Posts from the “Blind” Category

Guns, Drugs and Rock & Roll: The Tumultuous Life of Jim Marshall

Posted on October 29, 2021

*John Coltrane, in his backyard in Queens New York at sunset, 1963 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

American photographer Jim Marshall died peacefully in his sleep in 2010 at the age of 74 — probably the least likely end to a tumultuous life fueled by guns, drugs, and rock & roll. A natural born provocateur, Marshall understood the power of art to transform our lives. In his hands, the camera became a tool for activism, a recorder of history, and a means to salvation.

Whether photographing Johnny Cash during his historic San Quentin and Folsom prison concerts during the 1960s or traveling with Joan Baez on voter registration drives through the South during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Marshall was anchored in his work. Photography gave him purpose, put him in community, and was a way to show love — things that sometimes slipped away when he found himself alone.

In those moments, Marshall looked for ways to escape, his efforts to self-medicate often snowballing into catastrophic acts of self-harm. “A lot of creative people get really stuck in addiction because they are so sensitive,” says photographer Amelia Davis, Marshall’s longtime assistant and sole beneficiary of Marshall’s estate. “They connect with people on such a human level that they want to numb themselves out because it is overwhelming, especially when you are doing it 24/7 like Jim. Photography was his life so when there was downtime, he started feeling all these things and it was too much for him.”

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*Jimi Hendrix filming Janis Joplin backstage, Winterland San Francisco, 1968 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

*Monk Family, NYC, 1963 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Music, Photography

Larry Racioppo: Bowery Street

Posted on October 27, 2021

Girl with cotton candy, Fourth Avenue, 1974 © Larry Racioppo

While working as a cab driver, cameraman, waiter, photographer’s assistant, bartender, and carpenter, Brooklyn native Larry Racioppo traveled around the city in the 1970s making photos of New York as it teetered along the edge of bankruptcy. Despite — or perhaps because of — the lack of basic government services, the people found a way to make the best of their circumstances through creativity.

“The 1970s were a tough time for all New York City,” says Racioppo. “Government services were being cut back and unemployment was relatively high — but the working class people I knew and lived among were familiar with hard times. Volunteers from block associations, local churches, and fraternal orders like the Veterans of Foreign Wars created and staffed community events regularly. Most of these activities were focused on helping kids have fun.”

It’s a way of life that only exists in tiny, ungentrified pockets scattered across the five boroughs today. In the new exhibition, Bowery Street, Racioppo explores one of the last remaining vestiges of old New York: an undeveloped three-block section of Coney Island’s amusement area that is still home family-owned booths and concessions offering games of chance and skill.

“Here are games with regulation size basketballs and narrow rims, games with water pistols and darts, rings to toss and bbs for shooting zombies. Because they remind the 1970s street fair games I played years ago, I really enjoy photographing them,” says Racioppo, who received a 2021 New York City Artist Corps grant to document this little corner of Brooklyn that echoes a way of life Racioppo photographed at the very dawn of his career.

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*Girl and boy on circular car ride, 13th Street, 1976 © Larry Racioppo*

*Ticket booth and empty ride, Fourth Avenue, 1974 © Larry Racioppo*

Categories: 1970s, Art, Blind, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Photography

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite

Posted on October 21, 2021

*wame Brathwaite, Grandassa Models at the Merton Simpson Gallery, New York, ca. 1967.*

While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used nonviolence to push for Civil Rights and Malcolm X embraced the ethos of Black Nationalism to fight injustice in the United States, Brooklyn-born photographer Kwame Brathwaite turned to the teachings ofPan-Africanism and Marcus Garvey to introduce the “Black Is Beautiful” movement in the 1960s.

Rejecting the standards imposed by Western cultural hegemony, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath embraced African aesthetics, creating Grandassa Models in Harlem and Naturally 62, a fashion show that set the groundwork for a global revolution in fashion and beauty. With the introduction of “Black Is Beautiful,” the brothers helped to popularize natural hair, a full range of skin tones, and African styles across the diaspora.

“I have been called ‘The Keeper of Images,’” Brathwaite writes in Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, selections from which are currently on view in a major museum tour across the United States. “My task has been to document creative powers throughout the diaspora—not only in our Black artists musicians, athletes, dancers, models, and designers, but in all of us….I have often been asked how I was granted so much access as a photographer. It was the fact that people trusted me to get it right, to tell the truth in my work.”

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*Kwame Brathwaite, Marcus Garvey Day Parade, Harlem, ca. 1967*

*Man smoking in a ballroom, Harlem, ca. 1962.*

Categories: 1960s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs

Posted on October 20, 2021

*Gianfranco Gorgoni, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970, 2013*.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the avant-garde turned its back on the “ruthless commercialization” of art in America, understanding that the commodification of the object was driven by business above all. Determined to make work that could defy the system while simultaneously offering a space for cultural critique, the land art movement was born. Artists including Christo and Jeanne Claude, Robert Smithson,Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, and Michael Heizer transformed the natural landscape into extraordinary spectacles that combined elements of installation, sculpture, and architecture.

In 1970, 29-year-old Italian photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni (1941–2019) ventured into the Utah desert alongside Robert Smithson, embarking on what would become his career as a “roadie, stuntman, and documentarian” as an art critic once quipped.

“For me, seeing these expanses of desert where Heizer, Smithson, and De Maria were realizing large works was an almost mystic experience,” said Gorgoni, whose documentation of the movement is chronicled in the new book and exhibition Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs. “Getting lost in those parched, sandy stretches, there were incredible places; more than the work itself, the place where the work was situated mattered.”

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*Gianfranco Gorgoni, Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains, near Jean Dry Lake, Nevada, 2016*.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Andy Warhol: Photo Factory

Posted on October 15, 2021

*Dolly Parton © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.*

Andy Warhol was a master diarist, a man who understood that the foundations of art, history, and culture are built on the shared experience of daily life. Under the banner of Pop Art, Warhol elevated consumer products and celebrities into the realm of fine art. With his time capsules, Warhol preserved the mundane for posterity — much in the same way his daily calls to Pat Hackett detailing his comings and goings about town became the basis of The Andy Warhol Diaries, which was published after his untimely death in 1987.

But perhaps Warhol’s penchant for chronicling mid-century life could best be seen in his enduring, albeit lesser known, photography practice. Between the early 1970s and his death, Warhol had produced some 130,000 black and white 35mm photographs and 20,000 Polaroids. No matter where he went, Warhol took a camera along — his “date” as he fondly described his Polaroid camera.

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*Keith Haring and Juan Dubose, 1983 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.*

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

Ruth Orkin: The Centennial

Posted on October 1, 2021

*People lying on Tanglewood Lawn, Lenox, Massachusetts, 1948 © Ruth Orkin*

At the age of 17, Ruth Orkin (1921–1985) decided to ride a bicycle from Los Angeles to New York in order to attend the 1939 World’s Fair. She made the trip in a matter of three weeks, photographing her journey along the way — a singular feat that spoke to Orkin’s ability to realize her greatest ambitions.

“Ruth had a big personality. She was very charismatic,” says her daughter Mary Engel, Director of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive, who is honoring the centennial of her mother’s birth with the new book Ruth Orkin: A Photo Spirit and exhibition “Ruth Orkin: Expressions of Life”. Working across genres, Orkin created a singular archive of mid-twentieth century life, capturing a feeling of optimism that defined the modern. Orkin’s empathic eye found its home whether photographing celebrities or strangers she encountered on the street.

Although Orkin was an unconventional mother, telling her children Mary and Andy to call her “Ruth” so she could hear them in a crowd, she never put work above her family. Although she always carried a camera around her neck, Orkin brilliantly integrated her practice into every aspect of her life to avoid any sense of intruding upon those she loved.

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*Geraldine Dent, Cover of McCall’s, New York City, 1949 © Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021*

*Famous Malted Milk, New York City, 1950 © Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Janette Beckman: Leaders of the New School

Posted on September 20, 2021

*Leaders of the New School, 1991 © Janette Beckman*

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.

“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.”

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.”

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Categories: 1990s, Art, Blind, Music, Photography

Bruce Davidson: In Color

Posted on September 14, 2021

*Central Park, 1991 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

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.

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.

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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*Chicago, 1989 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

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

Joe Conzo: Remembering 9/11

Posted on September 10, 2021

Photographer Joe Conzo remembers getting an early start on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to vote in the mayoral primary, which saw billionaire media mogulMike Bloomberg throw his hat in the ring for the very first time. As the grandson of Dr. Evelina López Antonetty (1922-1984), the legendary Puerto Rican activist affectionately known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx,” Conzo was raised to fight for the rights of the community throughout his life.

Growing up amid the rubble of “benign neglect,” wherein the Nixon White House implemented a policy to deny government services to Black and Brown communities nationwide throughout the 1970s, Joe Conzo learned the only way to create change was to do it yourself. Whether accompanying his grandmother and mother Lorraine Montenegro to protests or photographing the early years of Hip Hop as it came up on the streets of the Bronx, Conzo understood “all power to all the people” was not simply a slogan — it was the truth.

While serving in the Army, Conzo trained as a combat medic and decided to continue in that line of work after being discharged. In 1992, he became a member of the Emergency Medical Services (EMS), which merged with the New York Fire Department (FDNY) in 1996. By 2001, Conzo was working as a union delegate, a position that would come to serve him and his colleagues in ways he could never have imagined.

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Categories: Blind, Manhattan, Photography

Sarah Schulman: Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

Posted on September 7, 2021

*The House of Color video collective. From left to right: Pamela Sneed, Robert Garcia, Julie Tolentino, Jocelyn Taylor, Wellington Love, Idris Mingott, Jeff Nunokawa © T. L. Litt*

*Kissing Doesn’t Kill © Courtesy of Gran Fury*

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.

“Five people cannot do a paradigm shift in America — you need coalitions to make change,” says Sarah Schulman, author of the new book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, which brings together more than 200 interviews with ACT UP members to create a masterpiece of activist history and tactics.

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.

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*Mark Lowe Fisher’s funeral. From left to right: Tim Lunceford, Joy Episalla, BC Craig, Vincent Gagliostro, Scott Morgan, Eric Sawyer (partial) (Photographer unknown)*

*Tim Bailey’s political funeral, with Joy Episalla in the van, June 30, 1993 © Donna Binder*

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

Carla Moral and Katia Repina: My Own Wings

Posted on September 2, 2021

*Arisleida, NYC © Carla Moral and Katia Repina*

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.

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.”

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.”

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*River, Gallo, NYC © Carla Moral and Katia Repina*

*Alex, NYC © Carla Moral and Katia Repina*

Categories: Art, Blind, Photography