Posts from the “Art” Category

William Gedney: A Time of Youth – San Francisco, 1966-1967

Posted on April 1, 2021

*From A Time of Youth: San Francisco, 1966–1967 © William Gedney, courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University*

A year before 1967’s famed Summer of Love, American photographer William Gedney(1932-1989) set out for San Francisco on a Guggenheim Fellowship to record what he described as “aspects of our culture which I believe significant and which I hope will become, in time, part of the visual record of American history.”

Filled with optimism and hope, Gedney arrived in San Francisco ready to embed himself amid a new generation of youth coming of age that rejected the strictures of the status quo in the pursuit of happiness. He gravitated towards a group of hippies living at “The Pad,” a communal house in Haight Asbury, just a few blocks from the home of the seminal counterculture rock band Grateful Dead.

Between October 1966 and January 1967, Gedney made 2,100 photographs across 62 rolls of 35 mm film, chronicling the everyday lives of a group of lovers and friends as the beatnik era gave way to the hippie scene. In these images there is nothing of the Pollyanna spirit to come, no “love will save the world” ethos brimming amid the youth, but rather a forlorn, more disaffected truth.

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Categories: 1960s, Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Peter van Agtmael: War in the 21st Century

Posted on March 30, 2021

*9/5/20. Protesters taunt militia members who had marched on the Breonna Taylor memorial. Louisville, Kentucky. © Peter Van Agtmael*

On January 17, 1991 a coalition of 35 nations led by the United States invaded Iraq launching the Gulf War, codenamed Operation Desert Shield — the largest military alliance since World War II. Over five weeks, the allied powers waged one of the most intense aerial bombing campaigns in military history, dropping some 85,000 tons on Iraq and broadcasting select strikes as seen from far above, creating the image of war as video game.

“As Operation Desert Storm erupted last week, there was only one unequivocal victor in the first days of war: the Cable News Network,” Variety reported on January 20, 1991. In just one month, the 10-year-old cable news service gained global prominence by live broadcasting from the frontlines into 10.8 million U.S. homes. Among those watching was future Magnum Photos member Peter van Agtmael, then a fifth grade student living with his family in Bethesda, Maryland.

“What I remember most vividly were videos showing air strikes and smart bombs filmed from the airplanes,” he says of the powerfully crafted propaganda produced by the U.S. government – a far cry from the horrific reportage witnessed during the Vietnam War. “It was about how accurate the weaponry was and avoiding civilian casualties, and to my mind, I believed it. I didn’t have any critical thinking skills at that point and I didn’t come from a politically radicalized family that was trying to puncture the myth by questioning what was going on.”

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*A gardener of a small health clinic in Garmsir, Helmand. Afghanistan, 2009. © Peter Van Agtmael*

*Marines swim in an irrigation canal at their outpost south of Garmsir in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2009. © Peter Van Agtmael*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Alex Webb: For the Record

Posted on March 29, 2021

*Alex Webb. Gouyave, Grenada, 1979. © Alex Webb/Magnum Photo*s

The documentary photograph, both art and artifact, occupies a singular place in the historical record. It acts as testimony, bearing witness to those whose voices might otherwise go unheard, and it can be used as a form of activism to change the world.

A new exhibition, For the Record, brings together the work of some 35 photographers whose innovative approaches have redefined not just the genre but also the medium writ large. From Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York to Danny Lyon’s Bikeriders, to Larry Clark’s Tulsa, and Bruce Davidson’s Brooklyn Gang, the exhibition chronicles the role of documentary photography in shaping the way we see and think about the times in which we live.

By combining classical and contemporary approaches, the exhibition explores the ever-evolving language of photography and the ways in which it simultaneous straddles the realms of reportage and fine art. As 17th-century clergyman Thomas Fuller famously said, “Seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth” — a sentiment that captures documentary photography’s extraordinary ability to communicate the emotional impact of people, places, and events.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Alex Webb. Port au Prince, Haiti, 1979. © Alex Webb/Magnum Photo*s

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes from a Disappeared City.

Posted on March 29, 2021

*Provisional Notes from a Disappeared City © Reynaldo Rivera*

“The only decade I feel nostalgic for is the ‘70s,” says photographer Reynaldo Rivera from his Los Angeles home. “There’s a dreamlike thing in my psyche about the ‘70s as this magical time even though I had this horrifying experience. My father kidnapped me and my sister, took us to a village in Mexico, and left there from ‘69 to ’75. It’s like an Oliver Twist story. This lady took us in and used to sing Toña la Negra songs. Music was my babysitter at a time when I would have had mother, my aunts and uncles.”

After singing a few lyrics to Toña la Negra’s bolero “Arráncame La Vida” Rivera shares the translation by text: “Rip the life from me / With your last love kiss / Tip it, take it, tale me heart / Rip me life and in case the pain hurts you / I must be from not seeing me / Because at the end, your eyes, I took with me.”

“This is what influenced me,” Rivera says. “Music opened the door that allowed me to create an environment where I’d want to take photos. Being into all this Mexican super tragic music created this baroque me, this person that’s over the top emotional. From Toña la Negra, and later Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, I sought answers that told me to take a beating and still love it!”

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

Iringó Demeter: She is Warm

Posted on March 26, 2021

Hailing from a tiny Transylvanian village of just 200 people, London-based photographerIringó Demeter remembers growing up surrounded by nature and animals. “It was very lonely but that pushed me to observe and question everything around me,” Demeter tells AnOther. “I relate to being an observer: looking at things as they happen, listening to them, and wondering why they are that way. A piece of grass blowing in the wind – there is so much beauty and so much quietness about it.”

Demeter’s fascination with nature serves her well in the creation of a series of female nudes brought together in the new book She Is Warm (Libraryman). Included as number 12 of the publisher’s quarterly Seasons Series, which draws inspiration from Kim Ki-duk’s seminal film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring, the book showcases Demeter’s original perspective on the nude, one rooted in the idea that our bodies are our first home.

Over the past four years, Demeter has amassed a collection of works crafted from what could be described as “slow” photography. “I would never carry a camera,” she says. “I look at all of these things, then maybe a day or a year later I photograph a body and think back on that experience. I work with single images. I always say that if I take away one good image, I am happy. I don’t have expectations that every it has to be good – no, that’s way too much pressure. I focus on single images and when I have it, I’m like this is great!”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Photography, Women

Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood

Posted on March 24, 2021

*Emine Dressed Up for Republic Day, Trabzon, Turkey, 1965 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

“I didn’t have the happiest home life or childhood, so I think that gave me a feeling of justice and passion for people that don’t have all the breaks,” Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) said in 2010 on KOBRA SVT, Swedish National Television.

“I think it was important to me to be free and wander the world and not have a family,” Mary Ellen Marks added. “I think if you don’t come from a happy home, maybe you don’t want to tie yourself down. I always wanted to be completely free. Even from the time that I was like eight years, seven years old, I remember walking home from grade school thinking, When am I going to get out of here? I’ve got to be free. So the freedom was always a major thought for me, a major plan.”

That desire for freedom became the driving force in the artist’s life. Having no children of her own, Mark was able to dedicate herself wholly to the creation of an extraordinary archive of work, selections from which were recently published in the three-volume monograph, The Book of Everything (Steidl), published at the end of last year and edited by film director Martin Bell, Mark’s husband and collaborate for 30 years.

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*Amanda and her cousin Amy. Valdese, North Carolina, 1990 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

*Brooke and Billy at Gibbs Senior High School prom. St. Petersburg, Florida, 1986 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

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

Frankie Perez: See Me Up? It’s ‘Cause I’ve been down

Posted on March 22, 2021

From Bronx jams in the 1970s to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, the art of breaking has come along way over the past 50 years. One of the four elements of hip hop, breaking took its name from the dancers who took to the floor to show out when the DJ would cut the breaks.

With the release of seminal hip-hop films like Wild Style and Style Wars in the early 1980s, followed by Hollywood fare like Breakin’ and Beat Street, breaking became a global phenomenon, with aspiring B-boys and B-girls doing windmills, headspins, and backspins in their freshest fits.

With the commercial success of rap music, the culture moved away from hip hop’s roots, but breaking continued to grow, becoming an underground phenomenon around the globe. New York native Frank “B-boy Frankie” Perez discovered breaking while he was living in East Elmhurst, Queens, with extended family.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Huck, Music, Photography

Rebecca Norris Webb: Night Calls

Posted on March 19, 2021

An introverted child, American photographer Rebecca Norris Webb remembers the pleasures of being alone while growing up in rolling hills of Rush County, Indiana. “I was most comfortable a few feet off the ground, usually on the lowest branch of a sugar maple or sycamore tree,” she says. “Hidden by the foliage, I learned a lot about light by watching it shimmer between the leaves. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been a daydreamer. Between ache and sky, I float by seeing.”

But beneath the glittering light of the open sky, a darker, more disturbing world would reveal itself. As the daughter of a country doctor, Norris Webb recalls the grim reality of the circle of life: “Death and suffering were frequent visitors: the farmer who died in a tractor accident; the boy who walked with a limp because of TB; the racially motivated murder of the daughter of one of my father’s patients.”

Imbued with a profound sensitivity, Norris Webb found voice through verse penning poetry until she found the words deserted her after college. Inspired to find a new vessel by which to channel life, she purchased a camera in the mid-1980s and traveled for a year, hoping the creation of images would spark poems upon her return.

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*Indiana, Rushville from Night Calls © Rebecca Norris Webb*

Categories: Art

Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color

Posted on March 18, 2021

*Street scene in East Harlem, NY 1947 © Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography*

American photographer Ida Wyman (1926–2019) achieved her every dream except one — the opportunity to publish her illustrated memoir Girl Photographer: From the Bronx to Hollywood and Back before she died. Though Wyman was humble, she never lacked for confidence or nerve, becoming one of the few women photographers working for Look andLife magazines in the 1940s.

As with many things, Wyman was ahead of the times. “She never wanted to be the most famous,” says Heather Garrison, her granddaughter and executor of the Ida Wyman Estate. “I think in her later years she finally understood how important her journey was as a woman in a male dominated industry. She took meticulous notes and records, and had her archive well organized. She wanted to put it all into one piece.”

Despite the fact Wyman did not live to see her book published, her work is receiving its proper due in the new exhibition in Santa Fe, Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color, which showcases a recently discovered collection of Ektachtomes Wyman made at the age of 21. The only color body of work from the period, Wyman’s photographs offer a poignant portrait of working class life in New York after the war. Neither activist nor ethnologist, Wyman was a humanist with a profound love for street portraiture. She eschewed the term “street photography,” seeing it as an anachronistic term to describe the documentation of urban life.

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Categories: Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Women

David Goldblatt: Strange Instrument

Posted on March 16, 2021

*David Goldblatt, Richard and Marina Maponya, Dube, Soweto, 1972.*

As a Jewish man born in South Africa, David Goldblatt (1930-2018) was an insider and an outsider at the same time. Born to parents who fled Lithuania to escape persecution, Goldblatt was possessed with a profound sensitivity to the exploited and oppressed. He took up photography as a teenager and began working full time in 1963 after selling the family store following the death of his father to document South Africa at the height of apartheid.

“David Goldblatt was a very political person and believed strongly in documenting the injustices that he saw around him. But he didn’t think of what he was doing as activism and he certainly didn’t want it to be propaganda,” says Pace Gallery curator Oliver Schultz.

Reflecting on what he describes as Goldblatt’s “compassion and dispassion”, Schultz discussed how the photographer’s matter of fact approach maintains its own profound emotional force. Although straightforward in its presentation, Goldblatt’s images can be unpacked like Russian nesting dolls, offering layers of meaning aligned with the viewer’s proximity to the subject of his work.

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*David Goldblatt, Couple at The Wilds. Johannesburg., 1975.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Africa, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Hazel Hankin: Coney Island, Summer of 77

Posted on March 14, 2021

*Hazel Hankin. Coney Island, Summer 1977.*

Brooklyn native Hazel Hankin can still remember the thrills and chills of going to Coney Island in the 1950s as a child, revelling in the vibrant atmosphere of “America’s Playground”. Drawn to what she describes as “a world that seemed to exist outside of normal life,” as a teenager, Hankin began hanging around Coney Island after dark with friends for late-night rides on the legendary Cyclone rollercoaster.

After graduating high school at 16, Hankin began studying art at Brooklyn College where she pursued her BA, then her MFA. Originally a painter, everything changed when Hankin, who married at 20, got divorced mid-degree.

“I didn’t have a place to paint but I had a place to put a darkroom,” Hankin remembers. “I didn’t know anything about photography. I was a blank slate. I learned photography on a 2 ¼ camera and didn’t even know about different photo formats.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1970s, Art, Brooklyn, Huck, Photography