Posts from the “Art” Category

Martin Guggisberg: MISS

Posted on May 30, 2013

Shiny. Glossy. Fresh. Young. Competition to see who wins. The prize? A title, a crown, finishing big in a pageant of hopefuls, teenage girls who traipse about in evening gowns, bikinis, full hair and make up, heels and the commitment to win. Photographer Martin Guggisberg captures the all the awkwardness, the surreal and the banal, the tarnished innocence and the plastic naïveté, the thrill of exhibitionism, adoring the attention, the chance to shine bright in the spotlight as they walk across the stage. It takes a certain kind of Miss to win titles like these: Miss Bikini. Miss Wildwest. Miss Asia. Miss Do-It-Yourself. Miss Handicap. Miss Italy Switzerland. Miss Polefitness. Miss Pit Stop Day.

Guggisberg’s photographs are glossy double page spreads, recalling nothing so much as the glossy pages of a men’s magazine. The difference is that here they are unposed, unaware of the camera, going about the daily business of the pageant circuit, their bodies, faces, hair an industry unto themselves. This is the business of self-exploitation, of a kind of beauty that is not very pretty but it is not without its appeal. Gone is the grace of the feminine and in its place is the crass vulgarity of mass appeal. It is a kind of appearance, a physical poise, a way of beholding oneself that makes the pageant contender a spectacle to behold.

Presence, appearance, the ability to embody a feminine ideal, one that is both virgin and whore at the same time, to be seductive and alluring but unavailable at the same time. A tease, a tempt, a twirl, nothing wrong in that it is not indecent so much as in poor taste, like the original reality show contest, only this one is live and it happens just once a year. There is a tradition of this, of judging the fresh new picks, like the old school country fairs of yesterday when the prize pig was awarded the bright blue ribbon for having the sweetest flesh. In exchange for money and honors, these young women happily, and sometimes unhappily, compete for Best in Show.

It’s easy to be a hater. The photographs aren’t flattering. They’re not rude either, they are just terribly unglamorous. Nothing kills so much as familiarity. Once the mystery is gone the allure begins to fade and on women this young that’s a sad reality. Start early before the looks begin to ebb, and what will be there for these girls but a distant past. These are the glory days. That’s what makes Guggisberg’s photographs poignant. They do not mock or exalt, but rather show us those times the mask has been lowered.

The effect is one of vulnerability, which is in distinct contrast to the large format, glossy pages that turn effortlessly. Yet stop on any image and something changes, no longer are these just quiet moments but a kinf od desperation is felt. Consider the woman whose arm is missing, the Cerrulean blue of her gown quietly falling over her shoulder, her eyes wide set with worry, concern, her lower lip bitten with a visible tension that strains through her seams. It is all or nothing and she wants it bad. What will happen? Turn the page.

Bikinis. Yellow. Red. Blue. Puple. Black and White. Shiny stilettos, silver, gold, white patent leather. Strippers without the implants or the drug habit. Aligned backstage before the parade begins. Casual calm but only just so. As one girl looks off into the distance, her eyes focused on a thought that has her concerned. Turn the page.

Now we see them from the back. The girl in purple has a Chinese tattoo running down her back. She’s also pulling at the bottom of her bathing suit, while a girl in red is content to let it ride all the way up. There are barely any faces, but those that are shown are edgy with anticipation. We’re headed up the stairs on to the stage. This is what it all comes down to, isn’t it?

We don’t know, we won’t know, who will win. It doesn’t matter to anyone, really, except the girls in the photographs. And they are without name, the photographs without caption. Because it is not who they are that drives this industry but our desire to tell stories about them to ourselves.

Categories: Art, Books, Fashion, Photography, Women

Gerhard Steidl: The Interview

Posted on May 20, 2013

Gerhard Steidl, photograph by Karl Lagerfeld

Gerhard Steidl is one of the world’s premier book publishers. He founded Steidl in 1968 in order to produce art books to the standards that he held in his mind and manifested with his hands. Unlike most publishers, who parcel out each aspect of the business to specialists in their respective fields, Steidl does everything under one roof. From acquisition, editorial, and design to production, printing, and binding to sales and marketing, every Steidl book access is given his personal touch. It is this touch we see and feel when we pick up a Steidl book. It is a sensory experience for the eyes, the hands, and yes, even the nose.

A book is more than a story. It is a complete world unto itself. It is a journey, an adventure, a trip into the mind of the author him or herself. This trip begins with the object of the book, for a book is more than words and images on paper; it is the very paper itself, the ink, the process of production that is at once hidden and revealed with each turn of the page. It is the collected experience of the tiniest details that make the book a thing to behold unto itself. It is this attention that Steidl brings to the art of book publishing that puts him on the same level as the artists he publishes. Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, William Eggleston, David Bailey, Bruce Davidson, Joel Sternfeld, Weegee, Raymond Depardon, Andreas Gursky, Arthur Elgort, Juergen Teller, Guy Bourdin, Ed Ruscha, Jim Dine, Berenice Abbott—and that’s just a few of the authors appearing on the new list for Spring 2013.

Steidl, like the artists he publishes, is driven by love, by passion, and by purpose. Book making is more than a profession; it is a way of life. It is a way of seeing and understanding life in order to share it with the expert and the amateur alike. Books are mystical objects, the mind forever captured on the paper we hold in our hands. Books are more than mere objects; they are repositories of soul. They are a wealth of knowledge, of expressions, of creativity to be revisited throughout our lives. Each time we visit, a deeper understanding occurs: of ideas, of style, of ourselves, and the word in which we live. The art of the book resides in the space where author and publisher meet, in the story they decide to tell and the way in which the story is presented to the world. The books of Steidl are stories put on paper, memories not yet our own until we behold them ourselves.

The beauty of the book is that it has not changed its form. It remains as Gutenberg designed it, leaves bound between covers, handy enough to be held in our arms. A book comes alive when it is opened, and it is here that the magic and mystery begin, as we turn the page and discover a new world held together by concept, content, and the quality of production itself. We are fortunate to have this opportunity to speak with Gerhard Steidl about his life’s work, as a single force who continues to honor the art of book making through his exquisite publishing programme.

Read the Interview at
aRUDE

Gerhard Steidl, photograph by Karl Lagerfeld

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Just Chaos! Curated by Roberta Bayley

Posted on May 16, 2013

Marcia Resnick, Johnny Thunders, 1972

Books and photographs. Photographs and books. The historical record reflects the times as they were lived by those who were there. And here we are, some four decades later, reflecting on punk as it first came up on the streets of New York, along the Bowery, at CBGBs, a mélange of artists, performers, and personalities making for great photography, for stories that are shared and collected, for memories rediscovered and truths being told. For those who were there, and those who missed it, Just Chaos! takes us back to a time and a place where you damn sure better do it yourself, cause if you don’t ain’t no one else.

In the windows and intimate niches of BookMarc, New York, now through May 23, Roberta Bayley has installed selections from 13 photographers of the era:, many which have not been seen before this exhibition. Featuring the work of Bayley, Janette Beckman, Stephanie Chernikowski, Lee Black Childers, Danny Fields, Godlis, Julia Gorton, Bobby Grossman, Bob Gruen, Laura Levine, Eileen Polk, Marcia Resnick, Chris Stein, and Joe Stevens, the photographs featured here are curated with an eye towards style, inspired by the energy of the era as it manifested in the world at that time. “It’s all based in poverty,” Bayley reflects. Everything was D.I.Y., do it yourself.

Fashion, music, style, photography—all of it came as an expression of the truth: after the hippie movement sparked, it became mainstream and lost its edge. Punk came out of that void, all claws and fangs and guitar strings, spikes and torn clothes. It was street, strung out and sexy. It was the artist as anti-hero, a Romantic poem at the end of the second millennium AD. It was about the absolutes of individualism, of speaking your own voice and saying F the system.

But the only constant in life is change, and in one’s own lifetime there are seismic shifts. And now it is that we look to books and photographs to remind us of how it used to be so that we may reflect and consider how the only constant is change. Godlis reflects, “Everyone went down to CBGBs. Everyone would come up with new ideas and you could connect with them. We put flyers on lampposts. That was the Internet of the day. You did not wait for something to be done by someone else.”

Making something out of nothing is what New York has been about, being an original, being authentic, having something no one else could touch. The depths to which Richard Hell, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, the Dead Boys, and so many others brought to their music was matched by the eye of the photographers whose energy enhanced their own. A dialogue was born, a conversation of photographs, emblems, images, icons. It was a new way of looking at the world, a freedom that came from commitment to one’s artistry.

Marcia Resnick explains, “Punks express themselves with youthful aplomb, audacity and honesty. They realize their creative drives without reservation, whether they are making music or outfitting themselves in unique attire. They do things to the best of their abilities without consideration for polish or acceptance.” Consider her photograph of Johnny Thunders: “He covered his face with a kerchief, like the Lone Ranger. He wore a syringe, like a feather, in his hat. He is the incarnation of audacity.”

And it was this audacity that first sailed across the seas, back to the UK, influencing their culture in notorious ways. As Janette Beckman notes, “Punk brought an anti-establishment raw freshness to music, art and style and politics. It was about change, the idea that people should question authority and ‘do it for themselves’. At that time the economy in the UK was terrible, the three day work week, no jobs, no future, British class system, led people to rebel against the way things were and had always been. Punk was an attitude and a life style, that changed everything in the UK.”

Punk has power because it is rooted in the commitment of the individual. Taking on its ethos requires one to maintain a level of personal integrity uncompromised by expectation of objection. As Bobby Grossman recalls, “My photos were synonymous with PUNK.I abandoned a career in painting and Illustration (BFA Rhode Island School of Design) and after a few visits to CBGB to see the first Talking Head shows. I picked up a camera and began to document my visits every night. I had basic photography skills and I found that a Konica point and shoot camera was the simplest and easiest way to go. I often shot from the hip so some of my images included the graffiti on the ceiling while missing most of the composition or maybe just getting a portion of it. I was very in the moment. Many or most No Wave and PUNK musicians were novices to their instruments and I guess you could say the same about me and my camera.”

Punk is the great equalizer. Take it and make it yours. You don’t need money. You don’t need hype. Do It Yourself. Take photographs. Make books. Hang shows. Photography offers a path into the past that makes it come alive in every glance. The cumulative effect of Just Chaos! is breathtaking. It is the awareness that this is it, this is the tipping point in history. We are back on Bleecker Street. The time is not the same, but the time is always now to be making moves.

Janette Beckman, Punks, Worlds End, London 1978

Categories: 1970s, Art, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Engines of War: The Interview

Posted on April 22, 2013

Anthony Suau
Nearly 20,000 people…, 2003, Photograph, 13 x 19 in, Edition of 12

On March 28, Jamel Shabazz invited me to the opening of Engines of War, a group show curated by Charles Dee Mitchell and Cynthia Mulcahy at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. in New York. The show overwhelmed, humbled, and inspired me with its well-thought mix of photojournalism, documentary work, portraiture, and video, which combined to a visceral feeling of fireworks exploding inside my chest, my heart beating faster and faster until I had to turn away to draw breath.

And in the midst of the intensity were images like Anthony Suau’s featured above, a respite, a smile, a giggle, a semblance of surreality and absurdity that makes me wonder what it’s all for. But it is not for me to answer, only for me to listen, and it is with great pleasure and reverence that I share here an interview with the curators, Mr. Mitchell and Ms. Mulcahy.

Please talk about the inspiration for Engines of War. What is it about this topic, and the way in which it is framed in this show, that is even more relevant now, in retrospect ten years after we first invaded Iraq ?

Cynthia Mulcahy: Dee Mitchell and I began talking in 2007 about curating an exhibition that examined war and out of these discussions came two exhibitions about war, both focusing on the first decade of the 21st century: XXI: Conflicts in a New Century in a City of Dallas cultural space in 2011 and this exhibition Engines of War in 2013 with a slightly narrower focus on the United States wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As curators of Engines of War we wanted to look at all aspects of a nation at war from the soldiers who fight the wars and their recruitment, the civilian populations of the United States and those of Iraq and Afghanistan, the politicians and governments and the media covering the wars, and we also wanted to look at the war industry itself and the manufacturing of weapons and military equipment and technology. In like manner, it was also very important for us to look at relevant issues related to a decade of war such as returning wounded veterans, civilian casualties, PTSD and the rise of military suicides.

As a nation now in our longest war in US history in Afghanistan, and having just passed the ten year mark on the US-led Iraq invasion, it certainly seems an appropriate and necessary time to reflect on our past history in the form of a curated visual arts exhibition examining war.

Jamel Shabazz
Cadet Major Mateo…, 2010
Digital C-Print photograph, 11 x 14 in, Edition of 25, Signed

Please talk about the photographers you selected, the stories, and truths they tell. I was very much intrigued by the group as a collective, the sum of the parts greater than the whole.

How did you conceptualize these specific photographer to tell the story of the Iraq War ? What does the group as a whole speak to about our assumptions about war as an industry, an act of aggression, and a “morality” play ? What can we learn by virtue of unconnected stories threaded together through the curatorial eye ?

Cynthia Mulcahy: : We waded through quite a bit of material, of which there is no dearth in the 21st century and the revolution in communications technology, in deciding what to include in the exhibition. We very much wanted to have a multiplicity of artistic practice approaches as well as perspectives, so we looked at the work of not just photojournalists and social documentary photographers but also street photographers and research-based practice artists as well as primary source material such as the war video game and digital comics series. The final contributors include American, Iraqi, British and Dutch artists and some original source material. Together and individually, these artists all powerfully either document or address the issues we as curators were looking at for the Engines of War exhibition and we hope the work as a whole serves to underscore the crucial societal role photojournalists and visual artists play in capturing and contextualizing history for the rest of us.

Eugene Richards
Shurvon at 6 a.m., 2008
Silver gelatin photograph, 20 x 24 in, Edition 4 of 30

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

The photograph is both art and artifact, a witness to history and evidence of what has come before. I was particularly struck when looking at the dead and wounded. Please talk about how photography allows us to observe the horrors of war in what is a complex and compelling silent space. Where is the line when it comes to speaking these hard truths ? Or should there not be a line and should we be asked to go as deep as the “reality” goes ?

Charles Dee Mitchell: When planning the exhibition, we knew we would be addressing both the home front and the actual theater of war. (That in itself is an interesting phrase,) In its role as reportage, photography is always engaged in capturing a specific moment, and it is those moments of extreme human suffering or tragedy that are, as you said, the most problematic.

Working on the home front with veterans who have returned from the war with traumatic physical and mental injuries, Eugene Richards develops a close relationship with his subjects and becomes privy to intimate moments that when we encounter them in a gallery may seem disturbing or even invasive. But there is a shared intimacy here that infuses the work with the humanity and social urgency that has distinguished all of Richards’ projects.

On the other hand, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is working on the ground during an engagement that has horribly bloody consequences. His photographs are unflinching documents of modern, mechanized warfare. We might see similar images in the press when reading accounts of the war. Their presence in the gallery affords viewers’ a chance, if they choose, to engage them with greater intimacy. Ghaith’s work epitomizes the duality of “art and artifact” that you mention in your question. When you ask if there is a line being crossed here, I would answer that there is no line in this setting. Photographers like Ghaith are doing an important and dangerous job. Engines of War would not be what we hope is the honest inquiry it is without both his presence and Eugene Richards’ contribution.

Lisa Barnard
Floor Plan, 2013, C-Print on gloss, 50 x 2 in, Edition of 5

I was struck by the table downstairs that is a floor plan of an industrial base. Please talk about the industry of war and its connection to the media as a machine. How does the photograph/art work/exhibition both challenge and substantiate the military industrial complex as a being of supreme power (so to speak).How does the photograph interact with the subject of war itself ? How does its stillness in time call us to a kind of attention, a care and consideration for the subject itself, and does this attention cause us to question or reinforce our previous assumptions about the act of war by the US ?

Charles Dee Mitchell: The blueprint produced by Lisa Barnard depicts not an “industrial base” but rather the floor plan of a trade show devoted to drone technology. Its layout is familiar to anyone who has ever attended a trade show or for that matter an art fair. Major exhibitors have large central locations with smaller exhibitors in less expensive booths along the perimeter. There are food courts, restrooms, and lounge areas. This piece, perhaps more so than any work in the exhibition, demonstrates that war and the technology that fuels it is big business. We presented the work on a glass-topped table so viewers’ could peer down at it and explore it as one does a map or a maze. Although a wall label explained exactly what the image presented, most people seemed to find the label after spending time with the floor plan. The label sent them back to Barnard’s image with more specific information to bring to their experience of its cool abstraction. This was the type of process we hope repeats itself in many ways throughout the exhibition.

Christopher Morris
Cadets listen…, 2009
Archival Ink Jet, 20 x 24 in, Edition 1/6

Benjamin Lowy
Iraq | Perspectives I…, 2003-2008, Digital C-Print photograph, 20 x 24 in, Edition of 10, 2 AP

Engines of War
Now through May 4

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Karolis Kosas: Anonymous Press

Posted on March 20, 2013

Bad Tattoo, Anonymous Press No. 7957

Dogtown, Anonymous Press No. 7945

The anonymous. It is you and it is me and it is all of us. We are always anonymous, leaving footprints in our wave, evidence of where we have been and what we have done that draws or escapes attention. Identity, in as much as it is a construct, is the positive set against the void, the great swath of nameless humanity that makes for our history on earth, the way we are and we are not at the same time, and the way our technology reflects this.

The Digital Era empowers the anonymous to express and create freely under the protection of the First Amendment. Not only can we say anything we desire, we do not need to sign our name to it. Evidence becomes traces and tracks, not necessarily a complete truth, but a piece of the larger puzzle that will never be solved so much as it will be played out by countless hands through which it passes.

Anonymous Press is the spirit of our times, a completely mechanized process for zine design. It liberates the human element from the process, and presents us with something else, the ghost in the machine, perhaps. Karolis Kosas designed a simple system. Type in a title of your devising. The title can be up to forty characters. Press enter. In less than one minute, Anonymous will present a twelve page zine that presents a search of pictures found in Google Image Search. The images are placed randomly, then numbered and added to a public library. Each zine is available, print on demand, for $3 plus shipping.

There is no credit to anyone other than Anonymous Press, which was designed by Kosas as part of his MFA thesis at Virginia Commonweath University, Richmond, from which he graduates this spring. Anonymous went live in December 2012. As of late February, over eight thousand volumes have been designed, proving that there is a relentless desire to create and disseminate ideas by any means necessary. It is the concept that makes each edition striking, the way that seemingly random information becomes part of a narrative when organized sequentially, around words of any language, even letters themselves. It is at once liberating and absurd, Dada to its core.

Anonymous Press appropriates appropriation so that there is nothing left, just a snake eating its tail as the ghost floats through the machine, whispering ideas in your ear. Kosas notes the inevitable trend towards vulgarity, as well as the self-promoting instinct that is now part of our lexicography, the way in which we are not only worthy of veneration but a brand unto ourselves. The way the anonymous connects to the known and spins through its archives and shares that which we may or may not know.

People want to know: Power, Sex, Love, Grief, Self, Reflection, Time, Edie Segwick, Tupac, Charlie Brown, Early Seventies, Frank Zappa, Shadow People, Skinhead, and Citizen Kane. Then it gets more complex. There were the book ideas themselves, things of distinction like: Crude Drawings of Men I Hate, Pictures of Girls Named Rachel, and I Am a Bodice Ripper. And lastly were the literary titles, the flashes of poetry and philosophy that made the words abstracted lyrics, feelings unto themselves, such as: We Demand to Be Taken Seriously and No Is Shorter Than Yes.

Anonymous Press is casually iconoclastic, dismissing notions of authorship with effortless grace, and in its place, offering a playground for unconscious energies. What we see is a reflection, though of who and what we will never know, but it allows us to consider that the ways in which we create and recreate meaning, in ways to subvert our understanding by offering an alternate interpretation through the very form itself. And it makes bookmaking more like playing the slots, which is has a charmingly harmless quality to the way it allows you to gamble against the odds.

Harlem, Anonymous Press No. 8629

I Love You, Anonymous Press No. 8019

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Harry Allen: The Media Assassin

Posted on March 18, 2013

Run-DMC and Doctor Dre, outside of WBAU/90.3 FM, in the Adelphi University Center, Garden City NY, July 1983, Photograph © Harry Allen

Pebblee-Poo at Home, Photograph © Harry Allen

T La Rock, Benjamin Franklin H.S., South Bronx, Photograph © Harry Allen

Harry Allen is the Media Assassin. Be it print, radio or digital; written or spoken word; or in the medium of photography Allen ihas had a hand in hip-hop culture dating back to 1982, when he first met Carlton “Chuck D” Ridenhour in 1982, when the two took an animation class at Adelphi University. Ridenhour, then a member of the Hip Hop group Sepctrum City introduced Allen Flavor Flav and Terminator X (who, along with Chuck D, would form the core of Public Enemy), Spectrum City founders Hank and Keith Shocklee (who, along with Chuck D and Eric “Vietnam” Sadler , would form PE’s legendary production team, The Bomb Squad ), future Def Jam President Bill Stephney, and Andre “Doctor Dre” Brown, best known for later co-hosting Yo! MTV Raps.

It was during this time that Allen began his work in photography, capturing the local scene and visiting New York City stars, before he began writing professionally in 1987. Allen’s first published article was one of the first pieces to illuminate the political ideology behind Public Enemy. After a 1989 Washington Times interview with Professor Griff brought accusations of anti-Semitism against PE, Allen began identifying himself as a “hip hop activist and media assassin”, becoming the group’s publicist as “director of Enemy relations.”

An early proponent of the Internet, creating an online presence for PE in 1991, Allen was recently named “social media curator” by Fast Company recently named Allen a “social media curator” and one of “11 People Who Could Make Your Twitter Experience More Interesting.” Currently hosting NONFICTION, a Friday afternoon radio show on WBAI-NY/99.5 FM (the flagship of the non-commercial Pacifica radio network), Allen has always had a great affinity for photography. It’s no small feat to host a radio show with photographers as your guests, and successfully convey the nature of their work through ideas, rather than images. But time and again Allen does this, and it is a testament to his innate ability to understand the various forms in which reportage takes place. I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak with Harry Allen about his career in the media, and spotlight his work as a photographer.

Your title “Media Assassin” is incredibly powerful. I have lots of questions about this… How did you come to this idea early in your career? How has it developed over the course of time? Has that changed as you have become a part of the media? And, ultimately, what is your responsibility to your listeners and readers?

Harry Allen: I created the title, Media Assassin, as a way of denoting a certain kind of aggression and intensity in my work. I see it as emblematic of the language employed by great thinkers I admire: Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, David Walker, and others. Over time, the title has become better known, but I can’t say that my objectives for my work have changed in this regard. Ultimately, I consider my responsibility to not “pull punches,” and to communicate in a way that conforms with my operative motto: Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

You’ve always taken a very intellectual and political approach to Hip Hop, something that existed back in the days, but seems to have vanished as money become an object of desire. What is the impetus to maintain your integrity as the culture evolves in another direction?

I can answer this question two related ways:

1) I think my approach to hip-hop is a reflection of who I am, and what I value. I am very much in touch with my own thoughts, and I am confident about them. As such, “maintaining” the approach you describe is merely a matter of doing what comes naturally to me. See this April 2010 interview Dr. Craig Werner and I did with Wisconsin Public Radio

2) I was brought up in, and continue to practice, Seventh-day Adventism as a spiritual system. SDAism has many values, but I think a core one is the idea that God-led people must commit to correct behavior, and not waver. Biblical characters who did this made a strong impression on me, early on, and continue to do so.

But even more, a kind of relentlessness about one’s position, if one believes it to be right and honorable, has become an aspect of my character. Growing up, I did not learn that “money” had an unlimited value. I learned that correct behavior was of higher value than money, and that this notion had a Godly basis. So, practicing correct ideas, and holding to correct standards, as I understand them—a relative kind of inflexibility about this—may be part of what you detect.

I love that you were taking photographs all along! It’s like discovering your house has another room you didn’t even know about. Where did your desire to photograph come from? Who are your inspirations and influences ? How does your visual work play into your mission? How did your subjects relate to you wielding a camera? And what has surprised you most about the public’s reception to your work when Bill Adler exhibited your collection, Part of the Permanent Record: Photos From the Previous Century?

I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures, from the days of dropping B&W 126 cartridges into the back of a cheap camera we had in the house. It got turned up in high school, though, when I was loaned a Canon Canonet GIII-17 rangefinder for a project, and learned I dug the process of making slide shows.

Around the time I left high school for college, I bought a Polaroid SX-70 Special Edition, and a Polaroid 600 SE. Later, I bought a used, match-needle Canon TX w/ a 50mm 1.8 lens and a Canon 577G “potato masher” automatic flash. It was with this basic rig that I shot the pictures you’ve noted.

My inspirations are anyone who has shot and printed a B&W image beautifully. I love the work of Arnold Newman, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Helmut Newton, Ansel Adams, and lots of others.

I think the connection between my photography and other work is that all are centered around the individual. That is, my favorite photography is portraiture. My favorite journalism is the profile, or the Q&A. The act of revealing a person, and their nuances, compels me, in all media.

The people of whom I tended to take pictures possessed big personalities, to begin. so, making images of them tended to be a straightforward task.

Part of the Permanent Record: Photos From the Previous Century was an immensely gratifying event. About 99% of the images we chose had never been printed before. I’d never seen them except on a contact sheet.

Though it was, sadly, Eyejammie Fine Art’s final photo show, getting the exhibit gave me a greater sense of my work and its value. I’d always thought that I had some photographic talent, and that there were people who’d like my work, but seeing people actually show up to look at my pictures was a big moment. Having people buy prints took it to another level.

Now, I’ve been taking some of those images around to colleges and universities, as part of a presentation titled Shooting the Enemy: My Life in Pictures with the People Who Became Public Enemy. See:

http://harryallen.info/?p=7317
http://harryallen.info/?p=7360

This has become an especially gratifying experience, as it gives me an opportunity not only to show the images, and to talk about them, but to discuss my ideas about hip-hop with interested audiences.

You’ve been in radio for nearly 30 years! I love Nonfiction on WBAI. Who have been some of your most memorable interviews? And who are your dream interview subjects?

I’ve been writing professionally since June 1987, and broadcasting since June 2003 on my Friday, 2 pm show, NONFICTION.

I’ve interviewed everyone from Harvard African and African American Studies head Dr. Henry Louis Gates to Black Panther Party activist Kathleen Cleaver; director David Cronenberg to dance music diva Ultra Naté.

I don’t have a favorite interview, or dream interviewee, but I most value those interviews where I learn something new and valuable that I didn’t know; where the subject reveals something of themselves that they’ve not said before; or where I ask them a question they say is so original that it stops them in their tracks.

My business is cultivating conversations. It’s my passion, and it’s something, thank God, I do well. The next part of my life is bringing together my God-given abilities in a way that drives a bigger, deeper, more profound conversation about human culture. That is what I’m onto now and next.

Grandmaster Flash On-Stage at the Ritz, NYC, Photograph © Harry Allen

Categories: 1980s, Art, Fashion, Music, Photography

Jim Naughten – Conflict and Costume: The Herero Tribe of Namibia

Posted on March 13, 2013

Herero Woman in Patchwork Dress (2012) ©Jim Naughten/courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York City

“Herero Cavalry Marching” (2012) © Jim Naughten, Image courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York City

“Herero Woman in Blue Dress” (2012) ©Jim Naughten, Image courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York City

Costume. How we define ourselves when we stand upon the world’s stage and read from the scripts we draft. In donning an ensemble, we assume a posture, an attitude, an aesthetic that we accept as how we see ourselves, and how we wish to be seen. Costume can shape identity the way the corset shapes a woman’s waist. It can take hold and command a sense of respect, of pride, and of purpose, and in this way it can become the most subversive thing on earth.

This is evidenced in Jim Naughten’s new series of photographs collected in Conflict and Costume: The Herero Tribe of Namibia, both a book published by Merrell and an exhibition at Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn that opens March 14 and runs through May 4. In Naughten’s photographs, the Herero stand tall against a blue sky, radiant like flowers blooming across the desert floor. They are garbed in fine style, a look the world has never seen, a post-colonial aesthetic that commands authority as it illustrates the defiant spirit of the Herero peoples.

The Herero arrived in Namibia in the eighteenth century, bringing with them horses, ox-drawn wagons, guns, and Christianity. As Lutz Marten writes in the introduction to Conflict and Costume, “They also brought new styles of clothing, and it was during these early days of contact with the wider world that the Herero were first introduced to the military uniforms and Victorian-style dress.” As their economy developed, the Herero took to sartorial expression of their success.

“Herero Man in Yellow Suit” (2012) © Jim Naughten, Image courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York City

In 1884, Namibia was annexed by the Germans to forestall British encroachment. The Germans, however, made for cruel rulers, with their brutally enforced notions of racial supremacy, alternately slaughtering or enslaving the populace. The Herero resistance led to a full-scale war from 1904-08. About 80% of the population was killed. In 1915, the German colonial army was defeated by South African forces, which then annexed the country until 1988. But it was the brutal war against the Germans that became central to the rebuilding of the Herero cultural identity.

Shortly after the end of World War I, the Herero created the Otruppe, a symbolic, rather than actual army. From the uniforms of the killed or departed Germans, a regiment was born, and women joined in creating grand dame gowns that befit the most regal ladies in the world. The Herero have created a highly detailed and symbolic form of costuming for the regiments, which are donned at ceremonies and festivals to commemorate the past take on a level of radical chic. “To the victor go spoils,” it has been said. To assume the costume of the enemy in memory of those who gave their life is nothing short of a kind of victory that few could ever imagine.

As Naughten observes, “Namibia is an extraordinary country, and perhaps most interesting to me is the stories that we don’t know, the ones that have been lost or fragmented in aural tradition. There’s very little literature from the last hundred years or so, but there’s a tangible sense of history in the ghost towns, colonial architecture, cave paintings, and the landscape that feels otherworldly and timeless.

“Herero Woman in Patchwork Dress 2” (2012) © Jim Naughten, Image courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York City

“When I look at the dresses and costumes I see a direct connection with this period with an almost a ghostly imprint of the German settlers. I see my images as both a study of and a celebration of the costume, and not as a formal documentary on Herero culture, and I the paradoxical nature of the story is one of the most interesting aspects. Why would the Herero adopt the cloths of the very people who cost them so dearly?

“I see the clothes as symbolic of survival and strength, but particularly of a kind of defiance. In that sense, they are heroic. The taking and wearing of their enemies clothing is considered a way of absorbing and diminishing their power. They march and drill after the German fashion of the period, and ride horseback with extraordinary skill (horses were introduced by the settlers). To me the Herero are undiminished and have an extraordinary grace and presence.”

Naughten’s portraits are as majestic as the people he photographs, imparting a feeling of beauty and power that many in the West rarely consider twhen they think of Africa today. Naughten’s photographs of the Herero show us what victory truly means, and how it is that every day we walk this earth, we honor those who came before us, embracing the good, the bad, and the ugly on mankind and transforming it into a symbol of cultural and personal pride.

First Published in L’Oeil de la Photographie
March 13, 2013

Herero Man with Cow’s Head (2012) ©Jim Naughten/courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York City

“Herero Women Marching” (2012) © Jim Naughten, Image courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York City

Herero Woman in Orange Dress (2012) ©Jim Naughten/courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York City

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Nat Finkelstein: Defend Freedom

Posted on March 7, 2013

Nat Finkelstein was a photographer with the photo agencies PIX and Black Star during the 1960s. He was a successful mainstream photojournalist, published in major media outlets. In August 1965, Nat was assigned by Life Magazine to photograph protesters in Washington DC. The protest – known as the Assembly of Unrepresented Persons—was designed to link opposition to the Vietnam War with support for voting rights to create a broader peace and freedom movement. Urged on by a young woman holding a “DEFEND FREEDOM” sign, the protesters tried nonviolently to enter the Capitol to present a “Declaration of Peace.” But police intervened and a melée ensued—with Nat Finkelstein there to capture every frame of it.

After the protest, Nat gave his negatives to a messenger from Life’s Washington office. Those negatives promptly disappeared. For almost 30 years they remained missing and this hole in the historical record persisted. But fortunately, the contact sheets of the images Nat captured that day were recently re-discovered. Below is Nat’s story, as he lived it.

Defend Freedom
Photographs and Story by Nat Finkelstein
First published by The Blacklisted Journalist, 2004

The Free Press is free only to the man who owns the presses. —A.J. Leibling, The Press

Liberty is murdered when the Free Press is Murdoched

It was the eighth of August ’65.

There’s hardly a person still alive who remembers that date and time and year when insurrections were here and the protest was clear: all comparisons stop there.

I was a stringer with two major photographic agencies, Black Star and Pix. I specialized in civil rights, politics, and the counterculture. I was younger then and still believed that it was possible to change the world 35 millimeters at a time. That as a photojournalist working for nationally distributed magazines, I could contribute to change and betterment:

”Show them the light and they will follow” sort of elitism. The Liberal trap: a fallacy.

BULLET: True that Playboy helped bring about certain temporary changes in societal attitudes towards sexuality. But Hugh Hefner never was and never would be a politically progressive publisher. He was never much more than a brilliant huckster of titillations, sex, and lightweight literature: An apostle of materialism and masturbation, the perfect exemplar of capitalism…

LOOK MA! ANYONE CAN DO IT. GET ON THAT RAFT AND COME TO AMERIKA CARLOS AND ROSITA, LOOK WHAT WE GOT AND YOU CAN HAVE IT TOO.

I had a good reputation for handling myself in competitive situations. I had acquitted myself well during Pope John’s visit, Marilyn Monroe’s circus performance, Castro’s visit to the U.N., and the previous Civil Rights demonstrations (as well as fending off sneak attacks of Warhol’s pack of grave-robbers, whiners and sycophants).

Furthermore, I was deeply involved in what was then called “The New Left”—both as a journalist and participant. Long before the onset of “The Struggle,” I had joined the Y.P.A. in the Fifties and had friends and contacts in the movement. I was trusted. So, when Howard Chapnick, the president of Black Star, was asked by Life Magazine to cover an upcoming anti-war demonstration in Washington, he gave the assignment to me. Before I left, Howard warned me of a feud between New York and the DC office. New York, being slightly more liberal of the the two, was less prone to sucking the Luce/Chenault ass. Sabotage was not unheard of—the rivalry was intense.

I arrived at Union Station in Washington the day before the march was scheduled and met up with a group of kids from Columbia University. They were students of Professor Paul Goodman, a well respected, left-leaning political philosopher, and I spent the day with them. I was surprised that they knew who I was and some of the previous articles that I had published. (This was to rebound on me later.)

As the evening progressed, the group became more diverse, as veterans of the civil rights struggle came in: The DuBois Society, CORE (Congress Of Racial Equality), SNCC (Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee). Fresh from voter registration drives in Mississippi, militants from Newark and Harlem were joining up with kids from Y.A.W.F. (Youth Against War and Fascism). White middle class kids and black militants coming together in an uneasy alliance. Together with the various Pacifist societies, as well as the followers of Martin Luther King, who previously had eschewed the anti war movement, they joined to form an Assembly of Unrepresented People, determined to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right of free assembly in order to petition their government and declare the war in Vietnam to be a racist war.

Neither Martin Luther King nor any of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference were present, here preferring to lend their support from a safe distance. They later lent their full support, but at this point in the struggle, the Afro-American section of ‘The Movement’ was represented by SNCC and CORE.

At this point I was encountered by a photographer assigned by Life’s Washington office (I believe Dennis Brock), who informed me that he was there to assist me and that I would get the best shots by climbing to the roof of the Smithsonian Institute, overlooking the parade route and getting an overhead view. This, of course, would take me away from the action and put me on the sidelines. I refused the advice.

Upon leaving the Mall, the march, led by David Dellinger, Stuart Lynde and Robert Moses was attacked by uniformed members of the American Nazi Party. They threw pails of red paint on the leading marchers, of which I was one.

The Nazis were gently led off by the Washington police. I followed, photographing the entire incident.

The Life representative then asked me if I was shooting in color, & I told him that I was shooting in both color & B&W. In that case, he said, you’ve got a cover.

When we reached the House of Representatives, the group was divided by Dellinger and Lynde, the pacifist wing. Those that wished to encounter the government’s forces should sit on the steps, while the pacifists would absent themselves from any physical action and stand on the side.

A short time after this was done, we were refused entry into the House of Representatives. A young Black lady (wearing a “Defend Freedom” sign) with a young white lady stood up and exhorted the crowd to exercise their legal rights and cross the police lines. At this point, I believe the photos speak for themselves. I was busy doing my job.

But you can observe that the first people to be accosted and intimidated by the police were the Afro-Americans. During the march, an apparently late Nazi threw some of his own paint, and was also roughed up by the police. However, he was not arrested.

At this point, the police forces were led and instructed by a non-uniformed, unidentified man, who apparently commanded the police to be rough. In fact, you can see this man in the pictures. Who he was, no one may ever know.

As you can see from the photographs, the other photographers stayed at a short distance from this action, whereas I was fully involved, as you can see one picture, to the point of being punched in the stomach by a policeman during the melee, even though I was wearing official press credentials identifying me as a photographer from Life magazine. I did my job recording the information before me; the brutality, the obvious concentration on people of color, the fingernails crunching nerve endings, the faces squeezed, the glee of the oppressors, the courage of the kids.

At the conclusion, I immediately headed to Union Station to return to New York. While at Union Station, a messenger from Life magazine sought me out, telling me they needed my color shots immediately as they were preparing for a cover. My ego, at that point bigger than my brains—I was thinking about my picture getting on the cover of Life magazine—handed the film to the messenger and returned to New York. Where I received a chewing out from Howard Chapnick, who told me these pictures would be lost forever, which they were. The black and whites—buried—were not retrieved until recently. Time-Life tells me they no longer have the negatives.

(Until recently I fully believed that there was a bureaucratic or interoffice rivalry that resulted in the lose of the story but in July the New York Times frontpaged a similar instance where an early civil rights [1964] story was similarly “lost”: More will appear.)

At that point, I decided to put down my cameras & pick up my militancy. The time for poetry ended, the time for political action began for me. I left for San Francisco soon after, and joined with people such as the Diggers (Emmett Grogan and Peter Cohen (aka Coyote).

As you’ll notice from these photographs, there were no “long-haired freaks”: no Abbie Hoffman, no Jerry Rubin, no Allen Ginsberg. No pot, no gratuitous violence on the part of the protestors. This came later. It is my firm belief this was done by the so-called capitalist “Free Press.” The mainstream media that appointed theatrical clowns such as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary, as representative of the antiwar movement. When actually, the antiwar movement consisted of the students and the ordinary American working class. The mainstream press persuaded middle America that William Burroughs was making opiates the religion of their children while their daughters were getting knocked up by commies and Blacks.

The culture war had begun.

www.natfinkelstein.com

Categories: 1960s, Art, Photography

The Inevitable Has No Plan

Posted on March 3, 2013

We pass through each other casually
as though it were not but it is meant to be.

Lyrically, the poets are called by it
Sophocles is it? Let me check. Okay. Yes.
Art. Stories. Poetry. Scene.
Drama. Romance. Passion. Intrigue.
Glamour. Fanning Mahhself.

Lists Are Exciting.

I wrote this a long time ago
but it greets me again
like Miss Sphinx up on Oedipus
by Gustave Moreau
in the American Wing
of the Metropolitan.

~*~

Categories: Art, Poetry

Estevan Oriol: Portraiture of Los Angeles

Posted on February 27, 2013

Portraiture of Los Angeles © Estevan Oriol

Back in ‘93, Estevan Oriol was tour manager for House of Pain. His father, a photographer, Eriberto Oriol gave his son a camera, told him to take pictures. Oriol remembers feeling weird about it. “Most people with cameras were paparazzi or tourists. They take out the camera for everything and nothing. I don’t want to look like that. Even now I sorta feel weird taking it out,” he reveals.

Oriol always loved cars and the lowrider culture of Los Angeles. In 1989 he purchased a 1964 Chevy Impala from a friend for $1500. Over the years he put in work, rebuilding it to its original glory. Over the years the car has had four different looks; he is currently working on a fifth edition.

This kind of dedication comes to someone with a love for the tactile, the machinery of our age, the car, the camera. Both are integral to his work. He describes Los Angeles as his canvas, as he sets forth around the city taking pictures along the way. He explains, “My Los Angeles is the beaches, mountains, everything. Beverly Hills, Hollywood, South Central, East LA, Downtown. There re so many different parts of it. I go everywhere. That’s a 300-page book right there.”

Indeed, Oriol’s filing cabinets are spilling with images, photographs going back two decades of Los Angeles, it’s residents, it’s landscape, it’s culture. And from this diverse backdrop, he is currently culling a selection of images for publication in his second monograph, Portraiture of Los Angeles (Drago). This book focuses on gang culture, a way of life that he has seen from the inside. Oriol observes, “You got cool guys, crazy guys, assholes. Most people are cool that’s why I hang out with them. It’s more a brotherhood, the family. Got the barbecue, lowriding, hanging out, school days, guns, drugs, a little bit of everything.”

And then there is style, culture, pride, a way of life that Oriol embodies as a self taught artist navigating any number of industries using the photograph. He laments on the death of magazines, as we all do, those grand days where archives were open for editors looking for classic and cutting edge work. Now Oriol is thinking about how to share his work with the world.

“I’m doing the book so that people can’t afford prints can buy the book. I ended up making products: calendars, playing cards, t-shirts. Not everyone wants t-shirts. People buy books and put them in their library. I want people to buy my books. I imagine a 60 year old man is walking through the airport and he sees the cover of my book, L.A, Woman, and he wants to get it because of that.”

That, in fact, is exactly what happened to Oriol in Italy, while promoting L.A. Women in Italy. He asked them if they knew his other work. His iconic “L.A. Fingers” or the lowrider/gang portraits that have dramatized his black and white work for years. The old man knew neither. He just knew what he liked: the ladies.

L.A. Woman is Oriol’s love poem to the girls and the gun molls, the gansta bitches and the baby dolls. It is around the way girls from the City of Angels, forever cast in film noir they are vixenish kittens prancing before the lens. Oriol’s women come hither on every page.

Oriol’s women have brought him success, and now as he prepares for his second book, he can reflect upon what it’s all about. We talk about the way it was back in the days, when gangstas all dressed in a way that represented their neighborhood, until that became a tool by which the LAPD would oppress their civil rights, with injunctions passed against public assembly of three or more people. We talk about police harassment, search and seizure, police brutality. We talk about how you reach a point in your life where you can’t be hanging out. Oriol is a grandfather. He’s building a legacy.

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

Begin With What Remains

Posted on February 17, 2013

It begins in feeling. Vibrations wave through viscera. Deep, dark, rolling waves come over me, coming up from the center and taking hold. Taking me over, making me over, got me singing Dionne Warwick, Don’t—

But it’s too late. The center has exploded. The bomb detonates. The ground shakes, the air breaks, the sky rains down clouds of filth. Fire burns until it burns no more and all that is left are these fragments and shards, charred, burned beyond recognition and me, I am. Lost and found. Found and lost. The picture is shattered and what remains is a puzzle of how many pieces and what did it look like in the first place?

Don’t know. Can only find out when I sit still for long enough to go backwards through hell. Begin with what remains, all that is left, trying to see if there is some semblance of sense that can be made by putting words to print. To think in words is to trap myself but they are my métier, and so I use myself. As bait. As trap. As predator. As prey. The circle is complete when I am yin to my yang, yang to my yin, and I realize, this is why it hurts so bad.

I couldn’t, even though I wish I could, walk away. It’s too late. The show must go on. And I set it all up. I mean, none of this is by accident, even if I didn’t know exactly what it was for. It reveals itself, each and every step of the way, how this is the means to self mastery, self esteem, self respect. All the things I never learned, now I open the book to the very first page.

Blank page. That’s not so hard. Blank is peace, soothing me with its clear, cool charm. Blank is pure, untouched, unfettered pleasure of absolutely anything I dream. Possibility will always be superior to actualization if only because possibility hasn’t been touched. Blank I love. Blank is all I could be, to remove a little bit, each and every day. Blank one day, once again, when I return to from whence I came.

It’s not the blank that hurts. It is the act. Returning once more to discover what is left. If it is left. If there is anything there, or if I have to recreate it all, once again, deep inside my soul. I must, and thas where it starts. Or stops. Writer’s block isn’t the fear of writing, it is the fear of reliving the past.

But. I relive it anyway. It never ends. The screen in the eye of my mind, forever replaying clips from the past. Remixing them, splicing them along, so that memory is not the thing itself, but a pattern, a song. To put it to paper, this is the trick, to find the strength to discover the words that to allow me to simultaneously hold and release this feeling. That’s all there is.

Categories: Art, Photography