Posts from the “Blind” Category

June Newton, Portrait Photographer Also Known as Alice Springs, Dies at 97

Posted on April 13, 2021

*June as Hedda Gabler, Melbourne 1960 © Helmut Newton / Helmut Newton Foundation*

June Newton (1923-2021), the Australian born photographer and actress also known as Alice Springs, died on Saturday, April 9, at the age of 97 in her Monte Carlo home. The wife of late photographer Helmut Newton worked with her husband on the design and publication of his many monographs, and adopted a pseudonym when photographing art, fashion, and entertainment luminaries such as Yves Saint Laurent, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Jones, and Diana Vreeland.

Born June Browne in Melbourne in 1923, Newton trained as an actor, performing under the name June Brunell. In 1947, she met Helmut Newton, the son of a wealthy German-Jewish industrialist who had fled his homeland at the age of 18 to escape the Nazis. He worked in Singapore as a high-class gigolo before being sent to Australia as an enemy alien. Helmut had became a British subject, anglicized his name, and opened a fashionable Flinders Lane photography studio in Melbourne, where he met June, who was hoping to make some extra money as a model.

“I looked at the pictures on the wall and I fell in love with them,” June told The Guardian in 2006. Helmut told June, “Photography will always be my first love, but you will be my second.” They wed the following year, in 1948, and remained married until Helmut’s 2004 death following a car accident in Los Angeles at the age of 83.

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*Yves Saint Laurent and Hazel, Paris 1978 © Alice Springs / Helmut Newton Foundation*

Categories: Art, Blind, Photography

Peter van Agtmael: Sorry for the War

Posted on April 8, 2021

*Administrators survey the ruins of Mosul University in East Mosul as the battle continues to rage on the west side of the Tigris River. Mosul. Iraq. 2017. © Peter van Agtmael / Magnum Photos*

This year, the United States will mourn the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a historic event that precipitated U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which barely register in the American public’s consciousness. No longer the cause célèbre driven by a desire to destroy Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, few may be aware that a May 21 deadline for complete U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan will symbolically mark the end of the nation’s longest war. All but discarded as yesterday’s news, these wars have become an afterthought to the American mind, their consequences on foreign and domestic policy largely ignored.

Yet their impact continues to resonate and inform the world in ways in a myriad of ways deeply and inextricably intertwined, a hallucinatory labyrinth of events and implications Magnum Photos member Peter van Agtmael seeks to explore in his latest book, Sorry for the War (Mass Books). “Sorry for the War is dedicated to the anonymous lives caught in the middle of America’s wars. Twenty years later, we hardly know a face or a name,” van Agtmael writes in the acknowledgments, a poignant reminder of the incalculable cost of war.

Since 2006, van Agtmael has documented America at war at home and abroad, creating a hallucinatory picture of a nation willfully giving itself over to the numbing powers of cognitive dissonance. In Sorry for the War, van Agtmael takes us inside the belly of the beast, drawing damning parallels between the horrors of war and the fetid bliss of ignorance. Combing documentary photographs with images of mainstream media, van Agtmael explores the vertigo-inducing disconnect between reality and spectacle through a series of surreal images accompanied by annotated captions that provide at times deeply disconcerting context.

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The border had closed at midnight after Hungarian officials hastily erected a barbed-wire fence, blocking thousands of Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees from entering. Horgos, Serbia. 2015. © Peter van Agtmael / Magnum Photos

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

William Gedney: A Time of Youth – San Francisco, 1966-1967

Posted on April 1, 2021

*From A Time of Youth: San Francisco, 1966–1967 © William Gedney, courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University*

A year before 1967’s famed Summer of Love, American photographer William Gedney(1932-1989) set out for San Francisco on a Guggenheim Fellowship to record what he described as “aspects of our culture which I believe significant and which I hope will become, in time, part of the visual record of American history.”

Filled with optimism and hope, Gedney arrived in San Francisco ready to embed himself amid a new generation of youth coming of age that rejected the strictures of the status quo in the pursuit of happiness. He gravitated towards a group of hippies living at “The Pad,” a communal house in Haight Asbury, just a few blocks from the home of the seminal counterculture rock band Grateful Dead.

Between October 1966 and January 1967, Gedney made 2,100 photographs across 62 rolls of 35 mm film, chronicling the everyday lives of a group of lovers and friends as the beatnik era gave way to the hippie scene. In these images there is nothing of the Pollyanna spirit to come, no “love will save the world” ethos brimming amid the youth, but rather a forlorn, more disaffected truth.

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

Peter van Agtmael: War in the 21st Century

Posted on March 30, 2021

*9/5/20. Protesters taunt militia members who had marched on the Breonna Taylor memorial. Louisville, Kentucky. © Peter Van Agtmael*

On January 17, 1991 a coalition of 35 nations led by the United States invaded Iraq launching the Gulf War, codenamed Operation Desert Shield — the largest military alliance since World War II. Over five weeks, the allied powers waged one of the most intense aerial bombing campaigns in military history, dropping some 85,000 tons on Iraq and broadcasting select strikes as seen from far above, creating the image of war as video game.

“As Operation Desert Storm erupted last week, there was only one unequivocal victor in the first days of war: the Cable News Network,” Variety reported on January 20, 1991. In just one month, the 10-year-old cable news service gained global prominence by live broadcasting from the frontlines into 10.8 million U.S. homes. Among those watching was future Magnum Photos member Peter van Agtmael, then a fifth grade student living with his family in Bethesda, Maryland.

“What I remember most vividly were videos showing air strikes and smart bombs filmed from the airplanes,” he says of the powerfully crafted propaganda produced by the U.S. government – a far cry from the horrific reportage witnessed during the Vietnam War. “It was about how accurate the weaponry was and avoiding civilian casualties, and to my mind, I believed it. I didn’t have any critical thinking skills at that point and I didn’t come from a politically radicalized family that was trying to puncture the myth by questioning what was going on.”

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*A gardener of a small health clinic in Garmsir, Helmand. Afghanistan, 2009. © Peter Van Agtmael*

*Marines swim in an irrigation canal at their outpost south of Garmsir in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2009. © Peter Van Agtmael*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes from a Disappeared City.

Posted on March 29, 2021

*Provisional Notes from a Disappeared City © Reynaldo Rivera*

“The only decade I feel nostalgic for is the ‘70s,” says photographer Reynaldo Rivera from his Los Angeles home. “There’s a dreamlike thing in my psyche about the ‘70s as this magical time even though I had this horrifying experience. My father kidnapped me and my sister, took us to a village in Mexico, and left there from ‘69 to ’75. It’s like an Oliver Twist story. This lady took us in and used to sing Toña la Negra songs. Music was my babysitter at a time when I would have had mother, my aunts and uncles.”

After singing a few lyrics to Toña la Negra’s bolero “Arráncame La Vida” Rivera shares the translation by text: “Rip the life from me / With your last love kiss / Tip it, take it, tale me heart / Rip me life and in case the pain hurts you / I must be from not seeing me / Because at the end, your eyes, I took with me.”

“This is what influenced me,” Rivera says. “Music opened the door that allowed me to create an environment where I’d want to take photos. Being into all this Mexican super tragic music created this baroque me, this person that’s over the top emotional. From Toña la Negra, and later Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, I sought answers that told me to take a beating and still love it!”

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

Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood

Posted on March 24, 2021

*Emine Dressed Up for Republic Day, Trabzon, Turkey, 1965 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

“I didn’t have the happiest home life or childhood, so I think that gave me a feeling of justice and passion for people that don’t have all the breaks,” Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) said in 2010 on KOBRA SVT, Swedish National Television.

“I think it was important to me to be free and wander the world and not have a family,” Mary Ellen Marks added. “I think if you don’t come from a happy home, maybe you don’t want to tie yourself down. I always wanted to be completely free. Even from the time that I was like eight years, seven years old, I remember walking home from grade school thinking, When am I going to get out of here? I’ve got to be free. So the freedom was always a major thought for me, a major plan.”

That desire for freedom became the driving force in the artist’s life. Having no children of her own, Mark was able to dedicate herself wholly to the creation of an extraordinary archive of work, selections from which were recently published in the three-volume monograph, The Book of Everything (Steidl), published at the end of last year and edited by film director Martin Bell, Mark’s husband and collaborate for 30 years.

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*Amanda and her cousin Amy. Valdese, North Carolina, 1990 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

*Brooke and Billy at Gibbs Senior High School prom. St. Petersburg, Florida, 1986 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

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

Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color

Posted on March 18, 2021

*Street scene in East Harlem, NY 1947 © Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography*

American photographer Ida Wyman (1926–2019) achieved her every dream except one — the opportunity to publish her illustrated memoir Girl Photographer: From the Bronx to Hollywood and Back before she died. Though Wyman was humble, she never lacked for confidence or nerve, becoming one of the few women photographers working for Look andLife magazines in the 1940s.

As with many things, Wyman was ahead of the times. “She never wanted to be the most famous,” says Heather Garrison, her granddaughter and executor of the Ida Wyman Estate. “I think in her later years she finally understood how important her journey was as a woman in a male dominated industry. She took meticulous notes and records, and had her archive well organized. She wanted to put it all into one piece.”

Despite the fact Wyman did not live to see her book published, her work is receiving its proper due in the new exhibition in Santa Fe, Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color, which showcases a recently discovered collection of Ektachtomes Wyman made at the age of 21. The only color body of work from the period, Wyman’s photographs offer a poignant portrait of working class life in New York after the war. Neither activist nor ethnologist, Wyman was a humanist with a profound love for street portraiture. She eschewed the term “street photography,” seeing it as an anachronistic term to describe the documentation of urban life.

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Categories: Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Women

Mitch Epstein: Property Rights

Posted on March 11, 2021

*Ashton Clatterbuck, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania 2018, dye coupler print, © Mitch Epstein*

It wasn’t until photographer Mitch Epstein traveled to India in the 1980s that he began to understand what it means to be an American. By putting distance between himself and the United States, Epstein began to develop a deeper sense of his cultural identity. His travels to Vietnam in the early 1990s became a turning point, deepening the political dimension of his work. From that point forward, Epstein began to confront the political underbelly of American history in a series of projects made throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Although Epstein did not set out to create a trilogy, in retrospect he recognizes the thread that weaves through the cycle that began with Family Business, an intimate story about the cost of pursuing the illusory American Dream. Afterwards, Epstein expanded his perspective in a study of American Power and most recently with Property Rites, an exhibition and soon to be released book that ultimately reckons with the call to resistance on the home front.

Epstein does not consider himself an environmental photographer, but the stories he shares offer entrees into American histories that have largely been erased from view. “I don’t have a political agenda or a preconceived operandi in my head when I’m making the pictures,” Epstein says. “It’s not useful to me to be at service to the ideas I already have in my head. That’s an artistic handicap. But in the end I’m clear about the importance of taking responsibility of the work, to contextualize and position it without denying its own enigma. I’m not explaining it.”

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*Tree of Life Synagogue Memorial, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 2018 © Mitch Epstein*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Ebony: Covering Black America

Posted on March 5, 2021

Throughout the twentieth century, most mainstream U.S. publications were reticent to bring more than one — if any — Black photographers on staff, resulting a biased depiction of the issues facing the Black America. Understanding the truth in journalist H. L. Mencken’s dictum, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one,” businessman John Harold Johnson founded the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago in 1942 to provide Black America with media made by, for, and about the community.

In 1945, the Johnson Publishing Company launched Ebony, which quickly became Black America’s answer to LIFE magazine. Rather than appropriate white culture, Ebonyoffered an inside view into a striving Black bourgeois through a series of photo essays and features on celebrities and current events. For 75 years, Ebony was the forerunner of Black American culture, chronicling the times, and offering a visual history of the nation from segregation through Civil Rights, and beyond.

“As one of the few individuals who know of a world before Ebony, let me tell you, John Johnson’s magazine was a game-changer, and remains one to this day,” retired educator Hazel S. Red says in Lavaille Lavette’s sumptuous new book Ebony: Covering Black America (Rizzoli New York). “It has been a vehicle by which we have maintained our dignity and sanity through our efforts to achieve true justice and equality for all.”

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

Michael Grecco: Punk, Post Punk, New Wave – Onstage, Backstage, In Your Face, 1978-1991,

Posted on March 5, 2021

Bow Wow Wow #2, Boston, Massachusetts, 1981 © Michael Grecco

“Punk, in a strange way, saved my life,” musician Lizzie Borden says in Punk, Post Punk, New Wave: Onstage, Backstage, In Your Face, 1978-1991, a breathtaking collection of 162 photographs by Michael Grecco accompanied by essays by Fred Schneider of The B-52sand music journalist Jim Sullivan.

By the age of 13, Borden — who shares her birth name a woman who allegedly killed her family with an axe — was rocking at CBGB, the epicenter of New York’s burgeoning punk scene. “It was filthy, it was raw. It was sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, and the bathrooms were disgusting,” she told Sullivan. “It was a group of people that not everyone wanted to join, but once you were in you were family….We would be up all night. Drugs, no sleep, more drugs. We lived in the streets. We squatted in Alphabet City. We lived punk rock.”

With “Do It Yourself” as the guiding ethos, punk encouraged all comers to make art without catering to careerist ambitions, commercial markets, or capitalist pretense. Stripped down to its bare essentials, punk was loud, angry, and raw — capturing the angst of adolescence and the disdain for the privileged politic of hippie ideology. With punk, anyone possessed with the audacity of youth could grab a guitar, jump on stage, thrash three chords, and howl at the moon.

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*Poison Ivy, The Cramps, Boston, Massachusetts, 1980 © Michael Grecco*

*Siouxsie and the Banshees, Boston, Massachusetts, 1980 © Michael Grecco*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Blind, Books, Music, Photography

But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography From the World

Posted on March 5, 2021

*Image from ZZYZX, in But Still, It Turns (MACK, 2021). © Gregory Halpern. Courtesy of the artist and MACK*.

After four years of living in a world filled with notions of “post truth,” we have witnessed shared objective standards crumble before our very eyes, resulting in a highly factionalized society. Invariably, this extension of the postmodern project would expand beyond discourse and into art with “post documentary” becoming a new way of thinking about photography, one which curator Paul Graham embraces in the new ICP exhibition and MACK book, But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography From the World.

For Graham, who first fell in love with what he describes as “serious photography” in the mid-1970s, the medium offered a semblance of order in an otherwise chaotic world. Documentary photography could ground us in place and time, offering guidance, insight, compassion, and understanding — helping us make sense of that which might otherwise be unfathomable. But what it wasn’t, and could never be, was fashionable.

Graham laments the art world’s marginalization of the documentary form without bringing to bear the political underpinnings such a position holds. Rather he focuses on the fact that, “It is difficult to make really meaningful work from life.” But nothing of value comes easy; for documentary photographers, the challenge of presence, intimacy, trust, mutuality, and awareness are heightened by a profound lack of control over their subjects.

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*Image from South County, AL (a Hale County), in But Still, It Turns (MACK, 2021). © RaMell Ross. Courtesy of the artist and MACK*.

*Image from Lost Coast, in But Still, It Turns (MACK, 2021) © Curran Hatleberg. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.*

Categories: Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography