Posts from the “Blind” Category

Linda Simpson: The Drag Explosion

Posted on March 2, 2021

*Kabuki Starshine on the town, 1993 © Linda Simpson*

Once relegated to the margins, drag queens came center stage in New York City in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, as a new generation of luminous beauties came of age in the downtown nightlife scene. Eschewing the female impersonator style of past performers, young artists took their cues from Warhol Superstars like Holly Woodlawn. Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis as well as cult sensation Divine to create personality driven entertainment. Visionaries like Lady Bunny, Lypsinka, and Kevin Aviance became celebrities in their own right, transforming the way we think about gender, beauty, fashion, and glamour today.

In 1992, RuPaul’s nightlife anthem “Supermodel (You Better Work)” a nightlife anthem became a global phenomenon, taking the leggy luminary to superstar heights. With his trademark blonde tresses. flawless physique, and exquisite wardrobe, RuPaul began his journey to take drag mainstream, a dream he fully realized with the smash reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which first began airing in 2009.

But back in the 1980s, drag was still underground, and slowly taking root at the Pyramid Club, a queer nightspot on Avenue A long before the East Village was gentrified. It was here that Linda Simpson — who The New York Times described as “a mother superior of the New York drag scene” — first got her start. Along the way, Simpson, an amateur photographer, amassed an archive of some 5,000 photographs, a selection of which are included in the new book, The Drag Explosion (Domain).

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*RuPaul and Willi Ninja at Coffee Shop restaurant across from Union Square Park, where Wigstock was held that year. Both performed later that day, 1991 © Linda Simpson*

*Afrodite, London Broil and Ebony Jet in the Pyramid Club dressing room, 1992 © Linda Simpson*

Categories: 1990s, Blind, Books, Manhattan

Deanna Templeton: What She Said

Posted on February 25, 2021

As the first generation of truly disaffected youth came of age, Generation X watched hippies trade in their “save the world” idealism of their youth to become yuppies who believed everything could be bought and sold. In Reagan’s America, neoliberalism took root, transforming corporations into people and people into brands. Raised as latch key children born to members of the “Silent Generation,” Gen-Xers understood they were on their own. Although taboo issues were finally starting to be spoken of openly on daytime talk shows, after school specials, and the occasional made-for-TV movies like The Burning Bed, by and large, silence continued to cloak the struggles many faced.

Hailing from Huntington Beach, California, American photographer Deanna Templeton lived in the quintessential suburban home that epitomized American life. But for all her family’s strides, Templeton felt lost in a culture that pushed a shiny, pretty, picture perfect image of womanhood promoted by fashion magazines. As a teen, Templeton kept a journal, chronicling the pain she felt inside, exacerbated by the endless capitalization of unattainable standards of beauty foisted upon girls in their youth. Like so many others, Templeton equated her innate value with her attractiveness, channeling her sense of self worth into her appearance to detrimental effect.

“By the time I hit 14 I was hard on criticizing myself for not being the way I wanted to be,” Templeton remembers. On November 17, 1986, she wrote in her journal, “Tonight for the 100th time I looked at myself in the mirror and realized how ugly I am and how cute I could of [sic] been. My acne is so horrible! I don’t understand why I am so ugly. I hate it. I wish I was dead until it went away. Someone please help me.”

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Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography, Women

Shikeith: Ceremonies

Posted on February 24, 2021

*Shikeith. “Prince” , 2019, Archival Inkjet Print on Canson Infinity Platine, 30 x 36 in*

In order to survive in America, Black culture has made itself illegible from the prying eyes of the white gaze, using art as a tool of subversion and self-expression. Since emancipation, Black Art has been a force of resistance, independence, and innovation, catapulting Black American culture to global heights in music, style, speech, and dance.

Often imitated but never duplicated, Black Art is the foundation of popular culture, as well as a vital force in fine art now as the art world races to align itself with the right side of history after active exclusion from museums, galleries, books, and mainstream media. Black Art is currently having a moment, not only for this reason but because it offers a panoply of perspectives and paradigms operating outside the boundaries of Western cultural hegemony.

Consider the subject of Black male desire and the ways in which it has been laden with the stain of racism and homophobia for centuries, forcing the expression of fundamental human drives into secrecy. Photography, by virtue of its ability to render visible that which we may not have seen, can become a tool of liberation and freedom when placed in the proper hands.

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*Shikeith. “The Adoration (never knew love like this before)” , 2020, Archival Inkjet Print on Canson Infinity Platine, 30 x 36in, Edition of 5*

*Shikeith. “O’ my body, make of me always a man who questions!” 2020, Archival Inkjet Print on Canson Infinity Platine, 50in x 60in, Edition of 5*

Categories: Art, Blind, Photography

The 1970s

Posted on February 22, 2021

*Miss USA Contestants, 1973 © Neal Slavin, Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, TX*

“Photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all,” celebrated writer Susan Sontag asserted in On Photography, a collection of polemical essays published in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. “Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made….Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, andAtget‘s Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry.”

Although Sontag later partially refuted positions established in the book, her initial impulse to enforce arbitrary hierarchies in art is as commonplace as it is trite. Since its invention in 1839, gatekeepers of the art world have resisted including photography within its hallowed halls; perhaps it was too commercial, too practical, or simply too democratic for the cultural elite to accept, let alone embrace, as an object to which they could attach exorbitant price tags.

Despite its long-standing marginalization, photography underwent a radical shift in the 1970s, catapulting it into the realm of fine art. Under John Szarkowski’s direction, the Museum of Modern Art staged a series of seminal exhibitions and wrote the landmark 1973 book, Looking at Photography, which reframed conventional notions of the relationship between photography and art. Recognizing that photography was not invented to serve a specific purpose, Szarkowski understood that its inherent plasticity of purpose made it the perfect medium for use by artists from all walks of life.

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*Denise Hustling, outside of Homestead Cade, Providence, RI, 1972 © Jeffrey Silverthorne, Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, TX*

Categories: 1970s, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography

Todd Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame

Posted on February 21, 2021

*Todd Webb, Untitled (44UN-7930-609), Trust Territory of Somaliland (Somalia), 1958, Two women walking on the beach, with a dog to their right.*

American photographer Todd Webb (1905-2000) didn’t get his start until later in life; after working as a banker, he lost everything in the 1929 crash and eked out a meager living West, first as first a gold prospector then a forest ranger. In 1934, he returned to his native Detroit to work for automobile manufacturer Chrysler, which donated a camera that Webb used on a trip to Panama.

Upon his return, Webb joined the Detroit Camera Club, where he met lifelong friendHarry Callahan, who he would go on to live with when he moved to New York in 1945 to become a professional photographer. Well enmeshed in the city’s booming postwar cultural scene, Webb’s career took off. In 1955 he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to create a portrait of the United States while walking coast to coast — the same year Robert Frank made The Americans.

In 1958, the United Nations commissioned Webb to travel across eight countries in Africa over the course of five months to document the industry, technology, and modernization at the dawn of the African Independence Movement. The photographs, long lost, have just been unearthed in the new book and exhibition, Todd Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame.

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Todd Webb. Untitled (44UN-8014-463), Tanganyika (Tanzania), 1958, Tanganyika police officer and man next to a wall near the Indian Ocean coastline.

Categories: Africa, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Good Pictures A History of Popular Photography

Posted on February 18, 2021

*“Woolworth Tower in Clouds, New York City,” 1928. © Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.*

Humanity takes solace in the notion that the “good” is an objective fact, a model of excellence that transcends subjective bias and cultural conditioning. But what if that which we esteem is simply an extension of popular thought? This question is at the heart of art historian Kim Beil’s new book, Good Pictures A History of Popular Photography (Stanford University Press), which traces the history of photography through 50 widespread trends across the United States between spanning 1989 to 2019.

Organized into six chronological sections, Good Pictures explores the role instructional primers played in helping aspiring photographers learn “how to make good pictures.” Beil examines the rise of approaches that have dominated a particular moment in time, such as soft focus, Hollywood Glamour, motion blur, lens flare, and fish-eye — and examines how the industry itself helps to commodify the notion of “good” in order to reinforce, rather than challenge, the prevailing social, political, and cultural ideologies.

Throughout Good Pictures, Beil teases out a distinctively, but perhaps not exclusively, American trait: the commodification of style and the manufacture of groupthink. We see this in the way in which photographic styles are recycled in an endless loop — emerging, disappearing, and then returning at a later time.

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*“Untitled [Still Life with Fruit],” 1860 © Roger Fenton Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Gift of Howard Gilman, 2005.*

*“The Mountain Nymph of Sweet Liberty,” 1866 © Juliet Margaret Cameron Source: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital Image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop

Posted on February 14, 2021

*Shawn Walker (b. 1940), Easter Sunday, Harlem (125th Street), 1972. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © Shawn Walker*

In the fall of 1963 — the final year of Jim Crow America — two Harlem-based groups of Black photographers came together to create the Kamoinge Workshop, which has since become the world’s longest-running photography collective. Taken from the Gikuyu language of Kenya, meaning “a group of people acting together,” Kamoinge provided a space for both professional photographers including Roy DeCarava, Adger Cowans, and Louis H. Draper to nurture emerging talents drawn from the community at a time when Black artists were systemically excluded from the fine art world.

As an institution of authority, wealth, and prestige, the fine art world mirrored and maintained the exclusionary systems of power of the dominant culture it served. The work of Black artists and depictions of Black life rarely appeared within the hallowed halls of museums and galleries. It fell upon Black artists to create and sustain spaces to nurture their own styles and approaches to artmaking, without the structures of support afforded to countless white male artists.

Rather than adopt the American obsession with “rugged individualism,” the members of Kamoinge understood the power of the group. Every Sunday, DeCarava, Cowans, and Draper would gather alongside founding members James Ray Francis, Herman Howard, Earl James, Anthony Barboza, Calvin Mercer, Beuford Smith. Herb Randall, Albert Fennar, Shawn Walker, James Mannas, and later Ming Smith, for rousing conversations about art, photography, film, music, and literature as well as in-depth critiques of their work. “We all met at somebody’s home and became family,” Walker remembers.

Without institutional support, Kamoinge made a way for themselves — a path they forged for nearly 60 years to become the longest-running photography collective in history. Yet, because of the on-going practice of exclusion within the art world, their works are only now being given their proper due in the major touring museum exhibition, Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop.

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*Beuford Smith, Two Bass Hit, Lower East Side, 1972. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts © Beuford Smith/Césaire*

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

Rose Hartman: Studio 54: Night Magic

Posted on February 10, 2021

*Bianca Jagger on a white horse that happened to be inside Studio 54 on her birthday in 1977. Rose Hartman / The Artists Company*

On April 26, 1977, hundreds of the world’s cultural elite had gathered outside 254 West 54th Street, desperate to get into the event of the year: opening night at Studio 54. Those in the know snuck in through the 55th Street side of the former CBS TV studio turned nightclub, while icons like Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty had no such luck. Failing to get the red carpet treatment, they left — missing out on all the fun.

In a scene out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, future TV host Robin Leach escorted preteen superstar Brooke Shields through a crowd that included grand dame Diana Vreeland, country music star Dolly Parton, fashion designer Halston, socialite Bianca Jagger, actress Margaux Hemingway, and pop star Cher.

The celebrated Alvin Ailey dancers, clad in costumes designed by Antonio Lopez, turned the party out with a live show. As Anthony Haden-Guest reported in his book, The Last Party, a doctor opened a massive bottle of Quaaludes, sharing the pills far and wide. After the hypnotic drugs kicked in, an orgy broke out. It was Sodom and Gomorrah in gold lame and peach chiffon, white suits and satin gowns.

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*Rose Hartman. Bethann Hardison, Daniela Morera & Stephen Burrows at Studio 54 party for Valentino, New York City – 1977*

Categories: 1970s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Rania Matar: On Either Side of the Window: Portraits During COVID-19

Posted on February 10, 2021

Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic nearly a year ago, we have been forced to transform the ways in which we engage with the world. With the threat of infection literally lingering in the air, many have retreated into social isolation, a physically and psychologically challenging feat unto itself. With no end to the pandemic in sight, many have sought deeper connections with their daily practices to maintain some semblance of equilibrium in an increasingly uncertain world.

For Lebanese/Palestinian-American photographer Rania Matar, the pandemic created a radical shift in her personal and professional lives. As a portrait photographer, Matar’s work challenges xenophobic, Islamophobic notions of “them vs. us” that flooded the American media following the events of September 11. A natural extrovert possessed with the profound gift for creating warmth and intimacy with her subjects, Matar uses the camera to collapse barriers created by jingoistic propaganda and fearful ignorance, revealing the innate humanity that lies beneath the surface of things.

Awarded the 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her series She, which will be published this June by Radius Books, Matar has spent the past few years traveling the globe making photographs that explore female adolescence and womanhood in the United State and the Middle East. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, Matar put her travels on pause and began to consider making art from a different vantage point.

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*Rania Matar (Lebanes-American, b. 1964) Minty, Kayla, Leyah, Layla, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2020*

Categories: Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography

Larry Fink: Retrospective

Posted on January 28, 2021

*Larry Fink. George Plimpton, Jared Paul Stern, and Cameron Richardson January 1999*

“I was born a communist,” says photographer Larry Fink, who turns 80 in March. The self-described “Marxist from Long Island” who first rose to critical acclaim with Social Graces, a series of work that contrasted life in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, where the artist has lived since the 1970s, with scenes of New York’s upper crust that same decade. Exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and first published as a monograph by Aperture in 1984. the work catapulted Fink to the forefront of the photo world, despite the fact that he eschewed career ambitions in favor using photography to achieve political goals.

“My mother was a communist. She was an organizer, and she had no fear. She was a bourgeois also. She loved mink stoles. My father was a kind, patient man with a stamp collection. My folks had some money so they used to drive around in a Studs Bearcat, go to Florida, and hang out. They liked leisure, parties and jazz music so my upbringing was a contradictory one,” Fink remembers.

“My sister Liz and I were brought up believing there was the beginning of a new world at the end of the old world, that all of the old cruelties [of capitalism] would dissipate in time. They wanted to get rid of class and thought everything would purify. They were wrong but that’s beside the point. They were right in thinking that they could.”

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*Larry Fink. New York Magazine Party New York, October 1977*

*Larry Fink. Pat Sabatine’s Eighth Birthday Party, Martins Creek Pennsylvania, April 1977*

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

Stephen Frailey: Looking at Photography

Posted on January 25, 2021

*Pink Powder, Lilly Donaldson wearing John Galliano, 2008 © NICK KNIGHT.*

We see before we think or speak, often relying upon pictures to learn words themselves. Our first books contain pictures, showing us how to translate the visual world into a verbal one, and in turn teaching us that images contain a language all their own.

It has been said, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” suggesting a single image can contain vast stores of information and ideas, as well as be a singular experience unto themselves, evoking a visceral response. In a world filled with images, visual literacy is an underutilized tool to help people navigate contemporary life.

Recognizing this, John Szarkowski, then Director of Photography at MoMA, penned the seminal 1973 book, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, an accessible history of photography for seeking to learn how to become proficient at reading pictures.

Nearly half a century later, the world has become deluged by stores of images flooding our daily lives by virtue of the explosion of digital technology and our reliance upon it. Yet the subject of visual literacy goes largely unaddressed, and it is for this reason that photographer and educator Stephen Frailey’s new book, Looking at Photography (Damiani) is a much-needed contribution to the discourse.

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*Poster, Koriyama City, 1990 © DAIDO MORIYAMA.*

*Bester V, Mayotte, 2015 ZANELE MUHOLI.*

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