Posts from the “AnOther Man” Category

Show Me the Picture: The Story of Jim Marshall

Posted on November 14, 2019

Johnny Cash off the bus at Folsom State Prison, Folsom, California, 1968 Photography by Jim Marshall, taken from Jim Marshall: Show Me the Picture by Amelia Davis, published by Chronicle Books 2019

In March 1984, Michelle Margetts, a 19-year-old journalism student at San Francisco State University, met Jim Marshall (1936-2010) at a bar in downtown San Francisco, to interview him for a ‘Where Are They Now?’ assignment. Marshall, who had famously shot Johnny Cash flipping the bird during his historic 1969 performance at San Quentin State Prison and Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, was, in the words of Annie Leibovitz, “the rock ‘n’ roll photographer”.

But Marshall, then 45, was down on his luck after being arrested on a gun bust in 1983 and doing work release to avoid prison time. “When I met him I found him hideous: a malevolent gnome,” Margetts recalls of the man who would become a short-term boyfriend and lifelong friend. Given the opportunity to talk, Marshall poured out his heart, revealing the deep vulnerabilities that lay beneath his gruff exterior. Then, just before it was to be published, Marshall sabotaged the entire thing and the story disappeared.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Restaurant in Harlem, New York City, 1963 Photography by Jim Marshall, taken from Jim Marshall: Show Me the Picture by Amelia Davis, published by Chronicle Books 2019

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography

Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies

Posted on November 5, 2019

Heal-a-zation Swathe a la Glob-Ba, silver gelatin print, 1985. The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

Artist, photographer, filmmaker, and “queer mystic” Steven F. Arnold (1943–1994) is a quintessential icon of our times, a revolutionary figure whose ideas about gender fluidity, radical acceptance, and non-binary consciousness, first realised in the late 1960s, are just now becoming part of the cultural conversation.

Protégé of Salvador Dalí and shared encounters with Debbie Harry, Anjelica Huston, Antonio Lopez, and Joni Mitchell, Arnold seamlessly weaved celebrity, glamour, and camp theatricality with ancient ritual, two-spirit philosophy, and eastern art into a majestic Baroque-inspired tableaux that will be on view atFahey/Klein Gallery during Paris Photo next week.

“Steven was a prophet,” says Vishnu Dass, director of the Steven Arnold Museum and Archive and director of Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies, a documentary about the artist’s life which came out earlier this year. “He visually fused his interests in filmmaking, spiritual traditions, sexuality, and gender to present a new visual mythology crafted for the late 20th century.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

The Luxury of Solitude, silver gelatin print, 1984. The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

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

Hugh Holland: Silver. Skate. Seventies.

Posted on October 30, 2019

Silver Skater, Del Mar Racetrack in San Diego county, 1975 Photography by Hugh Holland, from Silver. Skate. Seventies. published by Chronicle Chroma 2019

In the summer of 1975, Hugh Holland noticed something – teenage boys on skateboards were cropping up all across Los Angeles. Holland, then in his early thirties, was fascinated by these daring young men, who surfed drainage ditches on new-fangled urethane wheels which allowed them to transform a novelty toy into a tool that combined artistry and athleticism.

Holland took up photography just as the skaters were inventing a brand new sport on the streets of Los Angeles. As fate would have it, a drought hit the city in 1976 and all the backyard pools were drained, beckoning this small band of innovative outcasts to transform the barren landscape into a creative laboratory for their newfound pastime.

Over a period of three years, Holland amassed thousands of images of the emerging scene, documenting the skaters and the atmosphere, crafting a vivid portrait of rebellious youth living their best lives under the Southern Californian sun. Now, in the new exhibition Silver. Skate. Seventies., and accompanying book published by Chronicle Books, Holland presents never-before-seen black and white photographs from his archive. Here, he reflects on the importance of DIY culture, sport and art, and the rewards of doing something you love.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Night Pier Rider, Huntington Beach, 1975 Photography by Hugh Holland, from Silver. Skate. Seventies. published by Chronicle Chroma 2019

Solo Scott at Kenter Canyon Elementary in Brentwood, Los Angeles, 1976 Photography by Hugh Holland, from Silver. Skate. Seventies. published by Chronicle Chroma 2019

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Photography

Hal Fischer: The Gay Seventies

Posted on October 23, 2019

Between 1977 and 1979, American artist Hal Fischer created Gay Semiotics, a landmark series of photo-text works providing a pioneering analysis of gay historical vernacular as it unfolded on the streets of San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Asbury districts.

Inspired by the work of August Sander, Fischer made a series of street black and white portraits of gay archetypes accompanied by text that deftly deconstructed the symbols of the era’s quintessential looks such as Natural, Classical, Jock, Hippie, Urbane, Forties Trash, Western, Leather, Dominance, and Submission – along with detailed descriptions of signifiers like keys, earrings, handkerchiefs, leather apparel, gag mask, amyl nitrate, and other bondage devices.

In advance of the publication of The Gay Seventies, Fischer looks back on one of the first conceptual works to bring the structuralism and linguistics to photography and reflects on the nature of gay semiotics today.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Photography

Lloyd Ziff: Desire – Photographs 1968-1969

Posted on October 15, 2019

DESIRE: Photographs 1968–1969 © Lloyd Ziff

“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one,” Patti Smith writes in Just Kids, revealing the burning desire that drove her destiny. Along the way she met Robert Mapplethorpe and together they would meld a magical world of art and music born of passion, dreams, and youthful ideals.

As fate would have it, Lloyd Ziff crossed their path – quite literally. In 1968, Ziff was working as a graphic designer at CBS Records, creating album covers for Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin – but he harboured a personal passion for photography, which he took up in his last semester at Pratt.

“Robert and I were friends from school,” Ziff tells Another Man. “One day I saw him and Patti walking across the street and thought it would be fun to shoot some portraits of them. They had a tiny apartment on Hall Street across from Pratt. I went over one afternoon and only shot one roll of film.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1960s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Photography

Hunter Barnes: Outside of Life – Lowriders, Coolers, Bikers and Bloods

Posted on October 1, 2019

Booty Man, East St. Louis, Missouri, 2003 Photography Hunter Barnes

In 2003, Hunter Barnes travelled across the United States, photographing the outsider cultures he encountered along the way. The North Carolina native went to New York to photograph bikers, East St. Louis to shoot Bloods, the New Mexican deserts to capture lowriders, and California State Prison, where he was the first person to be permitted to photograph coolers, inmates often serving 25 years to life.

“When I travelled to take pictures, I would go on the road with nothing – I don’t even know how I did it,” Barnes tells Another Man. “I was 23 years old. I slept wherever, ate whatever, I was in it. It was the first time I developed patrons who gave me money to make editions of prints. I only do editions of four and two artist proofs.”

Now, a selection of those rare vintage prints is on view for the first time in over 15 years in Outside of Life: Lowriders, Coolers, Bikers and Bloods. The series began at the outset of Barnes’ career through bikers named Mike and Joey, who were old family friends. “It was a new world to me. I was invited in and I appreciated their trust,” he recalls.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Leroy, Espanola, Chimayo, New Mexico, 2003 Photography Hunter Barnes

OG Nub, East St. Louis, Missouri, 2003 Photography Hunter Barnes

Categories: AnOther Man, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Godlis: On the Inspiration of Brassaï

Posted on September 10, 2019

Lydia Lunch, Delancey Street Loft, 1977 © Godlis

In the summer of 1976, two events occurred, forever transforming the course of American photographer Godlis’ life and the history of punk. It began when he purchased a copy of The Secret Paris of the 30s, Brassaï’s evocative memoir from his youth featuring his adventures through the brothels and opium dens of the bas monde.

“During my first years in Paris, beginning in 1924, I lived at night, going to bed at sunrise, getting up at sunset, wandering about the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre,” Brassaï, then in his seventies, wrote. “I was inspired to become a photographer by my desire to translate all the things that enchanted me in the nocturnal Paris I was experiencing.”

On one of these nightly jaunts, Brassaï happened upon the Bals-Musette, a shady dance hall where Paris’s high society mingled with its underground. Here, he made pictures too scandalous to include in Paris by Night, the groundbreaking 1933 monograph that brought the Hungarian photographer to the world stage. But by the 1970s, in the wake of Free Love and the Gay Liberation movement, a new hunger for the lives of sexual libertines was in the air, and Brassaï published these images of the darker side of the French capital in The Secret Paris of the 30s in 1976.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Stiv Bators and Divine, Blitz Benefit, CBGB, 1978 © Godlis

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

New York: Club Kids by Waltpaper

Posted on September 10, 2019

“When the Club Kids came along, we brought this idea that our identity was enough; we didn’t have to do anything else,” Walt Cassidy tells Another Man. “It’s very much ahead of the time. We were criticised at the same time the way people criticise the Kardashians: ‘You’re interesting looking but what do you do?’”

Cassidy puts that question firmly to rest in his magnificent new book, New York: Club Kids (Damiani), which charts the history of the last underground subculture of the analogue age. Cassidy, also known as Waltpaper, was an integral figure in the groundbreaking New York nightlife scene of the 1990s, when a new group of upstarts transgressed boundaries with singular aplomb, deconstructing the realms of fashion, music, drugs, gender, pop culture, and media to recreate themselves anew every week.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

SKID, King and Queen of Manhattan pageant at Limelight, 1993. (Left to right) Bella Bolski, Lady Bunny, Aphrodita, Amanda Lepore, Olympia, Arman Ra
Copyright SKID. All Rights Reserved

Categories: 1990s, AnOther Man, Books, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Illicit Histories: James Bidgood

Posted on September 5, 2019

Tales from another time… In a new series, titled Illicit Histories, Miss Rosen tells the stories of queer art’s pioneers, unpacking the lives and work of people who revolutionised gay erotic imagery – often in defiance of censorship laws.

Born during the worst of the Great Depression in 1933, American artist James Bidgood displayed his love for glamour, fantasy and spectacle from a young age. “He begged his mother to buy him a paper doll set,” says Lissa Rivera, curator of James Bidgood: Reveries, now on view at the Museum of Sex in New York. “Despite the restraints on their financial situation, his mother bought one for him. Using his imagination, he turned an old cereal box into a technicolour masterpiece befitting a Busby Berkeley musical for the dolls.”

Now 86, Bidgood has forged a singular path throughout his life as a female impersonator, window dresser, fashion, costume, and graphic designer, photographer, stylist, and filmmaker. This remarkable career began when the young man from Wisconsin moved to New York in 1951 at the tender age of 18.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Photography

Greg Ellis: Sex Crimes

Posted on August 21, 2019

Beau Rouge, Los Angeles, 1954, Gelatin silver print from original large-format negative© The Estate of Bob Mizer (1922-1992). Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

It wasn’t until 2003 that the US Supreme Court finally gave LGBTQ people basic civil rights protection under the Constitution, ruling that sex between consenting adults of the same gender in private was not a crime. Under the current administration, though, these rights are slowly being chipped away in an effort to take the nation back to a time when citizens could be targeted for what have been interchangeably known as Crimes Against Nature, Unnatural Acts, and Sex Crimes.

For generations, these draconian laws lead to incarceration, institutionalisation, familial rejection, public shaming, loss of employment, denial of healthcare, and even death for members of the LGBTQ community. “This is our history,” says Greg Ellis of Ward 5B, who has co-curated Sex Crimes, a new group exhibition with Brian Clamp. “Times have changed, there have been gains made, and I think it’s good to put this context out there to say, ‘hey, not too long ago this is where we were, and we don’t want to head back there.’”

Rooted in the decades before Stonewall, Sex Crimes features work by artists including George Platt Lynes, John S. Barrington, Bruce of Los Angeles, James Bidgood, Mel Roberts, Jim French, and Jack Smith, all of whom created homosexual art and literature under the threat of arrest.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Untitled (Cowboy) / P00103, c. 1967-9, Vintage Polaroid print (Unique)© The Estate of Jim French (1932-2017). Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

Categories: 1960s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now Part II

Posted on July 25, 2019

Grace Jones, 1984. Photography by Robert Mapplethorpe, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 1998 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

In the three decades after Robert Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989, artists and critics have grappled with the artist’s complex legacy, questioning the objectification of his sitters. In the second instalment of Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now, curators Lauren Hinkson, Susan Thompson, and Levi Prombaum explore the dialectic between subversion, transgression, and exploitation that has made Mapplethorpe a lightning rod for controversy – then and now.

Lauded and vilified for his depictions of homoerotic desire, the black male nude and the female figure, Mapplethorpe brought underrepresented communities to the forefront of the art world during the height of the Aids crisis, which eventually claimed his life. His formally rigorous approach to image-making helped elevate photography to the pantheon of fine art, while his choice of subject matter fuels the culture wars that raged in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Where the first part of Implicit Tensions focused on Mapplethorpe alone, the new installment examines the artist’s legacy in a dialogue with six artists who use portraiture to examine our ideas about identity, visibility, and representation. The curators selected works by African, African-American, and white American LGBTQ artists including Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya that offer expansive approaches to the agency of the subjects in their work.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Siphe, Johannesburg (from Somnyama Ngonyama), 2018. Photography by Zanele Muholi, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Wendy Fisher, 2019 © Zanele Muholi, courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York

Self Portrait, 1980. Photography by Robert Mapplethorpe, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 96.4355 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

Categories: 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Photography