enterprise of Recordings and Musical Editions’) in 1964. At that time, record sleeves were one of the only means for an artist to convey their image to the public en masse. The government understood the power of art, photography, and graphic design to spread its message around the globe.

“We must bear in mind that a new society is being established in Cuba and graphic art plays an important role in communicating the message to this society,” Cuban graphic designer Félix Beltrán is quoted as having said in 1969 in the new book, Cuba: Music and Revolution – Original Album Cover Art of Cuban Music: The Record Sleeve Designs of Revolutionary Cuba 1960–85 (Soul Jazz Records) edited by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Huck, Latin America, Photography

Irving Penn: Photographism

Posted on January 15, 2021

*Irving Penn. Girl Behind Bottle, New York, 1949.*

In 1996, Vasilios Zatse began his journey with Irving Penn, starting as an apprentice to the master photographer and rising to become the deputy director of the Irving Penn Foundation. Zatse remembers arriving at Penn’s Fifth Avenue studio for the job interview, expecting to see the most modern equipment, only to be whisked back in time.

“When you stepped into the studio, it was as if the outside world didn’t exist. You were in Penn’s world,” Zatse says. “It felt like an atelier. It was a studio with very plainly painted walls, white and battleship grey, and creaky worn wooden floors and some of the cameras that dated to his beginnings at Vogue magazine, going back as far as the early 1940s or early 50s.”

Penn never fixed what already worked, but he constantly sought new solutions to old problems. “Penn was not one to accept given formulas, approach a task or an idea in a very elemental fashion,” Zatse says. “On more than one occasion he built his own cameras for specific concepts or ideas. Penn was not shy about thinking outside of the box.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Irving Penn. Two Hairy Young Women, New York, 1995.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Paolo Roversi: Birds

Posted on January 12, 2021

Rei Kawakubo is the living embodiment of radical fashion, her powers extending far beyond the runway. Known for her reticence to explain her masterful, mindboggling designs to the press, the founder of Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market has deftly maintained her enigmatic charms for more than half a century.

A true rara avis, Kawakubo told the Guardian in 2018 that she identifies punk “as a spirit, as a way of living”. Eschewing all that is popular in favour of that which is original, rebellious and authentic, Kawakubo, now 78, is one of the greatest designers working today.

One of Kwakubo’s gifts is her ability to trust that once she has done her part, we will do ours. It is a position she extends to collaborators alike. “Rei doesn’t give any instruction or any rules,” observes Italian photographer Paolo Roversi, who has worked with Kawakubo for four decades. “She lets you do your interpretation of her ideas, and still today it is the same. She did not change.”

Roversi remembers meeting Kawakubo in 1983 when she presented her first collection in a Paris hotel. “I was a little shocked because this moment was the Vogue designers: Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler. Then Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto changed a lot of those things. Rei was even more revolutionary – there were sweaters with holes, strange shoes. You felt she was taking a risk. She was going in the direction where no one was going before. Everything was different and new.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Fashion, Photography

Michael Brennan: They Must Fall – Muhammad Ali and the Men He Fought

Posted on January 8, 2021

*The Deafening Silence. Muhammad Ali in retirement, Los Angeles, Wednesday February 23, 1983 © Michael Brennan*

To be a world champion boxer, you must be a warrior in and out of the ring, a master of both the sport and the psychology that allows one man to dominate another. Muhammad Ali, the G.O.A.T. (“Greatest of All Time”), learned this lesson at the start of his career, when he converted to Islam and faced the rage of the mainstream press during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

But it didn’t stop there. On April 28, 1967, Ali refused to be inducted into the Armed Services to fight into the Vietnam War on religious grounds. The following day, the U.S. government stripped him of the World Heavyweight title and had his boxing license suspended. Sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, so he did what any fighter would do — he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was overturned in an unanimous decision in 1970. Ali immediately set forth to restore his reputation and his career, training harder than ever before and taking on all contenders in the ring.

As it so happened, Ali unknowingly crossed paths with Michael Brennan that same year while the British photographer sat in an airport outside Glasglow, Scotland on a quiet Saturday afternoon. “Suddenly the departure lounge doors opened and five or six big Black guys lead by Ali came running through the airport, chanting,” Brennan says. “They went out [on to the tarmac] and up the stairs of the airplane. The door closed and the airplane took off.”

A member of Ali’s camp was seated near Brennan and they began to chat. He gave the photographer his card and invited him to call whenever he was in the states. Three years later Brennan did just that when he moved to New York City. “In the early days, I wasn’t getting much work and I knew that if I took the bus to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, walked to Ali’s camp, and knocked on the door, he would come out. I would take a picture and that was the rent paid for the next month,” he remembers.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Sonny Liston. Fought Ali twice: February 25, 1964, title fight, Miami Beach; RTD after 6thround, and 25 May 1965, Lewiston, Maine; KO’d in the 1st round © Michael Brennan*

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

The Best Photo Stories of 2020: Portrayals of Sex and Identity

Posted on December 23, 2020

*Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Ladies and Gentlemen (Easha McCleary), 1974. Unique polaroid print*

“I am large. I contain multitudes,” American poet Walt Whitman famously wrote in “Song of Myself,” a profound work of humanism written more than a century before the nation would ride up demanding civil rights for all. Identity is not a singular thing but a kaleidoscopic expression of self. Like DNA, identity connects us across time and space to bridge the past, present, and the future of humanity.

Yet in a world where many have been marginalised or erased, we are charged to set the record straight, righting the wrongs of the past by telling stories that honour the legacy of our ancestors. Here, we showcase ten artists who explore ideas of sexuality, race and ethnicity in their work, revealing a shared love for that which unites us across generations.

*Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Sex Parts and Torsos, 1977. Unique polaroid print*

Andy Wathol: Sex Parts and Torsos and Ladies & Gentlemen

As the Gay Liberation Movement took off during the 1970s, Andy Warhol embraced the LGBTQ community, creating two seminal bodies of work, “Sex Parts and Torsos” and “Ladies & Gentlemen.” He began making tightly framed Polaroids of the torsos, buttocks, and penises of men recruited from hay bathhouses, though he largely kept these works hidden for years, describing them as “landscapes” in an effort to distinguish them from the recent influx of pornographic works.

At the same time, Warhol photographed trans icons including Marsha P. Johnson, Vicki Peters and Wilhelmina Ross for a portrait series titled Ladies & Gentlemen. Amanda Hajjar, Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska New York, observes: “What makes Warhol’s series special is that he captured Black trans women in a way that celebrated their identities and provided them with space to express themselves freely and fully.”

Luke Gilford: National Anthem – America’s Queer Rodeo

American photographer Luke Gilford inherited his love of rodeo from his father, a champion and judge who filled their home with memorabilia of the sport. In 2016, Gilford discovered the International Gay Rodeo Association and began to make portraits of LGBTQ riders collected in the book “National Anthem: America’s Queer Rodeo” (Damiani).

“One of my close friends in the rodeo community is a Black, gender-nonconforming bull rider. They said to me simply, ‘If I show up, I’m a cowboy.’ And they’re accepted as such, with no questions asked,” Gildford says. “This series is my way of holding up each person with dignity and respect, and showing a beauty, strength, glamour, or tenderness that they may not have seen before.”

*Sunil Gupta, Untitled #22, 1976. From the series Christopher Street*

From Here to Eternity: Sunil Gupta. A Retrospective

With “From Here to Eternity: Sunil Gupta. A Retrospective,” a major solo exhibition currently on view at The Photographers’ Gallery and accompanying book, Sunil Gupta looks back at works from 16 series made over the past 45 years that explore how the Delhi-born, Montreal-raised, London-based artist has used photography as a form of activism to address his experiences as a gay Indian man living with HIV.

“I photograph what’s around me, what’s happening to me, and this central question of, ‘What does it mean to be a gay man of Indian origin?’ That’s what stuck with me most of my life and it’s never really gone away,” Gupta tells Indian-American photographer Nick Sethi in a cross-generational conversation about art.

*Patch, Amsterdam, April 22, 1992 © The Remsen Wolff Collection, Courtesy of Jochem Brouwer 2020*

Remsen Wolff: Amsterdam Girls

In 1990, American photographer Remsen Wolff (1940–1998) embarked on the creation of “Special Girls – A Celebration”, creating more than 100,000 portraits of over 125 trans and genderfluid models from New York and Amsterdam. Wolff, who described himself as a “faux transsexual” made annual month-long pilgrimages to Amsterdam between 1990–1992 to photograph nightlife luminaries as well as anonymous trans women struggling with their gender identity – an issue the artist understood all too well. Like his subjects, Wolff was determined to shine – even if it took him a lifetime of wandering to find his way home.

Paul Smith: The Human Curve

An integral part of the downtown New York art scene in the 1980s, American artist Paul Smith began making using a homemade pinhole camera to create “Bodily Fluids” a series of black and white landscapes and sensuous scenes of sexual self-discovery made during the height of the Aids crisis.

“It wasn’t so common then for people to exhibit sexually intimate and frank work then,” Smith says. “I wanted to depict sex from a participant’s point of view, rather than from a voyeur’s. I would set up a shot but it was pretty improvisatory; I suppose I was just operating out of my libido.”

Read the Full List at AnOther

*Sunil Gupta, Untitled #9, 2010. From the series Sun City*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Books, Exhibitions

Huck: Top Ten Photo Stories of 2020

Posted on December 23, 2020

In a challenging year, visual storytellers are still finding exciting ways to document – be it through innovative new projects, or old archive series now seeing the light of day. Here are the best ones we covered this year.

Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha

Growing up in Germany, Russian Ghanaian artist Liz Johnson Artur spent her summers in the former Soviet Union. But in 1986, she received an invitation to stay with a family friend in Brooklyn. Deep in Williamsburg, long before it was gentrified, Artur found herself in a Black community for the very first time.

“Up until then I hadn’t really travelled in any countries that had a Black population,” she says. “Coming to Brooklyn was something I didn’t expect, but I realiszd I could take pictures of people.”

Karen O’Sullivan: Somewhere Below 14th & East

By the ’80s, New York’s Lower East Side (LES) had been decimated by the ravages of drugs, “benign neglect” and landlord-sponsored arson. As squatters took over abandoned buildings, living side by side with black and Latinx residents, they immersed themselves in the sound of hardcore, punk, and hip hop exemplified by bands like The Clash, Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, Black Flag, the Misfits and Minor Threat.

The LES became the Mecca of all things anti-glamour and glitz, raging against the Reagan-fueled yuppification of Manhattan. As the centre of resistance from the coming onslaught of gentrification, the neighborhood welcomed outcasts into the mix, giving them an outlet for creativity and self-expression in an increasingly neoliberal city.

Sergio Purtell: Love’s Labour

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.”

Read the Full List at Huck

*Liz Johnson Artur, Josephine, Peckham, 1995.*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait

Posted on December 15, 2020

In the mid-1970s, at the same time Cindy Sherman started making self portraits to explore the construction of white female identity, half way around the globe, Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso opened his own studio at the tender age of 13. Casting himself as the subject of his work, Fosso used photography to stake his claim in the world.

Born in 1962, Fosso was sick and partly paralyzed as a child. Although Nigerians traditionally commission a portrait of their child at three months, his father saw it as a waste of money. Fosso wasn’t photographed until he was 10 — a void that shaped his vision from the very beginning. Growing up in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, Fosso fled to Bangui, Central African Republic, to live with an uncle after his mother died. He apprenticed at a local photo studio for just five months before opening Studio Photo National in 1975.

“In Africa we say to become a real photographer you have to take the picture and then make the print yourself; that’s how you establish your professional credentials,” Fosso says in the new book, Autoportrait (The Walther Collection/Steidl), which brings together five decades of Fosso’s self portraiture.

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

Janette Beckman: The MashUp 2: Punk Photographs Remixed

Posted on December 14, 2020

Tim Kerr – Don’t let your heroes get your kicks for you © Janette Beckman

Many people associate graffiti with hip hop because of Charlie Ahearn’s 1982 film,Wild Style, which brought the underground art to the global stage for the very first time. Fab 5 Freddy, who starred in the film, understood the importance of introducing a codified culture to the world. In a series of vibrant tableaux, Wild Style presents what is now referred to as the “four elements of hip hop”: DJs (music), MCs (literature), B-boy (dance), and graffiti writers (visual art).

But true graffiti heads know the art predates the advent of hip-hop by half a decade, developing in tandem with but often times separate from rap music, Early graffiti writers were huge fans of rock and funk music. Some fell in love with the emerging punk scene of the mid-70s, as it encapsulated the same raw, anti-establishment ethos that graffiti required of its practitioners.

By the late 1970s, graffiti transformed the New York City landscape as writers painted masterpieces across the side of an entire subway car, simultaneously filing the insides with marker tags, turning every bare surface into a page from an autograph book. Meanwhile across the pond, British photographer Janette Beckman was getting her start at the Kingsway Princeton School for Further Education, teaching photography to a group of teen just a few years younger than she was. The year was 1976 and a student named John Lydon had just left the school and joined the Sex Pistols. Change was in the air.

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

Janette Beckman: El Hoyo Maravilla

Posted on December 2, 2020

While staying at the Beverly Hills bungalow of Go-Gos manager Ginger Canzoneri during the summer of 1983, British photographer Janette Beckman read a story in LA Weekly about a gang war happening on the streets of East Los Angeles.

“The article described this culture going on half an hour drive from where I was staying,” says Beckman, who was shooting music and underground cultures for Melody Maker and The Face. “I needed to go and check it out. It described them, what they wore and I was like, ‘Where are the photos?’”

Beckman got in touch with the journalist and he brought her out to Maravilla Park, home to El Hoyo Maravilla – a Mexican-American gang that got its start in 1935. “People told me it was a dangerous neighbourhood but I just went. I am really a believer that people are basically good,” Beckman says.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1980s, Art, Huck, Photography