Posts from the “Blind” Category

Ernest C. Withers: I’ll Take You There

Posted on August 30, 2021

*Double Exposure of a Nighttime March © The Ernest C. Withers Family Trust; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles*

Working at a time when mainstream American publications rarely hired Black photographers,Dr. Ernest C. Withers, Sr. (1922 – 2007) made a way. His work, on view in the exhibition “I’ll Take You There” and new book The Revolution in Black and White: Photographs of the Civil Rights Era by Ernest C. Withers (CityFiles Press) provides a look at Black life in the American South during the height of Civil Rights Movement.

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.

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.

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.

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*Ernest Withers’s Beal Street Studio © The Ernest C. Withers Family Trust; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles*

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

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.

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*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

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.

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

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

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

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

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And

Posted on August 4, 2021

*Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire celebrates with her friends, 1980–83/2009. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York*

At the age of 45, Lorraine O’Grady emerged as an artist fully formed when she made her first public appearance as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” in 1980 at Just Above Midtown, the center of New York’s Black avant-garde run by revolutionary gallerist Linda Goode Bryant. Dressed in a handmade gown comprised of 180 pairs of white gloves, a sparkling tiara, and beauty queen sash, O’Grady entered the gallery bearing flowers and a cat-o’-nine-tails whip.

The flowers were for the audience, the whip she saved for herself in a performance that decried the respectability politics that consumed the Black American middle class desperately striving to find some semblance of protection from the horrors of systemic racism. But O’Grady, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, knew such ideas were illusions at best. As she whipped herself, she spoke verse, her poem ending in a firm declaration: “Black Art Must Take More Risks!”

O’Grady wasn’t wrong, and she wasn’t afraid – even if it meant her work would go without proper recognition for more than 40 years. Now 86, the artist is finally being given her proper due with her first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled Both/And and which just ended, and the publication of two collections of her work from Duke University and Dancing Foxes Press.

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Lorraine O’Grady, Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in the White Kitchen tastes her coconut, 1982/2015. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

*Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two), 1983/2009. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York*

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

Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography

Posted on August 1, 2021

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An American original, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) established himself as one of the foremost painters of Black life. His luminous portraits capture the hypnotic energy and effervescent attitude of a people whose style and flair has been often imitated but never duplicated. Coming of age during the Black Power movement, Hendricks recognized the resounding absence of Blackness from the canon of Western art and sought to redress it by creating a pantheon of life-size portraits of friends, relatives, and strangers he met on the street.

Using the techniques of Old Masters, Hendricks would go on to create portraits with more bounce to the ounce than the average masterpiece. Never one to fear going against the grain, Hendricks crafted his own lane, working in figurative art at a time when abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art dominated the contemporary art world. A year before his death Hendricks told the Brooklyn Rail, “I didn’t care what was being done by other artists or what was happening around me. I was dealing with what I wanted to do. Period.”

While setting the art world ablaze with his paintings, Hendricks also worked as a photographer, strapping the “mechanical sketchbook” to his neck before leaving home and using the camera to record sources of inspiration. The new book Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography (published by Skira), offers an extraordinary look into the artist’s little known photography practice, providing a vital look at the ways in which picture making informed his work.

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

Polaroid x Keith Haring

Posted on July 27, 2021

*© Keith Haring Foundation. Licensed by Artestar, New York*

Keith Haring first made his name under the streets of New York in the early 1980s when he hit the train stations with a piece of white chalk in hand, crafting luminous love letters to the city in the space where advertising traditionally went. Using the subway platforms as a “laboratory,” Haring developed a simple yet evocative iconography replete with flying saucers, barking dogs, and most famously the “Radiant Baby.” In a landscape filled with graffiti masterpieces, Haring’s work caught the eye of the citizenry and art world alike.

Haring, who understood branding long before it became de rigueur, quickly shot to the top with projects including the Public Art Fund’s One Times Square Spectacolor billboard series, collaborations with choreographer Bill T. Jones, as well as fashion designers Willi Smith and Vivienne Westwood. His work was also shown at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale. Through it all Haring maintained his commitment to making art for the people, creating the first major work at the now-famed Houston Bowery Wall and the Crack is Wack mural in Harlem — for which he was arrested on charges of vandalism in 1986.

A true egalitarian who believed in the power of art, Haring made sure his work was accessible to all — employing the very ethos of photography by creating an object that could be reproduced infinite times and therefore rendered affordable. In April 1986, he opened the Pop Shop in the heart of Soho, making t-shirts, posters, stickers, buttons, and other ephemera featuring his work — a move for which he was first criticized then later copied en masse.

“I could earn more money if I just painted a few things and jacked up the price,”Haring explained. “My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art.”

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Categories: 1980s, Art, Blind, Photography

Erwin Olaf: Strange Beaurt

Posted on July 23, 2021

*“Palm Springs”, American Dream, Self-Portrait with Alex I, 2018 © Erwin Olaf*

eality — like nature — is a wild, savage, and beautiful force, a truth so grand as to be sublime that we can never truly fathom it, though we most certainly may try. Art, in its most exalted form, transports us into an ineffable realm, a space where understanding lays beyond the word itself. “We all know that Art is not truth,” Pablo Picasso famously said. “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

These sentiments speak to the work of Dutch photographer and multimedia artist Erwin Olaf, whose carefully staged images occupy the liminal space between fact and fiction. In the new exhibitions “New Series: April Fool and In the Forest” and “Strange Beauty“, on view in Munich, Germany along with a catalogue, Olaf revisits his archive, looking back over his 40-year career that explores meditative aspects of human emotion, motivation, and thought as well as pressing social and political issues facing women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.

“I always have to be a little bit angry otherwise I don’t work,” Olaf says with a frankness that underlies the heart of a true revolutionary. A rebellion is driven by love, and a desire to tear down false truths propped up by our current world. “I always get the question, ‘Is it real or unreal?’ With photography, why are we thinking we are looking at reality? Olaf asks.

“For me, the camera is an instrument to register my imagination and to translate the things in my mind into an image. When we see a painting, we accept that it is from the mind and the spirit of the painter. It’s the same with music, literature, and film. You can go to the cinema in the afternoon, watch a movie, and cry your heart out when you know it’s totally artificial. But when it’s photography, it should be part of the ‘real world.’ I don’t think so.”

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*“Palm Springs”, The Kite, 2018 © Erwin Olaf*

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

A Visual Conversation Between Carrie Mae Weems and Diane Arbus

Posted on July 20, 2021

*Diane Arbus, Black boy, Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1965 © The Estate of Diane Arbus*

“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way,” Diane Arbus said — a truth that challenges us to acknowledge we are not fully in control of our lives or our destinies, but rather charged to navigate the world with the understanding there is always something that will escape our perception or comprehension. Such wisdom requires that we act with faith, yet remain receptive to what we may uncover along the way, for it is only in the unknown that possibility can be found.

Photography, being both incredibly precise and prone to all sorts of “accidents,” makes this abundantly clear; for all our intentions, there’s still space for new understandings to emerge. With the portrait, artists explore the landscapes of the physical and psychological worlds simultaneously.

For Diane Arbus and Carrie Mae Weems, the photograph is a space to consider communities largely misrepresented, marginalized, or erased from the history of Western art. Whether using documentary or staged photographs, Arbus and Weems create tender, thoughtful, and honest portraits that engage with complex issues of identity, gender, and race in contemporary American life.

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*Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup), from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990 © Carrie Mae Weems*

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

Radical Tenderness: Trans for Trans Portraiture

Posted on July 16, 2021

*Julia and Maxi, 2003 © Johanna Jackie Baier*

“Visibility” is the buzzword du jour but like any other form of exposure it needs to be backed by viable changes in art institutions and industries, otherwise it runs the risk of being nothing more than a superficial act of tokenism. For trans artists, making work that depicts themselves and the worlds in which they live is an essential part of their activism.

In the online exhibition “Radical Tenderness: Trans for Trans Portraiture“, Alice Austen House executive director Victoria Munro and guest curator Dr. Eliza Steinbeck bring together the work of artists Johanna Jackie Baier (Germany), Zackary Drucker (US), Texas Isaiah (US), and Del LaGrace Volcano (US/Sweden) who use photography as an essential part of their practices of survival and care. Rather than follow the commercial trope of visibility, which caters to mainstream narratives that positions diversity as “one of each,” therefore reinforcing “otherness,” the artists featured here create a world that is inherently “for us, by us.”

“Photography for me is a survival strategy,” Del LaGrace Volcano says in the exhibition catalogue. “I am intersex but also trans and non-binary, so my approach is from the inside, not ethnographic or anthropologic. I make work with people I connect with or am hoping to know better. Afterwards, in silence, tenderly working with my memories of the photographic moments we created together, I wonder if they have any idea how much they all mean to me? Connection is the key ingredient and the process is as important, if not more so, than the product.”

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*My Name Is My Name I, 2016 © Texas Isaiah*

Categories: Art, Blind, Photography

T. Eric Monroe: Rare & Unseen Moments of 90s Hip Hop

Posted on July 13, 2021

*T. Eric Monroe. Erykah Badu, Power, 1997, NJ.*

Throughout the 1980s, corporate media called Hip Hop a “fad,” trying to dismiss a culture that made its way up from the streets and required no formal musical education — just beats, rhymes, and life. It wasn’t until 1989 that the Grammys introduced a rap category, but after a decade of snubs, artists had had enough. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, who had won the first-ever Best Rap Performance for “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” boycotted the show along with Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J, Slick Rick, and Public Enemy.

By the time the 1990s rolled around, Hip Hop was a distinctly underground phenomenon that made headlines as the subject of FBI attention and Senate hearings organized by Second Lady Tipper Gore. Although it would be years before white audiences transformed Black and Brown street culture into a billion-dollar global industry, Hip Hop was in its Golden Age.

Throughout the ‘90s, skater turned photographer T. Eric Monroe was on the scene, creating a massive archive of Hip Hop icons including Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, Lil’ Kim, the Fugees, and The Roots. Featured in the 90’s HipHop Art Tour on New York’s Lower East Side and the three-volume set Rare & Unseen Moments of 90s Hip Hop, Monroe retraces his journey documenting the scene for record labels and magazines including The Source, XXL, Thrasher, and Transworld Skateboarding.

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*T. Eric Monroe. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Barbershop Chair Stare, 1995, Harlem, NY.*

*T. Eric Monroe. Biggie Smalls, Hoodshock, 1996, Harlem, NY*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Music, Photography