Posts from the “Art” Category

Albert Watson: Creating Photographs

Posted on August 23, 2021

*Divine, New York City, 1978 © Albert Watson*

On the cusp of his 80th birthday, Scottish photographer Albert Watson has become one of the greatest photographers of our time. With more than 100 covers for Vogue, 40 covers forRolling Stone, and 100 album covers for Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Sade, Aaliyah, and Jay-Z, Watson stands alongside Irving Penn and Richard Avedon as an artist whose work has transformed the very way we see.

Since publishing his iconic photograph of Alfred Hitchcock holding a cooked goose by the neck for the 1973 Christmas issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Watson has become a veritable force of nature. Whether shooting fashion, celebrity, portraiture, advertising, landscape, still life, or fine art, Watson is equally comfortable photographing Queen Elizabeth II or Tupac Shakur.

With the recent publication of Creating Photographs, Watson offers an affordable and accessible guide to the secrets of his photography career, including, “Be bold,” “Capture the geography of the face,” “See the beauty and charisma of objects,” and “Surround yourself with good people.”

The book opens with a chapter titled, “Learning from the journey,” Watson looks back on half a century behind the camera. “I wasn’t trying to be a photographer so there was a lot I had to learn. I assumed that I should be learning technical things in the same way you learn to drive a car,” he reveals. Learning on the job, Watson discovered how things worked, what made them good or bad, and how he could make them better through the fusion of technique and creativity.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Mick Jagger in Car with Leopard, Los Angeles, 1992 © Albert Watson*

*Gabrielle Reece in Vivienne Westwood, Paris, 1989 © Albert Watson*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Fashion, Photography

Cey Adams: Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap

Posted on August 20, 2021

*Photograph by Jamel Shabazz. Four young men posing. This image was made on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the famous Delancey Street & Orchard Street in 1980, a major shopping hub.*

“Like a kid that’s always dreaming about going to the NBA and then you get the call, I was dreaming of this project even before I knew I was going to work on it,” says artist Cey Adams, the founding creative director of Def Jam. Adams art directed the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, which is released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings today (20 August 2021).

Tracing hip hop’s evolution from 1979 to 2013, the anthology brings together nine CDs with 129 tracks and a 300-page illustrated book published to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Featuring photographs by Janette Beckman, Charlie Ahearn, Anthony Barboza, Adrian Boot, Jamel Shabazz, and Glen E. Friedman, it offers a panoramic history of a culture born on the streets of the Bronx, that has since become a multi-billion dollar global phenomenon.

The anthology’s creators eschew the notion of a canon and instead envision the project as a foundation upon which to build. “I was on a call with LL Cool J and Chuck D, and we talked about not only making this book, but our journey as a people,” says Adams, who got his start as a graffiti writer in the 1970s.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*MC Sha-Rock, The Valley, NYC, June 1980, photo by Charlie Ahearn*

*Female Rappers, Class of ’88, 1988, photo by Janette Beckman*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Graffiti, Huck, Music, Photography

Hiro, Celebrated Fashion Photographer, Dies at 90

Posted on August 20, 2021

Yasuhiro Wakabayashi, the Japanese-born American photographer known as Hiro died August 15, 2021, at the age of 90 in his country home in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. Best known for his fashion and still life work, Hiro’s surreal vision of glamour established him among giants of the industry including his mentor Richard Avedon.

“Hiro is no ordinary man,” Avedon said. “He is one of the few artists in the history of photography. He is able to bring his fear, his isolation, his darkness, his splendid light to film.” Avedon’s words are a testament to Hiro’s extraordinary life, one turned upside down as a child born in Shanghai on November 3, 1930, just one year before Japan invaded Manchuria. One of five children of a Japanese linguist who may have been involved in espionage, Hiro lived a protected life during the better part of World War II, until the battles in the Pacific Theater came to an end.

After being interned for five months in Peking (now Beijing), the family was repatriated to occupied Japan in 1946. A stranger among his own people, Hiro became intrigued by elements of American pop culture in postwar Japan. While paging through glossy fashion magazines at hotels, Hiro discovered the work of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, and soon acquired a camera of his own. In the ruins of imperial Japan, Hiro realized a vision all his own — one that brought the luxurious and quotidian together to create a phantasmagoric spectacle of opulence.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Marisa Berenson, Hat by Halston, Harper’s Bazaar, February 1966, cover © HIRO*

Categories: 1960s, 1980s, Art, Blind, Books, Fashion, Photography

Syd Shelton: The Battle of Lewisham August 13th 1977

Posted on August 19, 2021

In the wake of global independence movements following World War II, the British Empire collapsed, the economy declined, and the extreme-right began to reassert itself on the national stage. During the late 1960s, the National Front (NF) rose to prominence by fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia to expand its power base.

The NF began targeting South London – home to Afro Caribbean and South Asian immigrants – to make their stand. They announced plans for an “Anti- Mugging March” from New Cross to Lewisham on August 13, 1977.

The march was precipitated by the arrest of young Black men and women known as the Lewisham 21. On May 30, the police raided their homes at dawn and charging them in connection with a series of muggings over a period of six months.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Patrick D. Pagnano: The Streets of New York

Posted on August 18, 2021

*Patrick D. Pagnano. Twin young women leaning on car; taken in NYC in the 1970s*

*Patrick D. Pagnano. Two men relaxing on park bench; New York city; Early 1970s*

“I was going to begin my tales of this city with a statement about how long I’ve been here, but the phone rang,” the Italian-American photographer Patrick D. Pagnano (1947-2018) wrote in a notebook on April 16, 1974 — just six weeks after he and his new wife, Kari, arrived in New York City for their honeymoon.

After spending their first week at the Times Square Motor Lodge, Pat and Kari found a cosy apartment on Thompson Street in the heart of Greenwich Village, which was then home to the bustling Italian-American community. “He loved the neighbourhood,” Kari says. “The Italian ladies in our building brought chairs down to sit on the stoop. There were a number of mafia-related characters that we always talked about. There was a guy on the next block, Sullivan Street, always walking up and down the sidewalk in his bathrobe.”

Pat was in his element. “The building we live in is practically all Italians,” he wrote in his notebook. “On Sunday you can smell the garlic and tomato floating from floor 1 to 6.” Undoubtedly the scent of Italian food evoked memories of home. A second-generation Italian-American, Pat was raised in a multi-generational home in Chicago’s South Side during the 1950s and 60s.

His family faced the horrors of ‘urban renewal’ twice in Pat’s youth: first when the government seized his father’s store to build the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects where the movie Candyman was based, and then a second time when the family home was razed to build the University of Illinois in Chicago. These experiences shaped Pat’s outlook, building a firm sense of solidarity with the working class.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Patrick D. Pagnano. Young man at Lunch Counter; taken in NYC in the 1970s*

*Patrick D. Pagnano. Four Guys Setting Up; taken in New York City in early 1970s*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, i-D, Manhattan, Photography

Douglas Corrance: New York 1970-1980s

Posted on August 17, 2021

By 1975, New York City teetered along the edge of bankruptcy, some $11 billion in debt. By October the situation had reached dire straits when President Gerald R. Ford refused a federal bailout, prompting the infamous Daily News front page: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”.

The headline cost Ford re-election the following year, and haunted him for the rest of his life – a fitting turn of events for the man who dared to turn his back on the city that never sleeps. New Yorkers, on the other hand, had no choice but to soldier on.

Despite the crumbling infrastructure and economic decline further exacerbated by the Nixon White House of “benign neglect,” which systematically denied government services to Black and brown communities nationwide, and landlord-sponsored arson that reduced city blocks to rubble at record speed, New Yorkers proved to be resilient.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake

Posted on August 15, 2021

*Hannah Wilke with Ponder-r-rosa 4, 1975*

Long before the selfie came into vogue, American artist Hannah Wilke (1940–1993) understood the importance of harnessing the power of self-representation through photography. At the tender age of 14, the native New Yorker donned her mother’s mink stole, white pumps, and nothing else to pose for a self-portrait in front of a wall bearing her birth name, Arlene H. Butler — lest anyone not know exactly who she was.

“I become my art, my art becomes me…. My heart is hard to handle, my art is too,” Wilke wrote in a letter published in the 1975 book, Art: A Woman’s Sensibility(California Institute of the Arts). With the understanding that a woman laying claim to her own body was a transgressive act, Wilke rose to prominence doing just that. Working as a photographer, sculptor, video artist, and performance artist who turned the female gaze on herself, Wilke’s art acted as a Rorschach Test — admiration and criticism revealing more about the viewer than the art itself.

Emblematic of the revolutionary times in which she lived, Wilke emerged from the 1960s with a practice that reshaped the conversation about the relationship between feminism, art, and the role of women in society just as the Women’s Liberation Movement took off. She used her work to establish an iconography that centers the female body and pleasure at a time when such topics were taboo and largely excluded from the male-dominated provenance of art history.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Hannah Wilke: Intercourse with… audio installation cover, 1975*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography

Two Fingas & James T Kirk: The Junglist

Posted on August 11, 2021

Picture it: South London, 1994. Local writer Andrew Green and photographer Eddie Otchere adopt the pseudonyms Two Fingas and James T Kirk, respectively, and use their lived experiences as the departure point for Junglist, a fictional coming-of-age tale that follows the exploits of Meth, Biggie, Q, and Craig over a weekend set in the city’s burgeoning jungle scene. Moving at the speed of sound, the 20 year-olds completed the book in just two months, crafting a mesmerising pulp fiction novel that is equal parts music, poetry, and film.

As the lovechild of UK rave and sound system culture, jungle was the sound of the world at the edge of a new era about to reveal itself. Driven by breakbeats – the rhythms that Jamaican DJs like Kool Herc used when he invented hip hop in the early 1970s – microengineered to twist time into a sonic blaze, jungle drew from and remade techno, rave, electro, dancehall, dub, hip hop, and house into an Afrofuturistic sound. The burgeoning culture quickly took the city by storm, maintaining its own DIY feel via an interconnected web of nightclubs, white label pressings, and pirate radio shows.

“Jungle burst out of the underground and for a brief period (it) was everywhere – you couldn’t watch TV or listen to the radio without hearing elements of it,” says Green. “Jungle was the first electronic music I connected with; it felt like it was just for me, my crew, and my peers. We were making the scene appear out of nowhere. At the time, there were no clubs in the centre of London that played music for Black audiences so you had to be on the outskirts to find clubs. It was a mission to go out.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

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

David Hurn: Isle of Wight Festival 1969

Posted on August 11, 2021

Now age 87, Magnum Photos member David Hurn remembers the fateful day in February 1954 that first brought photography into his life. While on break, the young army cadet training at Sandhurst Military Academy was paging a copy of Picture Post magazine and stumbled upon a photograph of a Russian army officer buying his wife a hat in a Moscow department store.

“I started to cry – not something one normally did in the officers mess,” says Hurn, who describes how the picture triggered a memory of his father who he hardly saw during World War II. “One of the first acts he did at the war’s end was to take my mother, me in tow, to Howells, a department store in Cardiff, to buy her a hat: my first recollection of their love for each other.”

Suddenly understanding the power of the photography, Hurn decided in that moment to become a photographer despite knowing nothing about the medium. “Thinking back, I have no recollection of ever having taken any pictures,” he says. “To give up a firm profession for a total abstract one was reckless.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Huck, Music, Photography

Stephan Erfurt: On the Road

Posted on August 6, 2021

*Stephan Erfurt. New York Bridges, 1988.*

German photographer Stephan Erfurt fell in love with photography in 1978 while exploring the streets of Paris with his father’s camera. Alone in the city and still learning French, the camera gave him courage and confidence, inspiring him to become what he describes as a “visual explorer”.

Erfurt stayed true to this approach when he moved to New York City’s infamous Alphabet City in 1984. “Our back window faced a burned down house and our front window looked toward Tompkins Square Park where a lot of drug dealing was going on,” says Erfurt, who grew up in a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Although it was quite a change of scenery, the photographer found an oasis nestled away in the building’s roof garden. “We spent many evenings there with friends, having barbecues, drinking gin and tonics, and with our heads in the clouds above New York,” Erfurt remembers.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Stephan Erfurt. Wall Street New York, 1985.*

Categories: 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Roland L. Freeman: Portfolio

Posted on August 6, 2021

*Roland Freeman. Community Elders, Mississippi, 1975*

Now age 85, award-winning photographer Roland L. Freeman’s photography career began on August 28, 1963, when he borrowed a camera from a friend to photograph the March on Washington.

“I really wanted to say something about what was going on. I chose photography as my vehicle,” he says. The new exhibition, Roland L. Freeman: Portfolio, looks back at the artist’s extraordinary archive of work documenting Black America during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.

Born in Baltimore and raised in rural Maryland, Freeman grew closely involved in the Civil Rights Movement after he unexpectedly joined his first march while taking his grandmother to buy a new dress for Mother’s Day.“There were protests held outside a Baltimore department store because Black women weren’t allowed to try on dresses,” Freeman remembers. “My grandmother said, ‘Give me one of those signs. I’m sick of this crap!’ That started it, and I’ve never looked back.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Roland Freeman. Hallway of Polk Home, Americus, GA, 1971*

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