The self-proclaimed love child of Missy Elliott and Romare Bearden, Philadelphia native Jonathan Lyndon Chase creates powerful pictures of queer black life, rendering intimate moments with extraordinary tenderness and nuance. In his hands, the canvas becomes the space to craft a new visual language to explore the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, in vivid, visceral, and raw works that combine painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage.
“combing my hair” (2017). Acrylic, oil stick, rhinestone, glitter, canon printer collage, marker, graphite on cotton sheet 30h x 30w in Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery
Back in 2001, brothers Ray and David Potes were putting out photo zines the old fashioned way. Ray would edit and art direct while Dave ran copies while working in a college copy department. The one titled Hamburger Eyes really stood out — and began attracting photographers who wanted to share their work.
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Ray, who was living in Hawaii at the start, moved to San Francisco where David was, and the city became home base for a vital street photography culture that recalled the glory of Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz.
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Hamburger Eyes that quickly became a cult sensation in the photo underground, as the classic black and white format made the strange and mundane scenes of daily life all the more profound. In its back to basic approach, Hamburger Eyes elevated the photo zine into a work of art.
SF Eyes is a picture perfect postcard of San Francisco, when it was punk AF by crew members Jason Roberts Dobrin, Kappy, Dylan Maddux, Alex Martinez, Mark Murrmann, Ted Pushinsky, Andrea Sonnenberg, Stefan Simikich, and Tobin Yelland, among others.
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Hamburger Eyes spent its formative years in San Francisco, becoming an integral part of the scene. With the sweeping changes to the city, and to photography as a whole, most of the crew have decamped, but the love for the town never grows old.
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To celebrate two decades of San Francisco street photography, we have brought together some of the artists at the core to share the continuing story of Hamburger Eyes.
At the age of 16, Dave Heath was paging through a 1947 issue of LIFE magazine when he came upon “Bad Boy’s Story: An Unhappy Child Learns to Live at Peace with the World,” a photo essay by Ralph Crane that explored the life of an orphaned by growing up in Seattle.
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Heath, who had been abandoned at the age of 4, immediately felt seen. Living in foster homes and an orphanage, Heath saw himself in both the protagonist and the journalist at the same time. Heath had already been participating in a camera club and recognized that photography could become a lifeline between himself and the world.
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It was a commitment to which he would give his life, using the camera to document the political, social, and cultural events of the time, while simultaneously creating an investigation of the photograph itself. Largely self-taught, Heath made it his business to learn the craft, theory, and history of his chosen medium in order to create for himself.
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Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitude, on view at The Photographers’ Gallery in London through June 2, 2019, and the accompanying monograph from Steidl, provide a deep dive into Heath’s singular oeuvre that is a poignant and powerful look at the human animal.
Charles ‘ Teenie’ Harris, Group portrait of four cross-dressers posing in a club or a bar in front of a piano, including Michael ‘Bronze Adonis’ Fields, on left, and possibly ‘Beulah’ on right, 1955. Collection, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
“I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy.”
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New York artist and activist Donna Gottschalk memorably penned those words on a placard during the first Gay Liberation event on June 28, 1970 – the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The moment was captured in a photograph by Diana Davies, and published in the back page of Ecstasy magazine Issue 2, becoming a touchstone of the new age.
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It was a statement of bold confidence, a reclamation of self from a society that had been actively criminalising and pathologising homosexuality since the word appeared in English for the first time in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1892).
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Born from a repressive, regressive regime, queer art became a channel into which people could connect and express themselves. It sparked a new bohemia, one that continues to grow and bloom, which inspired the revised, updated paperback edition of Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer’s epic survey Art & Queer Culture (Phaidon).
For 65,000 years, the Murray-Darling basin has been an oasis at the end of the earth — a self-contained world fed by the rivers from which it takes its name, creating a rich, fertile climate in which the Aboriginal people of North South Wales, Australia thrived. Until —
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The imperialist forces of the UK settled the continent, destroying the natural ecosystem in more ways than one. Sixty-two species of mammal have gone extinct, while half the 34 native species of fish are threatened. The Aborginal people were either exiles, diseased or otherwise killed by settlers.
Today, the land is a symbol of late capitalism run amok, with climate change heralding the worst drought in 100 years, threatening the livelihood of inorganic businesses draining resources from the land including cotton, cattle and sheep farms.
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Perceiving the scope of climate change is daunting to realize – like the rotation of the earth of its axis, the consistently incremental changes go largely unperceived, so that it is only after the damage is done and the time has passed that we begin to understand all the warning signs flashing before our very eyes.
Back in the 1970s, while attending Central Saint Martins, Janette Beckman was living in a squat in Streatham, South London. After her upstairs neighbour moved to Los Angeles, Beckman too travelled to the city in search of some sun. There, she fell in love with the pop Americana she saw and took to photographing neon motel signs at night – an image Squeeze immortalised on their 1979 single, “Christmas Day”.
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Hooked, Beckman returned to LA in 1981 on assignment for Melody Maker to photograph R&B icons like Stevie Wonder, the Brothers Johnson, and Patrick Rushen. But it wasn’t until summer 1983 that she went the distance. While staying in the Beverly Hills bungalow of the Go-Go’s manager Ginger Canzoneri, Beckman happened upon a story in the LA Weekly about the Hoyo Maravilla gang in East LA. “There weren’t any pictures,” Beckman says over a glass of wine in her Manhattan studio – and she was determined to get them.
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Beckman spent the summer hanging out in El Hoyo Maravilla, a local park, and began hanging out with local gang members and their families. Then, at night, she’d hang out in Hollywood, catching punk shows at the Masque and the Whisky, fascinated by the dark style and sound of the scene.
In January 1947, French novelist, feminist, existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir boarded an airplane in Paris bound for New York ready to take the greatest adventure of her life: a road trip across America, visiting 56 cities in 19 states over 116 days.
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Carrying a letter of introduction from her soulmate Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir, then 39, toured the nation giving talks at women’s colleges while detailing her experiences and observations in the masterful travel diary, America Day by Day, first published in France in 1948.
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Written two years before de Beauvoir published her landmark work, The Second Sex, America Day by Day reveals a woman coming into her true self. “Usually, traveling is an attempt to annex a new object to my universe; this in itself is an undertaking: but today it’s different,” she writes.
Born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Adama Delphine Fawundu is the only first first-generation American of her siblings. Her brother and sister were born in Freetown, Sierra Leone and lived there until 1975, when Fawundu and her mother returned to bring them to the United States.
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Fawundu would not return again until 1992, at the age of 21, during the Christmas holidays, during the first year of a decade-long civil war. Though she was unable to return to her homeland, Fawundu traveled the continent, visiting South Africa in 1995, early in Nelson Mandela’s presidency, as well as Ghana and Nigeria. And when she finally could come home, she brought two of her sons, then ages ten and seven, to create the foundation for a lifelong connection to the motherland.
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Embracing the power of connection, Fawundu takes an expansive, inclusive approach, personifying the water spirit that connects Africa and its Diaspora using photography and film. In The Sacred Star of Isis, now on view at Crush Curatorial in New York through April 6, Fawundu travels the globe to create images from the New York State forests and the waters of the coast of Freetown, Sierra Leone, to cities within Argentina, a place known to systematically attempt to erase its Black presence.
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The exhibition includes “the cleanse,” Fawundu’s first film — a glorious celebration of rhythm and ritual contained in the moments when Fawundu places her perfectly pressed tresses under the shower and begins to wash her hair, an incantation filled with magic, power, and wisdom. Here, Fawundu shares her journey creating The Sacred Star of Isis.
For Rick Castro, fetish is the ultimate manifestation of self; the very notion of perfection, if you will. The journey began one day in 1970, when the photographer – who has shot and interviewed Ron Athey, Alice Bag and Tony Ward for AnotherManmag.com – discovered a copy of A Clockwork Orange in his aunt’s secondhand bookstore when he was 12.
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“It shocked me and made my young wheels turn,” Castro says from his Los Angeles home. “I was trying to put it all into context. The idea of glamourised violence and scary dystopia – it seemed to ring true. I started to see that is going to be the future – and it was. We’ve surpassed it.”
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And in doing so, we have embraced fetish in a broader sense. Castro explains, “For me it’s all-encompassing. The 21st century is all about fetish. On the positive side, it is the appreciation on a larger scale of things that would not have gotten a lot of respect in the past, but on the negative side it’s that cult of personality that I think is a waste of time and lead to the banality of America if not the world.”
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Words of wisdom from ‘The Fetish King,’ a title Castro has fully embraced, and given to the title to a three-decade survey of his black and white BDSM photographs, opening April 6 at the Tom of Finland Foundation in his native Los Angeles.
Heal-a-zation, Swathe a la Blob Ba, Silver Gelatin Photograph, 1981. copyright The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives
In 1974, American artist Steven F. Arnold traveled to Spain at the behest of Salvador Dalí, who was opening the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Catalonia that September and had embraced Arnold as his protégé.
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The legendary surrealist, known to tire of people in a matter of minutes, was utterly enchanted with the 31-year-old artist and dubbed him the “prince” of his Court of Miracles – his eccentric, eclectic coterie that included Donyale Luna, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Ultra Violet, and Amanda Lear, as well as Arnold’s dear friends Pandora and Kaisik Wong.
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“They made a scene,” says Vishnu Dass, Director of the Steven Arnold Museum and Archive. “In Spain, Dalí was occupied with getting press. He would have them dress and take them to public events as his entourage for the months leading up to the museum. There are newspaper clippings from Spanish newspapers that talk about riots with Dali’s transvestites.”
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Their cosmic connection was just one of the extraordinary relationships Arnold had throughout his life. “I call Steven a Queer Mystic,” Dass says. “His ultimate goal was to create a space where he himself and all those he loved could exist in a place that wasn’t binary or judging.”
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As an artist who never pursued fame, status, or wealth, Arnold was an integral figure in the American counterculture for 30 years, a true influencer whose legacy is being reexamined now, 25 years after his untimely death from complications due to Aids. In advance of an exhibition of his work at Fahey/Klein Gallery during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD – which opens today – Dass takes us on a magical journey through Arnold’s life and art.
Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.
At the age of 20, Hugh Mangum set forth on a journey as an itinerant portraitist working in North Carolina and Virginia. The year was 1897, and the future was bleak as the peace of Reconstruction was undone by the perils of a new evil on the horizon. Jim Crow, as America has named its system of apartheid and oppression, began, bringing forth the horrors of lynching and the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan.
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Over a period of 25 years, until his death in 1922, Mangum created photographs of the American South during a time when laws like 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, legalizing segregation and local Black Codes that severely limited black people’s right to vote, education, property ownership, and movement. In the 1970s, Mangum’s archive was discovered inside an old tobacco barn that had been set for demolition and saved at the last moment.
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With an open-door policy at his studio, all the world who could afford it donned their Sunday best and sat before Mangum. Using a Penny Picture camera, which allowed for up to 30 exposures in a single glass plate negative, Mangum delivered the classic fine, flat-field image with a graceful fall-off on the edges. The photographer engaged his subjects to reveal slivers of themselves with each new frame, capturing moments of unassailable emotional truth that speak to the human condition on the cusp of modernity.
Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.
Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.
