Posts from the “1990s” Category

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

Jamil GS: The ’90s

Posted on March 11, 2021

As the son of jazz saxophonist Sahib Shihab, who played with no less than John Coltrane, Quincy Jones, and Thelonious Monk, the connection between visual art and music was imprinted upon photographer Jamil GS as a child, while playing his father’s records and studying album covers in his hometown of Copenhagen.

“I believe input determines output,” he says. “I grew up in a very creative environment. My mother was talented at drawing and her mother was a famous illustrator working for fashion magazines and catalogues. There was a big American expat community in Copenhagen, and I was surrounded by musicians, artists, painters, poets, journalists, writers, directors, both American and Danish.”

Jamil GS got into hip hop in the 1980s at the age of 13 when he was a certified B-Boy, dancing in the clubs and bombing trains as a graffiti writer. “My dad started teaching me to play the saxophone,” he remembers. “He told me, ‘If you really want to do this and become good at it you have to practice six hours a day.’ As a teenager, I was out running the streets so I was like, I don’t know about that. I really wanted to be a professional graffiti artist, to be the next LEE or FUTURA.’”

After members of his crew got busted Jamil GS changed course, channeling his creative energy into photography, using the camera his father had given him at the age of 16. “For me, the connection with visuals and music is very close. When I hear the music, I see pictures,” he says. “I felt like photography hadn’t been explored that much by my generation. When something would come out in magazines or album art, there was a disconnect for me. I was like, this is not the experience I am having listening to this music. The music was so advanced and sophisticated: the production, compositions, poetry, slang. I wanted to make visuals that represented that.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1990s, Art, Bronx, Dazed, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Mona Kuhn: Works

Posted on March 8, 2021

As a young girl coming of age in 1980s Brazil, Mona Kuhn discovered the power of photography when she received a Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera for her 12th birthday. “Photography is a modern, fast-paced medium and in a way that is what I like because I have a very restless side to me – but at the same time it scares me,” Kuhn tells AnOther in advance of the April 6 publication of Mona Kuhn: Works (Thames & Hudson), her first retrospective monograph chronicling a quarter century of work, selections from which are now on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York.

Since she was a teenager, Kuhn had been drawn to figurative work, particularly that of painters including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. After meeting Braziian artist Mário Cravo Neto, who used figurative photography to investigate the Afro Brazilian heritage and mysticism in Bahia, Kuhn embarked on her first study of the human form.

“I always wanted to go against how fast-paced the medium is, and work with nudes as a way of stopping time,” Kuhn reveals. “I was interested in the nude because it wasn’t limited by fashion; it was open-ended. It was not an easy thing because nudes have been done a lot, maybe in ways I do not think are best. At the time I was in college, in the early 90s, Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts were iconic, but it was not how I wanted it to be.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: 1990s, AnOther, Art, Books, 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

Linda Simpson: The Drag Explosion

Posted on March 2, 2021

*Kabuki Starshine on the town, 1993 © Linda Simpson*

Once relegated to the margins, drag queens came center stage in New York City in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, as a new generation of luminous beauties came of age in the downtown nightlife scene. Eschewing the female impersonator style of past performers, young artists took their cues from Warhol Superstars like Holly Woodlawn. Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis as well as cult sensation Divine to create personality driven entertainment. Visionaries like Lady Bunny, Lypsinka, and Kevin Aviance became celebrities in their own right, transforming the way we think about gender, beauty, fashion, and glamour today.

In 1992, RuPaul’s nightlife anthem “Supermodel (You Better Work)” a nightlife anthem became a global phenomenon, taking the leggy luminary to superstar heights. With his trademark blonde tresses. flawless physique, and exquisite wardrobe, RuPaul began his journey to take drag mainstream, a dream he fully realized with the smash reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which first began airing in 2009.

But back in the 1980s, drag was still underground, and slowly taking root at the Pyramid Club, a queer nightspot on Avenue A long before the East Village was gentrified. It was here that Linda Simpson — who The New York Times described as “a mother superior of the New York drag scene” — first got her start. Along the way, Simpson, an amateur photographer, amassed an archive of some 5,000 photographs, a selection of which are included in the new book, The Drag Explosion (Domain).

Read the Full Story at Blind

*RuPaul and Willi Ninja at Coffee Shop restaurant across from Union Square Park, where Wigstock was held that year. Both performed later that day, 1991 © Linda Simpson*

*Afrodite, London Broil and Ebony Jet in the Pyramid Club dressing room, 1992 © Linda Simpson*

Categories: 1990s, Blind, Books, Manhattan

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

Larry Fink: Retrospective

Posted on January 28, 2021

*Larry Fink. George Plimpton, Jared Paul Stern, and Cameron Richardson January 1999*

“I was born a communist,” says photographer Larry Fink, who turns 80 in March. The self-described “Marxist from Long Island” who first rose to critical acclaim with Social Graces, a series of work that contrasted life in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, where the artist has lived since the 1970s, with scenes of New York’s upper crust that same decade. Exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and first published as a monograph by Aperture in 1984. the work catapulted Fink to the forefront of the photo world, despite the fact that he eschewed career ambitions in favor using photography to achieve political goals.

“My mother was a communist. She was an organizer, and she had no fear. She was a bourgeois also. She loved mink stoles. My father was a kind, patient man with a stamp collection. My folks had some money so they used to drive around in a Studs Bearcat, go to Florida, and hang out. They liked leisure, parties and jazz music so my upbringing was a contradictory one,” Fink remembers.

“My sister Liz and I were brought up believing there was the beginning of a new world at the end of the old world, that all of the old cruelties [of capitalism] would dissipate in time. They wanted to get rid of class and thought everything would purify. They were wrong but that’s beside the point. They were right in thinking that they could.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Larry Fink. New York Magazine Party New York, October 1977*

*Larry Fink. Pat Sabatine’s Eighth Birthday Party, Martins Creek Pennsylvania, April 1977*

Categories: 1970s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography

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.

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

*Bester V, Mayotte, 2015 ZANELE MUHOLI.*

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