Pat Kane. A dog walks near the Catholic Church of the Holy Family in Łutsël K’é, Northwest Territories. The church was built near the present day settlement in the 1930s and moved to its current location at the tip of the peninsula – one of the tallest and most recognizable structures in the community.
An Algonquin Anishinaabe member of the Timiskaming First Nation, Canadian photographer Pat Kane was raised in a mixed-race home. “My mother was born on a reservation in Quebec and my father grew up in an Irish immigrant family,” he says.
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“It wasn’t until I moved to Yellowknife [in the Northwest Territories] that I reconnected with my Indigenous side. The people here are so proud of their culture and their elders. That was a turning point for me.”
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Photography provided Kane with a path to explore his identity by documenting the lives of the local Indigenous community, who are related to the Dene people of the Navajo Nation. Although Kane isn’t from their nation, his work over the past 20 years has established a bond of trust, understanding and respect.
Pat Kane. Instant photos of Terri Enzoe, Jaysen Michel and Jennifer Michel cover an archive photo of students and missionaries of the Chief Julius residential school in Teet’lit Zheh (Fort McPherson). Terri, Jaysen and Jennifer are land and water protectors from Łutsël K’é, working as part of the Ni Hat’ni Dene Guardians to preserve their homelands.Pat Kane. Sage burns in a smudging bowl on Lila Fraser Erasmus’ dining room table. “We’re connected to the land, it is part of who we are as people, we are inseparable from it,” she says. “Our traditional medicines have strong healing powers – sage, spruce tips, chaga, fireweed, rat root – all of these plants we find on the land can help us with common sicknesses to serious diseases. If you take something from the land, it has to be picked with good intentions or else it won’t work. This is a very spiritual process for us.”
British photographer Janette Beckman arrived in New York City in December 1982 to spend the Christmas holiday with some friends. But after a couple of weeks in town, she was hooked — and never left. Beckman remembers staying in a loft of Franklin Street in Tribeca just opposite the Mudd Club when the neighborhood was still an artist’s outpost.
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“I didn’t mind the sketchy industrial neighborhood. I had been living in an unheated squat in rainy London and there was heat!” Beckman revels in the memory of the steam heaters designed after the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that made rooms so hot, people were forced to throw open their windows in the dead of winter. “There were artists living in the building and I was in the thick of it. We’d go out to clubs and then meet up afterwards at Dave’s Corner Luncheonette, which was open 24 hours on the corner of Broadway and Canal Street. It was a very exciting time.”
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Armed with her portfolio of photographs documenting London’s famed punk scene, Beckman went around to the record labels to see art directors in the hopes of shooting for them. But her photographs of the punk icons including Sex Pistols, Clash, and Siouxsie Sioux were too gritty for the high glossy aesthetics of 1980’s American pop. “They just looked at me and said, ‘We can’t really use you because the people in these pictures, their hair isn’t combed,’” Beckman remembers. “I was disappointed because I came from the music scene in England and thought I was going to get work.”
Tariq Zaidi. Elie Fontaine Nsassoni, 45-year-old taxi owner and Sapeur for 35 years, in Brazzaville, 2017.
After receiving his first camera at the age of 14, Tariq Zaidi dreamed of shooting for National Geographic. “Over the years I used to travel a lot,” he says. “My aim was to see the world, as many places as I could, travelling with a small backpack and just going.”
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While traveling from Morocco to South Africa by land in 2013, Zaidi was dazzled by the sight of a Sapeur. Determined to learn more, in 2017, the photographer traveled to Brazzaville and Kinshasa to learn more about the Congolese fashion culture known as La Sape, “Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes” (Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People).
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In Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo (Kehrer), Zaidi presents a series of stunning environmental portraits and interviews with members of La Sape in both cities. “Congolese people are known for taking pride in their appearance – yet La Sape takes the art of looking good to the next level,” Zaidi says.
As a teen coming of age, Bruce Davidson can remember his sense of color taking root in 1949. While working at a local camera store during his senior year of high school, Davidson was introduced to Al Cox Jr., a commercial photographer working in the town of Oak Park, Illinois. Cox invited Davidson to assist him with various tasks, including the painstaking process of making color prints in the darkroom. “It left an indelible impression on me at the age of seventeen,” Davidson wrote in Bruce Davidson: In Color, just re-released for the first time in five years.
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After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Davidson enrolled in the Design Department at Yale University in the 1950s where he met artist and educator Josef Albers, one of the foremost color theorists of the twentieth century. “His demonstrations had an impact on me at the time but I was not yet committed to color as a way of life,” Davidson wrote.
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After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, Davidson returned to New York in 1957 to resume his photography practice. Drawn to the Old World atmosphere of the Lower East Side, Davidson discovered among the pushcart vendors, tailors, and merchants a feeling of connection and community among people like his grandfather, a Polish émigré who arrived in the United States at the age of 14. Here he began making color photographs of the city as it was then — a world of immigrants who brought their culture to the streets of New York.
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“Never in my wildest dreams as a kid from the South Bronx did I think that photography would bring me around the world,” says photographer, author, and activist Joe Conzo.
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Coming of age in 1970s New York, Conzo’s worldview was shaped by his grandmother, Dr. Evelina Antonetty, who was fondly known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx” for the work she did on behalf of the Puerto Rican community; his mother, community Lorraine Montenegro; and his father, Joe Conzo Sr., legendary bandleader Tito Puente’s personal manager and confidante.
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Conzo witnessed the city’s infrastructure collapse under the weight of “benign neglect”, which denied basic government services to Black and brown communities across the United States, while landlord-sponsored arson reduced city blocks to rubble. He quickly learned the best way to create change was through collective action.
NYPD Police officers stop and search a car in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, 1979. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)
By 1975, New York City was $11 billion dollars in debt. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the city could no longer afford to maintain basic municipal services. Enraged about proposed budget cuts, unions representing the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the New York Fire Department (FDNY) created a pamphlet titled “Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” which they passed out at local airports and hotels. On the cover, a black hooded skull smiled menacingly; inside were a list of nine “safety” tips for tourists such as “Stay off the streets after 6 P.M.” and “Remain in Manhattan.”
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Unsuspecting recipients had no idea they were caught in a propaganda war waged against Mayor Abe Beame, who took the battle to court and secured a temporary restraining order to protect the “economic well-being of the city”. But the image of New York had already taken a nosedive as Hollywood and the media capitalized on the gritty glamour of a city struggling to survive.
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Taking a page from the new wave of neo-realist Hollywood films, including The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the Fear City pamphlet cast New York as a den of sin, doomed but for the heroism of the boys in blue. Copaganda, as it is popularly known, is a long-standing American trope, one which found increasing popularity with the arrival of television in the 1950s with shows like Dragnet, Naked City and Peter Gunn.
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By the 1970s, copaganda was everywhere, slickly produced to package violence to the masses. American photographer Jill Freedman (1939–2019) was not impressed. “I hate the violence you see on TV and in the movies. I wanted to show it straight, violence without commercial interruption, sleazy and not so pretty without its make-up,” she wrote in the introduction to her 1982 monograph Street Cops, which is being republished and exhibited this month.
A group of boys sit on a police patrol car in Alphabet City, New York City, 1980. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)Two drug dealers are arrested on 42nd Street, New York City, 1979. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)
In 1987, the American government’s impassivity facing the AIDS pandemic led people to organize themselves in order to act. A broad coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds came together as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) — and in just six years, they changed the world.
Together the members of ACT UP waged a multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They played offense, taking charge in a wide array of actions that included storming the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Washington, DC, and battling The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry to get results.
Hailing from the South Bronx, John Benton-Harris dreamed of being a pilot or a Method actor – then he discovered photography at age 14 and found his calling.
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Now 81, the photographer traces his foundation to Edward Steichen’s seminal photography exhibition, Family of Man, which he saw at Museum of Modern Art in 1955. “It motivated me to focus on the human condition and to try to explain men to men, and to myself, at the same time,” he says.
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In 1962, Benton-Harris “sort of gate-crashed” art director Alexey Brodovitch’s evening classes at the New York Institute of Photography. “He was criticizing everyone’s work,” Benton-Harris remembers. “He picked up my work and said, ‘He understood what this project was about.’ Then he looked up to say, ‘Who the hell are you?’”
Over the past decade, expecting parents across the United States have created a new practice of gender-reveal parties: held during pregnancy, the couple stages an elaborate — sometimes dangerous — display in which their unborn child’s sex is announced through the surprise “reveal” of a pink (girl) or blue (boy) effect.
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Jenna Karvunidis, the mother who started the craze in 2008 with a simple cake, came to recognize the inherent conflict of equating genitalia with identity. “Who cares what gender the baby is?” she wrote on Facebook in 2019. “I did it at the time because we didn’t live in 2019 and didn’t know what we know now – that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that have nothing to do with what’s between its legs.”
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The perfect plot twist, Karvunidis revealed in her post, was that “the world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!” Recognizing that the practice she unintentionally introduced is offensive, if not outright harmful, to nonbinary and transgender people, Karvunidis told ELLE: “That’s the thing with oppression; only those affected feel it.”
Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, Williams became one of the first nine Black police officers to join the force in 1948 after serving in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Although Withers was given a uniform, patrol car, and gun, he was forbidden to patrol white communities or arrest white folks. His power was proscribed strictly within the confines of Black Memphis, during the height of segregation.
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Off duty, Withers photographed the same community, documenting the fabled Beale Street music scene, the birthplace of Memphis Blues icons like B. B. King. After getting caught selling liquor illegally, Withers left the force to work as a freelance photographer. He shot for the Tri-State Defender, the Memphis offshoot of Chicago’s famed Black newspaper and legendary photo magazines Ebony and Jet, while also working as Stax Records’ official photographer for 20 years.
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Withers’ business cards bore the slogan “Pictures Tell The Story” — a philosophy he used over the course of six decades to create more than one million images. But it wasn’t until years after his death that the bombshell dropped — documents revealed Withers worked as a paid FBI informant.
Irina Rozovsky. Image from In Plain Air (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.
Throughout its existence, Prospect Park’s fate has mirrored that of the city, rising and falling with the economic tides, eventually being designated a New York City Historic Landmark in 1975 and listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Most, knowing little of its extraordinary history, simply partaking in the pleasures of an oasis nestled inside the eye of the storm, a quiet escape from the madness that churns in the streets beyond its walls.
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“I came to New York like millions of others, lured by a city pulsing with possibilities, where it’s not who you are or where you’re from but what you work to become,” writes Russia-born, America-raised photographer Irina Rozovsky in her book, In Plain Air (MACK), a collection of lyrical photographs made in Prospect Park between 2011–2020.
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Some 17,000 years ago, Brooklyn’s luminous Prospect Park took shape as the Wisconsin Glacier receded, leaving a string of hills, kettles, and plains in its wake. At the very northeastern tip, Mount Prospect took shape, forming one of the tallest hills in Brooklyn, rising some 200 feet about sea level and providing its own private oasis just a few miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean.
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During her first scorching summer in the city, where the air is so thick from pollution and humidity, it starts to bend light, Rozovsky escapes to the park where she can breathe easily among the trees and grass.
Irina Rozovsky. Image from In Plain Air (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.Irina Rozovsky. Image from In Plain Air (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.
