Posts from the “AnOther Man” Category

Rick Castro: Glory Hole

Posted on June 26, 2019

Rick Castro. Head bondage, 1992.

In a new online exhibition titled Glory Hole, the ‘King of Fetish’ Rick Castro delves deep into his 30-year archive to unearth a selection of rarely shown photographs. Featuring intimate portrayals of the male body, the Tom of Finland Store exhibition celebrates fetish and BDSM at a time when corporate censorship openly threatens expressions of queer identity. Just this year, Facebook barred Castro from his account for 30 days to prevent him from promoting his exhibition Fetish King: Seminal Photographs 1986-2019 at the Tom of Finland Foundation.

“It’s depressingly becoming really prevalent,” Castro tells Another Man from his home in Los Angeles. “Everything is becoming G-rated. The guise of community standards has nothing to do with the insidiousness of removing a specific voice (of the LGBTQ community). It’s biased and it’s very much overkill.”

But Castro has never allowed anyone to silence his voice. In the early years of his career, he struggled to find a venue to show his work. “Up until the internet, fetish never had a huge forum,” Castro says. “But now, it’s being co-opted and gentrified just like everything else.”

With Glory Hole, Castro fights back, showing why he wears the crown and reigns supreme. Here, alongside an exclusive preview of Glory Hole, he shares memories of his encounters with Kenneth Chang, whose photograph graces the cover of the 1992 cult classic The Bondage Book Vol. 1.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Photography

Tom Bianchi: 63 E. 9th Street. NYC Polaroids 1975–1983

Posted on May 15, 2019

untitled, nyc099 by Tom Bianchi

After discovering the Pines on Fire Island in 1972, Tom Bianchi found himself drawn into New York’s flourishing gay scene which emerged in the years following Stonewall.

“I was having an affair with the playwright Edward Albee, which brought me in and out of New York,” Bianchi says from his home in Los Angeles. “I thought New York was too difficult a place to live – too expensive and too crazy – but my contacts lead me to imagine I could live there and be a New Yorker. What was thrilling was the sexual availability of the gay community at that time: we were just bursting at the seams.”

In 1975, Bianchi moved to the heart of Greenwich Village and took a job as in-house counsel at Columbia Pictures. That year, Bianchi received a Polaroid SX-70 camera during a corporate conference and began documenting the lives of his friends and lovers in the early years of Gay Liberation – images which are now compiled in the new book, 63 E. 9th Street. NYC Polaroids 1975–1983.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

untitled, nyc079 by Tom Bianchi

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Gavin Watson: Oh What Fun We Had!

Posted on May 1, 2019

By the time Gavin Watson had left school at the age of 16, he had already amassed more than 10,000 photographs of his friends, taken at a council estate in High Wycombe, during the time the second generation of British skinheads were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Watson first encounted the Two-tone movement – which fuses ska, punk, and new wave – when he was 14, when he caught Madness on TV in 1979. 40 years on, Watson has come full circle with his new book Oh! What Fun We Had (Damiani), which launches at Donlon Books tonight and features never-before-seen photographs chronicling the rough-hewn kids who transformed skinhead culture into a global phenomenon.

“What’s crazy to me is I took so many pictures,” Watson says on the phone from his London studio. “I couldn’t afford to do it. No one ever paid me to do it. No one ever saw the pictures. I just took them for no real reason, except that I enjoyed taking them.”

Watson’s images have stood the test of time, and reflect the truth of skinheads – one which contradicts the mainstream media’s conflation of the subculture with the National Front. Here, the photographer talks us through his new book, transporting us back to a time when a group of marginalised youth became a threat to Thatcherite Britain because they refused to kowtow to the status quo.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

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

Janette Beckman: Los Angeles in the Early 80s

Posted on April 11, 2019

Rivera Bad Girls, LA © Janette Beckman, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Back in the 1970s, while attending Central Saint Martins, Janette Beckman was living in a squat in Streatham, South London. After her upstairs neighbour moved to Los Angeles, Beckman too travelled to the city in search of some sun. There, she fell in love with the pop Americana she saw and took to photographing neon motel signs at night – an image Squeeze immortalised on their 1979 single, “Christmas Day”.

Hooked, Beckman returned to LA in 1981 on assignment for Melody Maker to photograph R&B icons like Stevie Wonder, the Brothers Johnson, and Patrick Rushen. But it wasn’t until summer 1983 that she went the distance. While staying in the Beverly Hills bungalow of the Go-Go’s manager Ginger Canzoneri, Beckman happened upon a story in the LA Weekly about the Hoyo Maravilla gang in East LA. “There weren’t any pictures,” Beckman says over a glass of wine in her Manhattan studio – and she was determined to get them.

Beckman spent the summer hanging out in El Hoyo Maravilla, a local park, and began hanging out with local gang members and their families. Then, at night, she’d hang out in Hollywood, catching punk shows at the Masque and the Whisky, fascinated by the dark style and sound of the scene.

In the wake of an exhibition of her work at Fahey/Klein Gallery during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, Beckman shares her memories of the legendary LA underground.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

The Brothers Johnson © Janette Beckman, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Lux Interior, The Cramps, LA © Janette Beckman, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Categories: 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Rick Castro: Fetish King

Posted on April 5, 2019

For Rick Castro, fetish is the ultimate manifestation of self; the very notion of perfection, if you will. The journey began one day in 1970, when the photographer – who has shot and interviewed Ron Athey, Alice Bag and Tony Ward for AnotherManmag.com – discovered a copy of A Clockwork Orange in his aunt’s secondhand bookstore when he was 12.

“It shocked me and made my young wheels turn,” Castro says from his Los Angeles home. “I was trying to put it all into context. The idea of glamourised violence and scary dystopia – it seemed to ring true. I started to see that is going to be the future – and it was. We’ve surpassed it.”

And in doing so, we have embraced fetish in a broader sense. Castro explains, “For me it’s all-encompassing. The 21st century is all about fetish. On the positive side, it is the appreciation on a larger scale of things that would not have gotten a lot of respect in the past, but on the negative side it’s that cult of personality that I think is a waste of time and lead to the banality of America if not the world.”

Words of wisdom from ‘The Fetish King,’ a title Castro has fully embraced, and given to the title to a three-decade survey of his black and white BDSM photographs, opening April 6 at the Tom of Finland Foundation in his native Los Angeles.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

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

Ben Fredrickson: Polaroids 2005-2015

Posted on January 25, 2019

“I’ve had a curiosity about sex work since seeing films like Belle du Jour, but I was naïve – it’s totally not like that,” photographer Benjamin Fredrickson says with a knowing laugh.

After graduating from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design in 2003, Fredrickson had a run of bad luck, resulting in an injury that forced him to move back home with his parents. “I was going through a dark time, falling into a depression and feeling stuck,” he says, speaking to me from his New York studio.

In 2005, Fredickson embarked on a course that would change his life: he became a sex worker to support himself financially. “It was out of necessity,” he says. “At that time, it felt like my best option. Sex work allowed me to afford my own apartment and shooting Polaroids. At the same time I had a day job working at a local grocery store, so it was like having a double life.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Bandages, Minneapolis, 2017
© Ben Fredrickson, Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art

Categories: AnOther Man, Art, Photography

EVA.C Introduces “Kane”

Posted on December 12, 2018

From “Kane” by Emma Capps and Anna Howard

Anna Howard first discovered a single series of amateur S&M photographs made during the 1970s through an American porn dealer while doing research for 77 Broadway Market, the shop she owns with Conor Donlon.

“What spoke to me was the ambiguous power play, and how easily I found myself empathising with each of the different women,” Howard reveals. “They proposed a real visual riddle too; I couldn’t place them – the floral dresses, rope play, in a setting that looks like an air raid shelter.”

Howard showed the photographs, which bore the mysterious name “Kane,” to Emma Capps, her colleague at Donlon Books. “We’d talked for ages about doing some kind of project together, and when we came across this collection of photographs, it suddenly felt like: Oh, this is it,” Capps says.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

From “Kane” by Emma Capps and Anna Howard

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Photography, Women

Art Kane: Harlem 1958

Posted on November 27, 2018

Photography Art Kane; Taken from Art Kane: Harlem 1958, Wall of Sound Editions

American photographer Art Kane was introduced to the idea of the “Big Picture” while serving as a member of the Ghost Army – a 1,100-man unit tasked with creating 20 battlefield deceptions, complete with dummy tanks and fake radio transmission to mislead the German Army during the 1944 invasion of Normandy. “The experience of creating something larger than life really stuck with him,” Jonathan Kane, his son, tells me.

By 1958, Kane was restless. At 27, he was the hot young art director for Seventeen magazine but he yearned to be a photographer. He got word Esquire was planning a special issue dedicated to jazz and decided to pitch his very first photography story: “A Great Day in Harlem,” which they accepted and published as the issue’s centerfold.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of this legendary group portrait, one of the most celebrated images in American history, Jonathan Kane has put together the phenomenal book, Art Kane: Harlem 1958 (out this month via Wall of Sound Editions), featuring texts by Quincy Jones, Benny Golson, and Art Kane, as well as dozens of never-before-seen photographs of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie, and Gene Krupa, among others.

“It’s exciting to see the outtakes, and also rare,” Kane reveals. “My father did not believe in outtakes. He was about his one vision. I’m normally very protective but become bigger than even his original intention. The book is a journey through that day, and a revelation of the intimacy and connections between the musicians, and what is in the mind of a young photographer doing his first major professional assignment, and how it all crystallised in the ‘Big Picture.’”

Here, in an excerpt from the book, Art Kane looks back on this moment in time, as history was being made on the streets of Harlem.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Photography Art Kane; Taken from Art Kane: Harlem 1958, Wall of Sound Editions

Categories: AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Broy Lim: and now they know

Posted on November 7, 2018

and now they know by Broy Lim, published by Steidl

and now they know by Broy Lim, published by Steidl

In recent years, a global trend has taken hold as countries with statutes against gay sex have begun repealing their oppressive laws. As of September, the number of nations with anti-homosexuality laws dropped to 73, after India overturned Section 377A, adopted from the British Penal Code 158 years ago.

Inspired by this action, members of Singapore’s LBGTQ+ community put pressure on the government to repeal that same penal code. In response, Attorney-General Lucien Wong to release a statement on October 2 confirming the government’s continued prosecution of same-sex sexual activity, which carries a two-year prison sentence.

“There are no anti-discrimination laws in Singapore to protect people in the LGBTQ community,” artist and photographer Broy Lim tells Another Man. As a result, many people choose to lead a closeted life inside an extremely conservative, heteronormative society. Lim followed this path, maintaining two lives, until the opportunity to speak his truth revealed itself.

In and now they know, winner of the Steidl Book Award Asia, Lim gives us a look into his private life through a series of intimate photographs and handwritten verse. Here, he shares his discovery the power that comes from publicly declaring himself to the world.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

and now they know by Broy Lim, published by Steidl

Categories: AnOther Man, Art, Books, Photography

Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay

Posted on November 6, 2018

At the tender age of eight, Anthony Friedkin discovered what would become the two greatest passions of his life: photography and surfing. Growing up in Los Angeles, Friedkin enjoyed weekends and summers at the family beach house in Malibu, where he developed an unquenchable love for the ocean.

In 1970, at the age of 21, Friedkin began The Surfing Essay, a visual diary of his life as a member of California’s celebrated surf scene – a project that has continued for more than 45 years. After a near-death accident two years ago, Friedkin decided to organise the work into an exhibition and book.

Now, a selection of 50 hand-printed black and white photographs will be on show at Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay, opening November 8 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York. The consummate insider, Friedkin delved beneath the Hollywood stereotype of the blonde, bronzed Adonis to reveal the extremely individualistic athletes who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of the perfect wave. Here, he shares his journey of discovery, celebration, and triumph over circumstance.

Read the Fill Story at AnOther Man

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

Patrick Potter: Skins – A Way of Life

Posted on October 29, 2018

A group of skinheads sitting on the steps of Thomson House, works entrance, Newcastle on September 12, 1970. Photography NCJ

Skinhead culture emerged on the streets of London in 1969, as Mod scene was dying out and a new wave of bourgeois bohemians revelled in the “turn on, tune in, drop out” rhetoric of Timothy Leary. The self-indulgent pretensions of the hippie scene were an affront to Britain’s working-class youth; they created the figure of the skinhead, a back-to-basics rebel who was largely misunderstood.

The original skinheads were the first generation to be moved from historic East End slums and into then-new 1960s brutalist estates. Angry to be cut off from the old networks of support, skins sought to honour this devastating loss by creating their own utopian mythology of a shared working-class past.

Embracing their feeling of marginalisation from the mainstream, skins adopted a uniform that begins with a shaved head and ends in Doc Marten boots, with a nod to the style and sound of the Windrush Generation. Quintessential rebels in search of a good time, skins decamped en masse to pubs, football games, and gigs featuring ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dub DJs and bands.

Skins overtly rejected the historic codes of working-class deference, modesty, and rigid morality and, in the process, became a perfect target for both police harassment and fascist tactics during the 1970s and 80s, forever tainting the image of skinhead culture with the spectre of hooligans and neo-Nazis.

In the new book Skins: A Way of Life (out today via Carpet Bombing Culture), author Patrick Potter sets the record straight with a phenomenal history skinhead culture in the UK. Here, Potter gives a guide to the truth about this subculture.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Skinhead couple Glenda Peake and Tony Hughes. October 7, 1969.
Photography Doreen Spooner, Daily Mirror

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