Posts from the “1990s” Category

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

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

Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer

Posted on November 26, 2020

*Michael Clark during the opening of Derek Jarman, ICA, London, February 1984 © Steve Pyke*

*Michael Clark & Company with The Fall in I Am Curious, Orange, 1988 Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London © Richard Haughton*

With the conviction that actions speak louder than words, Michael Clark has transformed the face of the contemporary dance world since launching his own company in 1984.

“Rock is my rock. It has been vital to me at a personal level; it has shaped me as an individual as well as an artist,” says Clark. His collaborations with individualistic musicians like Wire, Laibach, The Fall, Jarvis Cocker and Scritti Politti, as well as boundary-breaking fashion designers and visual artists including BodyMap, Leigh Bowery, Trojan, Sarah Lucas, Charles Atlas, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Peter Doig have marked him as “British dance’s true iconoclast”.

“Michael’s choreography was like nothing I had ever seen – the movement and musicality, the props and costumes, it was so edgy, brave, creative, sexy, and fluid – at a time when fluidity wasn’t fluid. It just set you alight,” says musician Brix Smith Start, who fondly recalls the joys of Clark’s friendship and collaboration. “Michael was part of a very fabulous London scene. We hung out, partied hard, and lived the most decadent, debauched, and penniless life. We were all just scraping around but we were rich in everything, it didn’t matter about money. Our friendship shaped me as a person today.”

In conjunction with Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, a new Barbican exhibition and Prestel catalogue, we speak with four of Clark’s many collaborators over the years for an insight into the enfant terrible of contemporary dance.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Wolfgang Tillmans, man with clouds, 1998 © The artist, Courtesy Galerie Buchholz Berlin / Cologne, Maureen Paley, London / Hove, David Zwirner, New York*

Leigh Bowery and Rachel Auburn in Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan, 1986 Still, 16mm film transferred to video, sound, duration: 84:54 minutes © Charles Atlas, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph

Posted on November 24, 2020

Throughout her extraordinary life, Ming Smith has blazed a trail, becoming a pioneering figure in front of and behind the camera. Hailing from Columbus, Ohio, Smith grew up amid the horrors of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. Her high school guidance counselor discouraged her to attend college, advising Smith her future lay as a domestic, scrubbing floors. Undeterred, Smith enrolled in Howard University and received a BS in microbiology before moving to New York City in 1973.

To pay the rent, Smith took up modeling and worked alongside Grace Jones, B. Smith, and Toukie Smith as part of the first generation of Black models in beauty and fashion. But the limelight held no particular charm for Smith. Possessed with acute sensitivity to joy and pain, she found solace in being alone, camera in hand, guided by a desire to bearing witness to the spirit made flesh. Whether on the streets of Harlem or Dakar, making portraits of photographer Gordon Parks, writer James Baldwin, and musician Sun Ra, or photographing a field of sunflowers in West Germany, Smith used the camera to preserve the fleeting and fragile beauty of the world.

“When I’m shooting, I usually have a sense: ‘This is the photograph that I’m going to print. This is the moment,’” Smith says in the new book, Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. “I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out…The image could be lost in a split second. I go with my intuition.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Ming Smith, Amen Corner Sisters, Harlem, New York, 1976, from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2020) © Ming Smith, courtesy the artist and Aperture*

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

Tom Wood: 101 Pictures

Posted on November 24, 2020

*Tom Wood. ‘Anyone got any hairspray’ 1983.*

Hailing from County Mayo, Ireland, Tom Wood fell in love with photography as a young man when he began visiting a local charity shop filled with glossy picture magazines, abandoned family albums, and vintage postcards from the turn of the century, which he purchased for a penny apiece.

He never thought of making photographs until he was an art student at Leicester Polytechnic in the mid-1970s. “After I shot a few rolls at school, I saw the same camera in a chemist shop, a Rolleicord, and bought that,” Wood says.

“I suddenly felt I could take pictures and it was dead easy. When I left college, all I wanted to do was make underground avant-garde films but 16-millimetre film was really expensive, so I thought I would just do photography for a little while.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Tom Wood. Fashion sisters (sunglasses and platforms), 1973.*

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

Lyle Ashton Harris: Ecktachrome Archive

Posted on November 13, 2020

*Lyle Ashton Harris. ké, L.A. Eyeworks, 1985.*

In 1985, Lyle Ashton Harris travelled to Amsterdam to visit his brother, where he had an epiphany. Harris – then an economics major in his junior year at Wesleyan College – was truly an artist.

“I went over a wannabe Izod prep, came back with orange hair, and dropped out of [econ] school,” he says. “My South African stepfather encouraged my family to let me do what I needed to do.”

Harris had switched majors, studied photography, and received his MFA before pursuing his masters at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. “Cal Arts was on the cutting edge, contemporary thinking around art theory, AIDS activism, feminism, and the like,” Harris says.

“It was a ripe period where not only were these ideas being discussed in the classroom, but the activism spilled out into the street around communities like ACT Up and Gran Fury.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Lyle Ashton Harris. Marlon Riggs, Black Popular Culture conference, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, December 8-10, 1991.*

*Lyle Ashton Harris. Vaginal Davis, Spew 2, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, February 2- March 3, 1992.*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test

Posted on November 12, 2020

Dancehall emerged in Jamaica in the late 1970s, as a new generation forged an indigenous national identity coming of age in the years following independence from the UK. Embracing the already well-established tradition of sound system culture, the movement made itself known at local gatherings around Kingston, quickly radiating across the Caribbean diaspora.

Growing up between Kingston and Brooklyn, Section 8 fashion designer, stylist, and artist Akeem Smith, 29, became heavily involved in the dancehall scene. His aunt Paula and grandmother co-founded the Ouch Collective – a niche fashion house that created iconic outfits for the dancers.

Over the past 12 years, Smith began creating an extensive archive of artifacts chronicling the 1990s dancehall scene that forms the basis for the new exhibition, No Gyal Can Test. Smith weaves together scenes from the era in a multi-disciplinary show that combines photography, video, ephemera, sculpture, fashion, and audio components to evoke the extraordinary creative spirit of dancehall.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music, Photography, Women

A Brief Story of Homoerotic Photography in America, Part II

Posted on November 10, 2020

As the 1960s took shape, the polished veneer of polite society was stripped away and in its place came a new generation of Americans demanding the same Constitutional rights afforded to straight white men since the nation began. The Civil Rights Movement, the Sexual Revolution, and Second-wave feminism transformed the political and cultural landscape, setting the stage for the the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement.

On June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, Black and Latinx transgender people took a stand against state-sponsored violence, leading a five-day rebellion against the New York Police Department that begat a global movement for LGBTQ rights. Once the proverbial closet doors were torn off the hinge, there was no turning back. For one brief shining decade, the future was bright.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Tony Ward in String Bondage, 1996 © Rick Castro*

*“Prince” , 2019, Archival Inkjet Print on Canson Infinity Platine, 30 x 36 in, courtesy of Shikeith*

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

Diana Markosian: Santa Barbara

Posted on November 5, 2020

On January 2, 1993, Santa Barbara became the first American television show to air in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The beloved 1980s soap opera chronicling the lives of the wealthy Capwell clan of Southern California became a sparkling image of the American Dream, captivating a nation just liberated from the yoke of a communist regime.

Born in Moscow in 1989 – the year the Berlin Wall fell and the Eastern Bloc began to crumble to dust – photographer Diana Markosian grew up idolising Santa Barbara. “It was a window to another life that didn’t belong to us,” she says.

“We had nothing as a family. My brother and I were picking bottles to buy bread for my mom. Both my parents had PhDs, but couldn’t get work. My father was painting nesting dolls for tourists on the Red Square. They were reduced to nothing and they weren’t the only ones.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

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