Posts from the “AnOther” Category

Remembering Keith Haring

Posted on September 24, 2020

*Unknown photographer, 1989 Courtesy of The LGBT Community Center National History Archive*

Just 31 years old at the time of his death, Keith Haring (1958–1990) was a small-town boy who took the big city by storm when he moved to New York in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). He began frequenting Club 57, an experimental art space and nightclub in the East Village, and quickly became close friends with a new generation of groundbreaking young artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and Futura 2000.

In the early 80s, Haring made his name with some 40 “subway drawings”, introducing his soon-to-be iconic symbolic language to the world in a series of white chalk drawings on black matte paper that occupied unused advertising panels in New York City train stations. The public immediately fell in love with this early iteration of street art, which was often thematic in nature, offering holiday cheer as a treat. In 1982, Haring made his Soho gallery debut at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, and soon became the toast of the international art world – but at his heart Haring was a man of the people.

In 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop, the ultimate retail space that offered affordable art in the form of T-shirts, toys, posters, and buttons. He was also devoted to art in the service of activism, collaborating with organisations and charities around the globe to raise money and awareness on issues as diverse as Aids, apartheid, and the crack epidemic. In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with Aids and less than two years later he was gone – yet the love of his work lives on, generation after generation.

On September 24, Sotheby’s will open Dear Keith: Works From the Personal Collection of Keith Haring, a dedicated online auction presenting over 140 works of art and objects gifted to, purchased by, and traded with Haring among his circle, by artists including Andy Warhol, George Condo, Rammellzee, Roy Lichtenstein, Scharf, and Basquiat. Full proceeds from the auction will benefit The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center of New York, an organization Haring proudly partnered with during his life. In advance of the auction, we speak with fellow artists and friends who share their encounters with Haring over the years.

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled. Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Categories: 1980s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Manhattan

Sunil Gupta x Nick Sethi in Conversation

Posted on September 24, 2020

*Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Vadehra Art Gallery © Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2020*

*Sunil Gupta, Untitled #9, 2010. From the series Sun City. Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Vadehra Art Gallery © Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2020*

Photographers Sunil Gupta and Nick Sethi use the camera as a compass on their journey through life, using it to create connections that allow them to explore the complex intersections of identity, family, race, migration, and sexuality in the East and the West. Transforming photography as a tool of liberation, their vivid portrait and documentary work fuses the personal and political into a mesmerising mélange of places and faces.

With the October 9 opening of From Here to Eternity. Sunil Gupta. A Retrospective and the publication of Lovers: Ten Years On (Stanley/Barker) coming on the heels of the landmarkexhibition and catalogue Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography, Gupta’s work is being widely celebrated in his adopted home of London, nearly 40 years after the Delhi-born, Montreal-raised artist emigrated to the UK. Gupta’s retrospective will showcase works from 16 series over the past 45 years that reveal how he has used photography as a form of activism to address his experiences as a gay Indian man living with HIV, while also exploring ethical questions of documentation and representation that helped bring abut the formation of Autograph – the Association of Black Photographers, an organisation devoted to fighting discrimination in the UK.

Sethi, a first-generation Indian-American, who is currently based in New York, also uses photography to connect and explore the space where empathy creates understanding beyond the spoken word. In 2018, he released Khichdi (Kitchari), his first major monograph that comprises a ten-year documentation of the changing face of India, to much acclaim. One of photography’s most exciting new voices, he has since undertaken commissions for Another Man, Dazed, Louis Vuitton and more.

Here, Gupta and Sethi discuss navigating the complexities of coming of age in adopted cultures, the role photography can play in examining social structures and communities, and the restorative power of returning to the motherland.

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Categories: AnOther, Art, Photography

Christopher Makos: Dirty

Posted on September 11, 2020

*Christopher Makos. Hawaiian Shirt, 1976.*

At the outset of his artistic career in 1976, May Ray imparted upon American photographerChristopher Makos a simple ethos to make great work: “obey your instinct” – a directive that has served him well over the years.

Infused with a delectable mix of confidence, charisma, and striking beauty, Makos returned to New York ready to take the city by storm. The following year he published his first monograph, White Trash, a bold and beguiling collection of photos documenting the punk scene that effortlessly mixed high and low society with all the verve of a bright young thing.

Andy Warhol took notice and soon the two became friends and collaborators. When editor Bob Colacello departed Interview magazine in 1983, leaving his ‘Out’ column behind, Warhol suggested Makos start a column called ‘In’. Soon New York’s finest found their way to Makos’ studio, ready to bare it all.

“I remember at the time, if I had a model in front of me and if I didn’t ask him or her to undress they were so disappointed like, ‘Did I not make the grade?’” Makos tells AnOther. “When I look at some of these pictures now, I think about TikTok and Instagram, I was way ahead of the curve there because so many of these pictures of these sexy boys and girls; they’re of the moment now.”

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*Christopher Makos. Keven Kendall Red Bikini Polaroid, 1986.*

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

Remsen Wolff: Amsterdam Girls

Posted on September 7, 2020

*Patch, Amsterdam, April 22, 1992. © The Remsen Wolff Collection, Courtesy of Jochem Brouwer 2020*

In 1990, American photographer Remsen Wolff (1940–1998) embarked on the creation ofSpecial Girls – A Celebration, an ambitious series capturing more than 125 trans and genderfluid models from New York and Amsterdam. From this extraordinary series, Wolff amassed some 100,000 photographs – a selection of which will be on view in the new exhibition Remsen Wolff: Amsterdam Girls, opening this week.

The exhibition showcases a selection of portraits Wolff made between 1990 and 1992 on his annual month-long pilgrimage to Amsterdam, then known as “the gay capital of Europe”. A self-taught photographer, Wolff made intimate, spirited and at times subdued portraits of nightlife luminaries including Jet Brandsteder, aka Francine, Hellun Zelluf and Vera Springveer as well as anonymous trans women struggling with their gender identity – an issue Wolff understood all too well. In the last years of his life, Wolff took the name of Vivienne (Viv) Blum, a name inspired by Vivienne Westwood and family friend Edith Blum, and described himself as a “faux transsexual”.

Jochem Brouwer, Wolff’s former assistant who inherited the estate, draws a connection between artist’s focus on femininity with that of his mother, Isabel Bishop, an American realist painter renowned for her paintings of women. As the son of Bishop and neurologist Dr Harold Wolff, the artist was born into privilege, attending Phillips Exeter and Harvard University, where he received a BA in Art History in 1964. After marrying, fathering two daughters, and converting to Judaism, Wolff divorced, becoming a drifter and a loner for the rest of his life.

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Hellun Zelluf, Amsterdam, November 14, 1990. © The Remsen Wolff Collection, Courtesy of Jochem Brouwer 2020

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

Joel Meyerowitz: How I Make Photographs

Posted on September 3, 2020

When Joel Meyerowitz met Robert Frank on the set of a photo shoot one day in 1962, he had an epiphany that changed his life forever. Meyerowitz, then 24 and working as art director at a New York advertising agency, positioned himself behind the Swiss photographer and began to discern Frank’s unique and exquisite ability to capture fragmentary images of beauty as they appeared.

“I kept hearing the click [of his Leica] and seeing the frozen moment as it dissolved into the continuation of reality,” Meyerowitz tells AnOther from his home in Italy. “After a while I began to see those frozen moments happened every time he clicked so he must have been anticipating the richness of the moment in a very ordinary situation.”

After finishing the job, Meyerowitz stepped onto the street and discovered a world full of mesmerising happenings he wanted to capture for himself. He walked 30 blocks back to the office then promptly quit his job. Meyerowitz had no photography training, not even a camera of his own, but he knew exactly what he had to do to make his way in the world.

From that single leap of faith, an extraordinary career was born, one that has made Meyerowitz into one of the most celebrated street photographers of our time. This month Meyerowitz releases How I Make Photographs, an intimate volume filled with warmth, wit and wisdom gleaned from his extraordinary career in photography. Here, Meyerowtiz shares five tips for those who seek to record magical scenes of everyday life as it unfolds before our very eyes.

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*Joel Meyerowitz. San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, 1971.*

*Joel Meyerowitz. Vivian, Bronx Botanical, Gardens, New York City, 1966.*

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

Sophia Al-Maria: Little Birds

Posted on July 30, 2020

In the early 1940s, Anaïs Nin was part of a literary group penning erotic novels for a dollar a day, amassing a series of short stories published as Little Birds in 1979, two years after her death. “I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate,” Nin said in the preface to her 1976 masterwork, The Delta of Venus.

Though Nin’s efforts had a revolutionary effect, she was as much a liberator as perpetuator of white cultural hegemony. “As a teenager, Little Birds busted me out of cultural mores that I had grown up inside between the United States and the [Arabian] Gulf,” says artist, author, and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria (The Girl Who Fell to Earth). “Going back to it as an adult, I felt quite disturbed by viewpoints that were Orientalist, sexist, and racist.”

In Al-Maria’s hands, Nin’s erotic vignettes have been transformed into the basis for Little Birds, a six-episode series airing August 4 on Sky Atlantic. A kaleidoscopic melodrama set inside the decadent “international zone” of Tangier, Little Birds presents a multi-perspective look at the lives of troubled American heiress Lucy Savage (Juno Temple), local dominatrix Cherifa Lamour (Yumna Marwan), impoverished English aristocrat Hugo Cavendish Smythe (Hugh Skinner), and Egyptian prince Adham Abaza (Raphael Acloque) in 1955, the year prior to Moroccan independence from France.

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Categories: AnOther

Tyler Mitchell and Ryan McGinley in Conversation

Posted on July 27, 2020

*Untitled (Sosa with Orange Hula Hoop), 2019. Photography by Tyler Mitchell.*

The American photographers Tyler Mitchell and Ryan McGinley have risen to global acclaim for their dream-like imagery of youth and possibility. Their photographs are mesmerising meditations on a utopian state of bliss, offering the understanding that liberation from all that constrains us is not only possible but a fundamental necessity of existence. It is a viewpoint that led both artists to prominence at the outset of their careers: in 2018, Mitchell, then 23, was the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of American Vogue; 15 years earlier, McGinley, then 25, became the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The July 28 publication of I Can Make You Feel Good, Mitchell’s debut monograph, is an intimate and powerful vision of Black utopia, bathed in the rich sun-soaked light which has become the photographer’s signature. It stands alongside The Kids Are Alright (2002), McGinley’s first handmade book, which captured the exploits of the artists, skaters, and graffiti writers populating New York’s downtown scene at the turn of the millennium, in an ongoing conversation about the power of beauty, freedom, and truth.

On a Friday in July, McGinley met with Mitchell in his Brooklyn home to discuss the joys of coming of age as skaters, artists, and authors in the new millennium.

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*Untitled (Boys of Walthamstow) 2018. Photography by Tyler Mitchell.*

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

Stanley Stellar: Night, Life

Posted on July 21, 2020

As a young gay boy growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Stanley Stellar always felt alone. “I didn’t have any friends,” he tells AnOther. “I would go up to the roof of my building, sitting there by myself, and thinking about the future. My greatest joys were looking at stacks of magazines. Images became my friends.”

After studying graphic design at Parsons in the early 1960s, Stellar began his career as an editorial art director designing magazines and coffee-table books. “I’m a child of all media,” he says. “Inside my head are all the images of the second half of the 20th century. I was very aware of what was being done and who was doing it, along with the history of photography. After seeing so many other people’s work I wanted to take my own pictures.”

In 1976, Stellar got his first professional camera and set forth on a mission to document Manhattan’s West Village, which was flourishing during the early years of the Gay Liberation Movement. “When I came out, the gay world was on the street. If you were a young gay man you had very few choices as to what to do, how to meet people, have sex or friends. I found Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street; for so many years that was the spot,” Stellar says.

“I was invited to gay men’s apartments and seeing what their lives were like. It made a real impression on me; I needed to record us in ways that were not necessarily commercial. Images of men in society meant GQ or porn magazines on 42nd Street – that was it. I wanted to do what I had not seen.”

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Art, Photography

Jessica Lange: Highway 61

Posted on October 15, 2019

At the age of 18, Jessica Lange boarded a Greyhound Bus outside the Tulip Shop in her hometown of Cloquet, Minnesota, and headed south down Highway 61 on her way to Europe and beyond. The year was 1967, and the winds of change were in the air. A new America taking shape, as fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan foresaw on his seminal 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited, the very first album Lange ever bought.

For Lange, the historic 2,575 kilometre interstate highway that runs from the Canadian border down to New Orleans, is a plumb line through her life – a marker of where she has been, who she was, and who she has become, as well as a testament to the changes that have shaped the United States over the past 70 years.

In the new monograph, Highway 61, Lange takes us along for a ride, creating a timeless portrait of America that evokes the work of Robert Frank. A quiet, careful observation of the human condition, Lange’s photographs reveal a sense of solidarity among the working class, recognising that they built this country from the ground up. She visits motels, roadside fruit stands, local bars, vintage diners, amusement parks, farms, private homes, markets, and sometimes just walks the streets as one of the people, rather than Hollywood royalty.

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Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

Ann Ray & Lee McQueen: Rendez-Vous

Posted on October 15, 2019

Follow the Line, 1997. Image courtesy of Ann Ray and Barrett Barrera Projects

The year was 1996, and a young upstart named Lee Alexander McQueen took the helm of Givenchy as head designer at just 27 years old. French photographer Ann Ray stepped inside his fantastical world, spending two weeks with him while he was creating his first couture collection that same year.

“I had to move to London, so Lee asked me to photograph his collections and basically, I never stopped,” Ray tells AnOther while visiting New York. The result was a lifelong friendship and creative collaboration that would continue until his tragic death at the age of 40 in 2010. Given unprecedented access to document his design process and behind-the-scenes moments during his legendary runway shows, Ray spent 12-hour days in the atelier over a period of 13 years, making more than 35,000 photographs that capture the complexity of McQueen: the man, the artist, and the iconoclast.

Now, in the new exhibition Ann Ray & Lee McQueen: Rendez-Vous, Ray reveals a portrait of the artist as a young man ascending to the heights of fashion by breaking all the rules to create an avant-garde spectacular replete with theater, performance art, and gothic fairytales. Here, Ray shares her memories of life in the inner circle, sharing a side of McQueen that only those closest to him ever knew.

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Home, 2000 Image courtesy of Ann Ray and Barrett Barrera Projects

Categories: 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Martin Parr: Early Works

Posted on October 15, 2019

Martin Parr remembers when, as a young man growing up in the UK, he first realised that it was his destiny to become a photographer. It began when his grandfather lent him a camera, and increased when he discovered Creative Camera magazine in the late 1960s, immersing himself in the work of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.

“But what was most exciting for me was seeing the work of Tony Ray-Jones,”Parr tells AnOther. The year was 1971. Parr, a photography student at Manchester Polytechnic, came across Ray-Jones’ photographs made in England in the late 1960s and was transfixed. “This was one of those moments when your life is changed,” he remembers. “You see something and think, ‘Ahh, this is the aspiration I can look to in terms of work.’”

With his compass set, Parr set off to photograph the coast and countryside of north England and Northern Ireland, creating series of black and white works that laid the foundation for the next 50 years of his practice. In the new book,Martin Parr: Early Works(RRB Photobooks/Martin Parr Foundation), the photographer takes us back to those formative years, painting a portrait of Britain that eloquently captures the idiosyncratic character of its people.

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