Posts from the “Art” Category

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.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

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

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

Guzman: 90s Music Icons

Posted on September 10, 2020

*Guzman. Salt N Pepa, for US Magazine, early 1990s.*

By the 1990s, the music industry had changed irrevocably. Vinyl was becoming a thing of the past as CDs came to the fore, and music videos skyrocketed in popularity, requiring artists to develop an aesthetic to embody their sound.

Guzman – the husband and wife photography duo of Constance Hansen and Russell Peacock – helped to define the look of the times with a series of iconic album and magazine covers for everyone from Fishbone to En Vogue.

The couple got their start in music photography with the cover of Debbie Harry’s 1986 album, Rockbird, collaborating with the likes of Stephen Sprouse and Andy Warhol. Three years later, they hit the big time, when they photographed the cover of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 – a groundbreaking album that transformed the course of Hansen and Peacock’s careers.

Throughout the ’90s, Guzman would go on to photograph some of the era’s biggest acts, among them Lenny Kravitz, Luther Vandross, SWV, and Salt-N-Pepa. Long before industry personnel began crowding photo shoots, photographers and artists collaborated in intimate settings.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Guzman. Lenny Kravitz for Vibe Magazine, 1998.*

*Guzman. Hole for “Celebrity Skin” album cover shoot, 1998*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Huck, Music, 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.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

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.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

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

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

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

Joseph Rodriguez: LAPD 1994

Posted on September 3, 2020

*Joseph Rodriguez. A young man received a ticket for jaywalking.*

Rife with systemic abuses of power, the Los Angeles Police Department’s brutalization of Black and Latinx communities came to a head when four cops charged with assaulting Rodney King were found not guilty in April 1992, sparking off the LA Riots.

That June, Willie Williams became the first Black Chief of the LAPD after Daryl Gates was forced to resign. Recognizing the power of publicity, Williams gave the New York Times Magazine unprecedented access to the LAPD in an effort to sell the public “A Kinder Gentler Cop.”

In September 1994, the Times commissioned photographer Joseph Rodriguez to ride along with members of the LAPD across the city and around the clock over a period of two weeks. A native New Yorker, Rodriguez had been in Los Angeles for two years working on a project that would become East Side Stories: Gang Life in East LA (powerHouse Books, 1998).

“It was an eye-opener,” Rodriguez says of his time with law enforcement, which has been compiled in the forthcoming book, LAPD 1994 (The Artist Edition), a photographic expose of his time with members of the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) unit, the subject of the 1988 film Colors, the Rampart Division, and the 77th Street Division in South Central and Watts.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Joseph Rodriguez, Rampart officers search an abandoned motel for a murder suspect. The building is just a few blocks from Charlie Chaplin’s old mansion.*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Huck, Photography

The Camera Ministry of Khalik Allah

Posted on September 1, 2020

Khalik Allah From the series, “125th & Lexington” © Khalik Allah | Magnum Photos

Hailing from New York, Jamaican-Iranian artist Khalik Allah is a self-taught photographer and filmmaker documenting Black life across the diaspora. In his hands, the camera illuminates the spirit made flesh, liberating the soul of his subjects from the burdens of their social circumstances.

Whether making images in East Harlem for the film ‘Field Niggas’ (2014) and his first book Souls Against the Concrete (University of Texas Press, 2017) or traveling to the Jamaican countryside to explore his family roots in ‘Black Mother’ (2018), Allah invokes the teachings of the Five-Percent Nation in his work. In summary Allah describes the Nation – which emerged in Harlem in 1964 and in which he grew up in as “an educational outreach movement.” He continues: “Its teachings are directed at young black men and women to give them ‘Knowledge of Self’; to uplift them by restoring them to the awareness of Black people’s contributions to world history prior to American slavery.”

Here, the 2020 Magnum nominee discusses the importance of staying true to his vision and following his own path to co-create stories of love and innocence with his subjects.

Read the Full Story at Magnum Photos

*Khalik Allah From the series, “Black Mother” © Khalik Allah | Magnum Photos*

Categories: Art

How the Spiral Group Amplified the Diversity of Black Artists in 1960s America

Posted on August 21, 2020

*Romare Bearden. Mysteries from Prevalence of Ritual, 1964. Etching, aquatint and photo engraving.*

Who is the Black artist in America—and how does race inform one’s relationship and responsibilities to society? As the civil rights movement surged through the United States during the summer of 1963, a group of New York–based African American artists brought these questions to the fore as the Spiral Group. Dedicated to critical inquiry, the collective centered the concerns of Black artists at a time when they were largely excluded by white-owned art institutions.

“I suggest that Western society, and particularly that of America, is gravely ill and a major symptom is the American treatment of the Negro,” Spiral Group co-founder Romare Bearden told ARTnews in a 1966 feature. “The artistic expression of this culture concentrates on themes of ‘absurdity’ and ‘anti-art’ which provide further evidence of its ill health,” Bearden continued, outlining the art world’s complicity in maintaining a racist status quo. “It is the right of everyone now to re-examine history to see if Western culture offers the only solutions to man’s purpose on this earth.”

Together with Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff, Bearden established the Spiral Group in order to incorporate elements of philosophy, sociopolitical activism, and creative integrity into conversations around artmaking. In total, the group would include 15 members, aged 28 to 65, including Emma Amos, Calvin Douglass, Perry Ferguson, Reginald Gammon, Felrath Hines, Alvin Hollingsworth, William Majors, Richard Mayhew, Earl Miller, Merton D. Simpson, and James Yeargans.

The group’s logo, chosen by Woodruff, symbolized the group’s noble aims: an Archimedean spiral moving upward and outward in all directions from a fixed starting point, with segments numbered 0 to 15 to represent each artist. In theory, the group’s starting point seemed straightforward enough—their focus was Black artists in America. But as the group’s journey would soon illustrate, that nexus would eventually prove to be rather elusive.

Read the Full Story at Artsy

*Emma Amos. Untitled (painting made for Spiral Exhibition, 1965), ca. 1964 Oil on canvas.*

*Norman Lewis. Untitled (Alabama), 1967. Oil on canvas. © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY*

Categories: 1960s, Art, Artsy

Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah: Andy Sweet’s Summer Camp 1977

Posted on August 18, 2020

Back in 1968, Andy Sweet began spending summers at Camp Mountain Lake, a sleep away camp in Hendersonville, North Carolina. As time went on, the adolescent camper graduated to counselor, then photography instructor, teaching the next generation of secular Jews from South Florida the joys of making photographs.

In 1977 he returned with a mission for his work brought about by a course of study at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s MFA program. As a documentary photographer who had just crossed over to color, Sweet was inspired by the emerging photographers of the time: Robert Adams, Emmet Gowin, and Bill Owens.

“These three photographers all have something in common with the way I work,” Sweet is quoted as saying in the foreword of Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah: Andy Sweet’s Summer Camp 1977 (Letter 16 Press). ‘Their photographs are not the reason of their subject matter. The subject matter is the reason of their work. Belonging, knowing, and understanding, before picking up the camera, is the most determining factor.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1970s, Art, Feature Shoot, Photography

Karlheinz Weinberger: Photographs Together & Alone

Posted on August 18, 2020

*Karlheinz Weinberger. Knabenschiessen, Albisguetli 1962*

Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006) fell in love with photography in his early 20s, and spent the next six decades of his life capturing the pleasures of youth, rebellion, and the male form.

It all began in 1958, when Weinberger met a teen named Jimmy Oechslin on a street near his home. “Jimmy was dressed like what post-war Swiss society might think of as a n’er-do-well or a ruffian,” says Bruce Hackney, US Manager of the Karlheinz Weinberger Stiftung. “Outfitted in a Lee denim jacket, a kerchief around his neck, his shirt unbuttoned to his waist and his jeans stuffed into cowboy boots, Jimmy looked more like a stylish ranch hand than a middle-class teen.”

At the same time, they also introduced their own unique elements into their looks, from oversized pendants made with mortar shell casings to pieces of sheet metal emblazoned with words or images of matinee idols. “Weinberger took all this in and crafted his portraits to accentuate their casual yet very deliberate fashion decisions,” Hackney says. “The most provocative of his images from this time period are the close-ups of crotches featuring the exaggerated fly closures,” Hackney says.

“As a gay man, I think Weinberger identified with the Halbstarken’s marginalization; they shared a mutual ‘other-ness.’ I’m sure he admired how a bunch of seemingly, nefarious societal cast-offs were freely expressing themselves.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Karlheinz Weinberger. St. Petersinsel, 1964

Categories: Art

Born to Be Wild: Dennis Hopper’s Radical Transformation of Hollywood

Posted on August 14, 2020

*Blandford. US Film Director Dennis Hopper seen here in London following the 1969 Cannes Film Festival to promote his film Easy Rider. 19th June 1969.*

At the tender age of 19, Dennis Hopper made his film debut in Nicholas Ray’s teen classic, Rebel Without a Cause. The 1955 film introduced the world to James Dean, the renegade with a heart of gold whose demeanor and style helped plant seeds of the American counterculture. But Dean would not live to see his influence; he died one month before the film was released.

Hopper was devastated by the death of his friend. Wracked by grief, the young actor became unmanageable. After a confrontation with director Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas in 1958, Hopper made Hollywood’s dreaded blacklist. But the young maverick could not be stopped and soon found other means to channel his creative impulses.

In the 1960s, Hopper began spending time with artists like Andy Warhol, William Claxton, Joseph Albers, and Ed Ruscha. Inspired to get behind the camera, he made a series of photographs of his everyday life, photographing the changing landscape of America as it unfolded before his eyes during the 1960s. Adopting an unconventional approach, Hopper took a wide array of vantage points and quickly became a participant in his work.

It was a sensibility that he would bring to Easy Rider, Hopper’s 1969 return to the silver screen, which he co-wrote with Peter Fonda and Terry Southern. Conceived as a modern take on the Western, Easy Rider tells the story of two bikers named for Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, and allegedly modeled on Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, who decide to bike from Los Angeles to New Orleans to celebrate at Mardi Gras after scoring big on a drug deal.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Categories: 1960s, Art, Jacques Marie Mage

Nicole R. Fleetwood: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Posted on August 13, 2020

*Courtesy of Russell Craig. Photo by Kisha Bari, provided by the Soze Agency.Russell Craig, Self Portrait, 2016. Pastel and paper on canvas, 10 X 8 feet.*

While more than two million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, Black and Latinx communities are affected disproportionately by the prison industrial complex. For generations, families have been torn apart leaving few untouched by a system that amounts to legalised slavery under the 13th amendment.

Coming of age during the 1980s and early 90s, the subject hit close to home for curator and author Nicole R. Fleetwood. “So many forces coalesced to restructure Black life—our homes, families, institutions, neighbourhoods. I felt like my community was under siege,” she says, “As a teenager, I worried all the time about people I knew—that they would end up jobless, on crack, in prison.”

“I remember the horror of younger people going to prison for longer periods of time. It was collectively traumatising. There are now tens of thousands of middle-aged people in prison who have been there for decades, sentenced as teenagers.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Courtesy of Tameca Cole and Die Jim Crow Tameca Cole, Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016. Collage and graphite.*

Categories: Art, Huck