Posts from the “Art” Category

Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay

Posted on November 6, 2018

At the tender age of eight, Anthony Friedkin discovered what would become the two greatest passions of his life: photography and surfing. Growing up in Los Angeles, Friedkin enjoyed weekends and summers at the family beach house in Malibu, where he developed an unquenchable love for the ocean.

In 1970, at the age of 21, Friedkin began The Surfing Essay, a visual diary of his life as a member of California’s celebrated surf scene – a project that has continued for more than 45 years. After a near-death accident two years ago, Friedkin decided to organise the work into an exhibition and book.

Now, a selection of 50 hand-printed black and white photographs will be on show at Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay, opening November 8 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York. The consummate insider, Friedkin delved beneath the Hollywood stereotype of the blonde, bronzed Adonis to reveal the extremely individualistic athletes who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of the perfect wave. Here, he shares his journey of discovery, celebration, and triumph over circumstance.

Read the Fill Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Kimberly M. Jenkins: Fashion and Race

Posted on November 6, 2018

An image by Stevens Añazco featured in Fashion and Race: Deconstructing Ideas, Restructuring Identitiesvia @stevensanazco

When Vogue Italia published the ‘all black’ issue in July 2008, it asked: “Is Fashion Racist?” In the decade since, the question has come to the fore countless times, demanding investigation, critique, and, ultimately, dismantlement.

Inspired by the conversation the question posed, Kimberly M. Jenkins, a fashion educator and independent researcher, began developing an academic initiative. It began with the course “Fashion and Race”, which she has taught at the New School’s Parsons School of Design since Autumn 2016. “The first thing we do in the class is to go about discussing what race, systemic oppression, and white privilege are to set up the terms we will be relying upon in order to look at how the construction of race has shaped fashion and beauty industries,” Jenkins explains.

Driven to bring her vision to the public, Jenkins created The Fashion and Race Database Project, an online archive filled with vital source materials. Now, as part of the third and final phase of the project, Jenkins has curated Fashion and Race: Deconstructing Ideas, Reconstructing Identities, a group exhibition of student and graduate work, which runs until 11 November.

The artists featured in the show confront and subvert racism to assert their vision and claim their space as people of colour navigating worlds of fashion and beauty. In How to Be Black, Avery Youngblood, a ‘Beyoncé Formation Scholar’, simulates a ‘how-to’ guide,’ recording the everyday life of a young, multidimensional black woman, while Jamilla Okubo created Hair as Identity, a zine that explores preconceived notions of black hair. Kyemah McEntyre presents her dashiki prom gown, which went viral in 2015. Jenkins also organised a free film screening of The Gospel According to André, followed by a Q&A with André Leon Talley and director Kate Novack. Here, Jenkins speaks about how the next generation of artists are becoming the change they want to see in the world.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography

Posted on November 2, 2018

John M. Valadez, Brooklyn and Soto, from the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio, ca. 1978

In the years following World War II, America’s Latinx communities were becoming increasingly marginalised and misrepresented. The Latinx immigrants joined African Americans who fled the South during the Great Migration, one of the largest, most rapid movements in history. Cities became the point of arrival for millions of migrants, who entered into established communities where their cultures took root, such as Spanish Harlem, the South Bronx, and East Los Angeles.

Many of their stories have largely gone untold, and E. Carmen Ramos, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s deputy chief curator and curator of Latino art, aims to correct this. In Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography, Ramos has organised the work of 10 Latinx photographers – Manuel Acevedo, Oscar Castillo, Frank Espada, Anthony Hernandez, Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Ruben Ochoa, John Valadez, Winston Vargas, and Camilo José Vergara – who documented their communities as insiders.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

John M. Valadez, Couple Balam, from the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio, ca. 1978

Camilo José Vergara, 65 East 125th Street, Harlem, 1977

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

Patrick Potter: Skins – A Way of Life

Posted on October 29, 2018

A group of skinheads sitting on the steps of Thomson House, works entrance, Newcastle on September 12, 1970. Photography NCJ

Skinhead culture emerged on the streets of London in 1969, as Mod scene was dying out and a new wave of bourgeois bohemians revelled in the “turn on, tune in, drop out” rhetoric of Timothy Leary. The self-indulgent pretensions of the hippie scene were an affront to Britain’s working-class youth; they created the figure of the skinhead, a back-to-basics rebel who was largely misunderstood.

The original skinheads were the first generation to be moved from historic East End slums and into then-new 1960s brutalist estates. Angry to be cut off from the old networks of support, skins sought to honour this devastating loss by creating their own utopian mythology of a shared working-class past.

Embracing their feeling of marginalisation from the mainstream, skins adopted a uniform that begins with a shaved head and ends in Doc Marten boots, with a nod to the style and sound of the Windrush Generation. Quintessential rebels in search of a good time, skins decamped en masse to pubs, football games, and gigs featuring ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dub DJs and bands.

Skins overtly rejected the historic codes of working-class deference, modesty, and rigid morality and, in the process, became a perfect target for both police harassment and fascist tactics during the 1970s and 80s, forever tainting the image of skinhead culture with the spectre of hooligans and neo-Nazis.

In the new book Skins: A Way of Life (out today via Carpet Bombing Culture), author Patrick Potter sets the record straight with a phenomenal history skinhead culture in the UK. Here, Potter gives a guide to the truth about this subculture.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Skinhead couple Glenda Peake and Tony Hughes. October 7, 1969.
Photography Doreen Spooner, Daily Mirror

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography

Diana Markosian: Quince – Coming of Age in Cuba

Posted on October 23, 2018

Diana Markosian Girls stand outside their friend’s quinceañera venue as they wait for their big entrance © Diana Markosian | Magnum Photos

Diana Markosian Teens gather in the courtyard of a church as they prepare for their friend’s quinceañera festivities © Diana Markosian | Magnum Photos

After being awarded the 2018 Elliot Erwitt Fellowship Grant to travel to Cuba for one month, Diana Markosian set forth to explore the exquisite moment of transformation, as a girl becomes a woman in society, and the way this experience informs the feminine identity. The ensuing project, Quince, which is made up of portraits and imagery from locally made magazines, will be shown at Paris Photo, in the Grand Palais, from November 8-11.

“A lot of my work is about the past and memory. It is less about going somewhere and more about finding my way into that country and my understanding of what that country represents for me,” the Armenian-American artist explains.

Born in Moscow in 1989, Markosian’s early years were shaped by living through the total collapse of the Soviet Union. She discovered an immediate and intimate parallel between her childhood experiences and the lives of those she encountered during her visit, “The 90s in Cuba was a time that is referred to as the ‘special period’ — a moment when the country, which was dependent on the Soviet Union, was in total economic collapse. It’s something I experienced first hand living in Moscow and Yerevan as a child.”

In sharing these stories, Markosian felt a connection to the lives of those she met in Cuba, and realized the story she was searching for could be found deeper in the countryside. She began traveling outside of Havana, going from town to town, until she arrived in Matanzas, famed as the birthplace of the Afro-Cuban music and dance traditions of danzón and rumba.

Here, she met a few girls and their parents, who struck up a conversation by showing Markosian a photobook that was made for their daughter’s quinceañera, a Latin American tradition celebrating a girl’s 15th birthday. As Markosian leafed through the book, she became intrigued.

Read the Full Story at Magnum Photos

Diana Markosian A girl rides around her neighbourhood in a pink 1950s convertible as her community gathers to celebrate her 15th birthday © Diana Markosian | Magnum Photos

Categories: Art, Latin America, Magnum Photos, Photography, Women

Vince Aletti: The Disco Files

Posted on October 22, 2018

Drag queens mugging. © Peter Hujar

In 1973, Vince Aletti was living in a two-room apartment in New York’s East Village that cost just $125 a month – a fee he could afford as a freelance music journalist for magazines like Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy. Aletti’s beat was covering black pop music like R&B, Motown, and Philly International. Then one night, a friend took him to The Loft, the private party hosted by DJ David Mancuso, where he got his first taste of disco – before the genre even had a name.

Aletti became the first person to write about the emerging disco scene, chronicling its rise from the underground to the top of the charts, introducing Black and Latinx gay culture to the world. In his weekly column for Record World magazine, Aletti showcased the latest breaking records, top ten playlists from DJs like Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons, and Nicky Siano, scoops and reviews.

Aletti’s impressive archive is available to the public once more in The Disco Files 1973–78: New York’s Underground, Week by Week (D.A.P.). Here, Aletti shares some memories of those disco nights so long ago.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

The men’s room at G.G. Barnums. © Toby Old

Refreshments at New York. © Toby Old

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Music

David Bailey: Peru

Posted on October 21, 2018

Photo: © David Bailey

David Bailey is at home anywhere he goes. Driven by a profound sense of curiosity and a desire to engage, the photographer’s observant eye and quick intellect allow him entrée into just about any situation he chooses for himself; his calm confidence combined with an easy laugh span any chasm where language might otherwise be a barrier.

“They probably think I am mad for wanting to take a picture of them,” Bailey tells AnOther, reflecting on his experiences travelling through Peru in 1971 and 1984, with Grace Coddington for British Vogue and the Wool Board, and for Tatler, respectively.

Bailey made a practice of shooting fashion in the morning and evening so that he had the day to himself. He made his way through the cities and the towns, travelling across the plains and into the mountains, to create a captivating portrait of a people and a place collected in the new exhibition David Bailey: Peru, opening October 19 at Heni Gallery, London, and accompanying book publishing November 1.

Bailey’s Peru unfolds like an epic poem filled with magic and mystery, history and myth, as scenes of daily life evoke a sense of timeless wonder and awe. Now in his 80th year, Bailey laughs, “You ask me to remember what, 60 years ago?” – only to do just that for us.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Photo: © David Bailey

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Art, Books, Fashion, Latin America, Photography

Mike Miller: California Love

Posted on October 18, 2018

Tupac, 1994. © Mike Miller

A fourth generation native of Los Angeles, photographer and director Mike Miller has been repping the West Side since the early ’70s. His story reads like a Hollywood film: a young upstart who went on to find his calling in art – with no less than supermodel Linda Evangelista gifting him his first camera, a Nikon F2, formerly owned by Peter Lindbergh.

Yet it’s not the gloss of high fashion for which Miller is best known. Instead, it’s the grit, glory and glamour of the LA hip hop scene – a legacy that’s being celebrated in new exhibition California Love, currently on view at M+B Photo in Los Angeles.

Growing up in Hollywood, Miller and his brothers got into enough trouble for his mother to pack the family up and head out to Santa Monica when he was 12. Living on the beach changed his life. “I wanted to be a director, with no clue how to get there,” he recalls. “Some of my neighbours were big producers and they put me on at Warner Brothers and Fox Studios when they started as 20th Century Fox. My friends from the beach were 50, 60 years old and I was like 15 but they were my bros. We connected on different levels because back in the day, that’s the way it was.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music, Photography

Sara Bennett: Life After Life in Prison – The Bedroom Project

Posted on October 17, 2018

SHARON, 57, back in supportive housing seven years after her release. Corona, NY (2017) Sentence: 20 years to life Served: 20 years/ Released: May 2010 “My body tells me, I was in prison, but my mind tells me that I never spent a day there. I have this sense of freedom and a strong sense of feeling liberated. I am so in touch with my womanhood, of being a mom and a grandmother, a friend and a partner, a spiritual sister. I’m in touch with all that . . . my room is a place of peace and a sanctuary to come home to every day. I love turning the key in my door.”

American photographer Sara Bennett knows the legal system from a vantage point few have. Working as a public defender specializing in cases with battered women and the wrongly convicted, Bennett has developed a profound understanding of the impact that prison has on innocent and vulnerable lives.

The experience of prison resonates long after release for many who are consigned to spend years inside the system. Over the past five years, Bennett has begun documenting the lives of former inmates in the project Life After Life in Prison. Here we see women making their way back into the world, adapting to the challenges of life after having lost it all.

With a humanist eye and a sensitivity to detail, Bennett shares stories rarely told anywhere: the struggles of the dispossessed and marginalized who carry the weight of redemption on their own shoulders. It is only when they are able to retreat into their own private worlds that they may lay down their burdens for a moment.

It is here that The Bedroom Project centers itself, deep within the most intimate space of one’s domicile. Here, Bennett creates a series of portraits that reveal each of these women within the sanctity of their private lives. In each photograph, there is a sense of relationship between subject and space, in the way they dress, decorate, arrange, and pose for the portrait. A sense of consistency begins to reveal itself, a sense that we may know and be known through the way we live.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

TRACY, 51, in her own apartment three-and-a-half years after her release. Jamaica, NY (2017) Sentence: 22 years to life Served: 24 years Released: February 2014 “I imagined coming home, living in a one- or two-bedroom apartment, where one was a master and an extra room for guests. Here I have that. I call this room my “doll house,” my safe haven. I feel at peace. I’ve finally unpacked. I spend a lot of time in here. I take pride in everything. I put more into this room than into the kitchen. I know I need to eat, but my room is my nutrition.” © Sara Bennett

Categories: Art, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

James Casebere: The Interview

Posted on October 16, 2018

When you enter the world of American artist James Casebere, the uncanny comes alive, restoring a sense of mystery and enchantment, silence and serenity, beauty and wonder to our experience of the everyday world. Yet, in Casebere’s work, nothing is what it seems – for every photograph is a complex construction of architecture and landscape built with tabletop models in his studio.

Although Casebere has had a home in Columbia County since 1996, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that he started living and working in the country full time. Though the transition was difficult, Casebere soldiered through, dedicating himself to the creation of two new series of work that have centered him in a positive and profound space, one which speaks to the restorative powers of nature and our abilities to meet the challenges of the future with optimism and resilience.

A warm and welcoming man, Casebere laughs easily and lights up when speaking about art and architecture, two of his great passions. He segue ways easily between the personal and the political, finding quiet spaces where they mix, mingle, and meet to create profound reflections on the nature of trauma and loss, restoration and healing. Sitting on the patio of his Berkshires home, Casebere shares his journey into the country and the ways in which he continues to adapt to an ever-changing world.

Read the Full Story in the New Issue of Upstate Diary

Categories: Art, Upstate Diary

Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory

Posted on October 15, 2018

Photographer unknown, Mind Crime Hookers party crew on 6th Street Bridge, Boyle Heights, 1993. Courtesy Guadalupe Rosales.

“The word legend means to create stories we have to tell,” observes Chicanx artist Guadalupe Rosales. “When I think about my ancestors, this is something that has passed on as someone who is Mexican. We keep these people and loved ones close to us through their stories and legends.”

Passing down stories, traditions, and hard-won lessons from one generation to the next, Rosales has built a vernacular archive of ’90s Chicanx culture and history – selections of which are currently on view in Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory at Aperture Gallery, New York, as well as in Los Angeles (Aperture Magazine, Fall 2018).

Her story begins when, at the age of eight, Rosales and her family moved to a home in East Los Angeles that faced The Boulevard, a historic street where teens had been linking up since the ’60s. Rosales fondly recalls, “hanging out, watching from the window when I was 11 or 12 before I was allowed to do these things – and seeing the beautiful cars, the men and women getting to know each other, exchanging phone numbers. As I got older and was able to go out that was something that got passed down to me and my sisters.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Photographer unknown, Guadalupe Rosales’s cousin, Ever Sanchez (right), and unidentified woman, East Los Angeles, 1995

Shrine to Ever Sanchez, Guadalupe Rosales’s studio, 2018; Photograph by Mike Slack for Aperture

Categories: 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography