Posts from the “1990s” Category

How Danny Lyon Became the Defining Photographer of America’s Outsiders

Posted on May 10, 2024

Few artists are willing to risk it all, except those who know no other way to exist. Photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon inherited the spirit of rebellion and resistance from his mother, who regaled him with heroic tales of her brothers’ fearless crusade against the Tsar in the Russian and Bolshevik Revolutions of the early 20th century. As a young boy growing up in Queens, New York, Lyon would lie in bed at night and dream of seeing the world – never knowing his destiny was inextricably bound to history, art, and film.

Now 82, Lyon charts his extraordinary journey in the new book, This is My Life I’m Talking About (Damiani), a picaresque memoir that reveals his natural gifts for storytelling. Like his photographs, Lyon’s prose is electric, poetic, and filled with explosive details, bringing readers into the middle of the action before roaring off to the next episode. The stories move with the same intense pace with which he worked, crisscrossing the country on his red Triumph motorcycle during the 1960s.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Danny Lyon. Susan Measles and Nancy Weiss.*

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

Larry Racioppo: Coney Island Baby

Posted on October 29, 2021

*Larry Racioppo. Palm Reading sign and the Thunderbolt rollercoaster, 1978.*

With its beach, boardwalk, and amusement park, Coney Island has long been the perfect escape from the stress of everyday life. South Brooklyn native Larry Racioppo and his extended family reveled in the pleasures of “America’s Playground” during his youth and teen years.

In the late 1960s, Racioppo enrolled in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and traveled to rural California, where he served two and a half years. He returned home in November 1970, with the dream of becoming a photographer.

In early 1971, Racioppo and a friend drove out to Coney Island to revisit his childhood stomping grounds — only to discover “Electric Eden” was on the brink of collapse. The once bustling boardwalk empire had become a ghost town. Abandoned buildings, burned out lots, neglect, disrepair, and white supremacist graffiti had brought seaside paradise to a standstill.

“Seeing the physical decline in my neighborhood and the city in general saddened me,” says Racioppo. “When I went to Coney Island I was struck by its emptiness. I saw that some attractions like the Tilyou Theater were closed not for the winter but for good.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Larry Racioppo. Young Boy in the Arcade, 1979.*

*Larry Racioppo. Stauch’s Baths with WARRIORS graffiti, 1979.*

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

Helmut Newton: Legacy

Posted on October 25, 2021

*Helmut Newton. Thierry Mugler Fashion, US Vogue, Monte Carlo, 1995*.

“One’s period is when one is very young,” wrote fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland in her 1984 memoir D.V., a pertinent observation about the ways in which our aesthetic sensibilities are imprinted during our earliest years. For Helmut Newton, whose childhood was spent in Weimar, Germany, the luminous drama of noir and glamour cast a powerful imprint upon his style, one that he brought to bear throughout his revolutionary fashion photography career.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1920, Helmut Neustädter fell in love with photography at a young age. At 12, he started photographing the Funkturm (Radio Tower), a sleek, chic symbol of the emerging modern age and a motif to which he would return. Surrounded by artists, intellectuals and innovators who made Berlin one of the most avant-garde cities of the time, young Helmut came of age in a culture ripe with pleasure, provocation, and decadence.

“It sounds quite promising as one thinks of the liberalism of the Weimar Republic and the Roaring Twenties, of alcoholic and erotic debauchery,” says Dr Matthias Harder, Director and Curator, in advance of the opening of Helmut Newton: Legacy at the Helmut Newton Foundation on 31 October. “Helmut’s mother, an elegant woman with a strong sense of fashion, influenced him early on. In 1936, aged 16, Helmut began a two-year apprenticeship with then-famous photographer Yva, who published her sophisticated and, for the time, sometimes erotically-charged fashion photographs and portraits in many magazines.”

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Helmut Newton. Prada, Monte Carlo, 1984.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, i-D, Photography

Jamel Shabazz: Prospect Park – My Oasis In Brooklyn

Posted on October 14, 2021

Hailing from Red Hook, Brooklyn, Jamel Shabazz recounts his early memories of visiting Prospect Park in the mid-1960s. Spring was in the air and his youthful Aunt Bev took Shabazz and his two cousins on the F train to the park.

“The atmosphere of the park was quite refreshing after a strenuous school week and a great escape from the concrete and congestion of public housing,” Shabazz says. “What I remember most was the beautiful greenery, numerous horse trails, and the warm spirited people I would meet along the way. It felt like being in another state.”

The son of a Navy photographer, Shabazz first picked up the camera in high school, making portraits of his friends. After graduating, he served in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany. Shabazz and his unit spent a lot of time in the Black Forest where he developed a deep appreciation for nature. “I recall thinking to myself that the only other place that mirrors this atmosphere, is Prospect Park,” he says.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Gillian Laub: Family Matters

Posted on September 29, 2021

*Gillian Laub, Grandpa helping Grandma out, 1999, from Family Matters (Aperture, 2021). © Gillian Laub*

On a brisk winter afternoon in 1999, Jewish-American photographer Gillian Laub stepped onto the streets of New York’s Upper East Side to enjoy a cigarette in between classes at the International Center of Photography. As she stood there, a Norwegian classmate spotted a gaggle of older women adorned in lavish furs and brightly colored lipstick walking down the block. He found them vulgar and called them as much. Gillian nodded along — until recognition struck.

“Gillian, oh my gawd, what are you doing up here?” her grandmother Bea screamed, the thick Bronx Yiddish accent filling the air like the full-bodied parfum of a potato knish served up piping hot from a sidewalk cart. Bea, accompanied by Gillian’s mother and her Aunt Phyllis, enveloped her with an effusive display of hugs and kisses, before rejoining a larger group of ladies making their weekly Upper East Side art crawl.

Gillian felt embarrassed, then defensive, wanting the Scandinavian student to understand and perhaps empathize with her family’s rags to riches story; their exuberant show of wealth — like their extravagant displays of affection — was evidence of their fierce determination to overcome prejudice and discrimination. Gillian fought back the urge to explain how a series of anti-Semitic pogroms during the Russian Revolution of 1905 split both sides of her family apart. Her great-grandparents fled Ukraine and headed to distant shores, arriving in the US in the early 20th century to make a better life for themselves.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Gillian Laub, Chappaqua backyard, 2000, from Family Matters (Aperture, 2021). © Gillian Laub*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, i-D, Photography

DASHCAM – Dash Snow: Photographs of Life

Posted on September 24, 2021

*Dash Snow. Untitled (Jade and Secret Nest), 2007.*

A mythic figure in every sense of the word, Dash Snow evoked the romantic archetype of the rebel who sacrificed everything, including, ultimately, his own life. A member of the 27 Club, Dash died from a drug overdose in 2009, just as his star was on the rise.

Born Dashiell Snow on the 27th of July 1981, Dash was the great-grandson of French aristocrats and art collectors Dominique and John de Menil, founders of the Menil Collection museum and the Rothko Chapel, a chapel and work of modern art home to 14 paintings by Mark Rothko, both in Houston. An anti-authoritarian to the core, Dash rebelled against his parents and was sent away to a boarding school for troubled youth. After getting out, he fled to New York during the 1990s and 00s — the last gasp of the city’s once-legendary libertine age — and quickly fell in with the city’s demi-monde.

As a member of the legendary graffiti crew IRAK, Dash was an integral figure on the downtown scene. His exploits became the stuff of legend alongside a wild cast of characters. The quintessential renegade, Dash embodied the ethos of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll as he charted his way from the upper echelons of society to the streets, refusing to play by the rules. But the very world he disdained loved him for his insouciance, catapulting him to art star for his antics — like sperm and glitter-encrusted collages of Saddam Hussein or the “hamster nests” whereby rooms would be entirely destroyed, made ritualistically with friend Dan Colen in hotels and later galleries.

In what would have been his 40th year, Morán Morán and the Dash Snow Estate have organized DASHCAM – Dash Snow: Photographs of Life, the artist’s first posthumous gallery exhibition in the United States. Guest curated by Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator of White Columns, New York, the exhibition focuses on Dash’s lesser-known black-and-white 35mm photography.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Dash Snow. Untitled (Self-portrait in Bedroom), 2008.*

*Dash Snow. Untitled (Gang Gang Dance), 2006.*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, i-D, Manhattan, Photography

Janette Beckman: Leaders of the New School

Posted on September 20, 2021

*Leaders of the New School, 1991 © Janette Beckman*

British photographer Janette Beckman arrived in New York City in December 1982 to spend the Christmas holiday with some friends. But after a couple of weeks in town, she was hooked — and never left. Beckman remembers staying in a loft of Franklin Street in Tribeca just opposite the Mudd Club when the neighborhood was still an artist’s outpost.

“I didn’t mind the sketchy industrial neighborhood. I had been living in an unheated squat in rainy London and there was heat!” Beckman revels in the memory of the steam heaters designed after the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that made rooms so hot, people were forced to throw open their windows in the dead of winter. “There were artists living in the building and I was in the thick of it. We’d go out to clubs and then meet up afterwards at Dave’s Corner Luncheonette, which was open 24 hours on the corner of Broadway and Canal Street. It was a very exciting time.”

Armed with her portfolio of photographs documenting London’s famed punk scene, Beckman went around to the record labels to see art directors in the hopes of shooting for them. But her photographs of the punk icons including Sex Pistols, Clash, and Siouxsie Sioux were too gritty for the high glossy aesthetics of 1980’s American pop. “They just looked at me and said, ‘We can’t really use you because the people in these pictures, their hair isn’t combed,’” Beckman remembers. “I was disappointed because I came from the music scene in England and thought I was going to get work.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1990s, Art, Blind, Music, Photography

Bruce Davidson: In Color

Posted on September 14, 2021

*Central Park, 1991 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

As a teen coming of age, Bruce Davidson can remember his sense of color taking root in 1949. While working at a local camera store during his senior year of high school, Davidson was introduced to Al Cox Jr., a commercial photographer working in the town of Oak Park, Illinois. Cox invited Davidson to assist him with various tasks, including the painstaking process of making color prints in the darkroom. “It left an indelible impression on me at the age of seventeen,” Davidson wrote in Bruce Davidson: In Color, just re-released for the first time in five years.

After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Davidson enrolled in the Design Department at Yale University in the 1950s where he met artist and educator Josef Albers, one of the foremost color theorists of the twentieth century. “His demonstrations had an impact on me at the time but I was not yet committed to color as a way of life,” Davidson wrote.

After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, Davidson returned to New York in 1957 to resume his photography practice. Drawn to the Old World atmosphere of the Lower East Side, Davidson discovered among the pushcart vendors, tailors, and merchants a feeling of connection and community among people like his grandfather, a Polish émigré who arrived in the United States at the age of 14. Here he began making color photographs of the city as it was then — a world of immigrants who brought their culture to the streets of New York.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Chicago, 1989 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

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

Joe Conzo: The Elements

Posted on September 8, 2021

*Sal & Mickey Abbatiello, The Fever: 365 Nights of Hip Hop*

“Never in my wildest dreams as a kid from the South Bronx did I think that photography would bring me around the world,” says photographer, author, and activist Joe Conzo.

Coming of age in 1970s New York, Conzo’s worldview was shaped by his grandmother, Dr. Evelina Antonetty, who was fondly known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx” for the work she did on behalf of the Puerto Rican community; his mother, community Lorraine Montenegro; and his father, Joe Conzo Sr., legendary bandleader Tito Puente’s personal manager and confidante.

Conzo witnessed the city’s infrastructure collapse under the weight of “benign neglect”, which denied basic government services to Black and brown communities across the United States, while landlord-sponsored arson reduced city blocks to rubble. He quickly learned the best way to create change was through collective action.

Read the Full Story a Huck

*Biggie Rolling Dice by Manuel Acevedo, 1994*

*Japanese Print by Manuel Acevedo, 1986*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Huck, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Sarah Schulman: Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

Posted on September 7, 2021

*The House of Color video collective. From left to right: Pamela Sneed, Robert Garcia, Julie Tolentino, Jocelyn Taylor, Wellington Love, Idris Mingott, Jeff Nunokawa © T. L. Litt*

*Kissing Doesn’t Kill © Courtesy of Gran Fury*

In 1987, the American government’s impassivity facing the AIDS pandemic led people to organize themselves in order to act. A broad coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds came together as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) — and in just six years, they changed the world.

“Five people cannot do a paradigm shift in America — you need coalitions to make change,” says Sarah Schulman, author of the new book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, which brings together more than 200 interviews with ACT UP members to create a masterpiece of activist history and tactics.

Together the members of ACT UP waged a multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They played offense, taking charge in a wide array of actions that included storming the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Washington, DC, and battling The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry to get results.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Mark Lowe Fisher’s funeral. From left to right: Tim Lunceford, Joy Episalla, BC Craig, Vincent Gagliostro, Scott Morgan, Eric Sawyer (partial) (Photographer unknown)*

*Tim Bailey’s political funeral, with Joy Episalla in the van, June 30, 1993 © Donna Binder*

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

Albert Watson: Creating Photographs

Posted on August 23, 2021

*Divine, New York City, 1978 © Albert Watson*

On the cusp of his 80th birthday, Scottish photographer Albert Watson has become one of the greatest photographers of our time. With more than 100 covers for Vogue, 40 covers forRolling Stone, and 100 album covers for Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Sade, Aaliyah, and Jay-Z, Watson stands alongside Irving Penn and Richard Avedon as an artist whose work has transformed the very way we see.

Since publishing his iconic photograph of Alfred Hitchcock holding a cooked goose by the neck for the 1973 Christmas issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Watson has become a veritable force of nature. Whether shooting fashion, celebrity, portraiture, advertising, landscape, still life, or fine art, Watson is equally comfortable photographing Queen Elizabeth II or Tupac Shakur.

With the recent publication of Creating Photographs, Watson offers an affordable and accessible guide to the secrets of his photography career, including, “Be bold,” “Capture the geography of the face,” “See the beauty and charisma of objects,” and “Surround yourself with good people.”

The book opens with a chapter titled, “Learning from the journey,” Watson looks back on half a century behind the camera. “I wasn’t trying to be a photographer so there was a lot I had to learn. I assumed that I should be learning technical things in the same way you learn to drive a car,” he reveals. Learning on the job, Watson discovered how things worked, what made them good or bad, and how he could make them better through the fusion of technique and creativity.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Mick Jagger in Car with Leopard, Los Angeles, 1992 © Albert Watson*

*Gabrielle Reece in Vivienne Westwood, Paris, 1989 © Albert Watson*

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