Posts from the “Blind” Category

Godlis Streets

Posted on January 21, 2021

In 1975, New York had reached its breaking point. After years of being denied funding for essential services under the federal policy of “benign neglect,” the city was falling apart. Robberies, burglaries, and aggravated assault had spiked dramatically while the city was $34 million in debt, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford had just announced he would veto any bill calling for a federal bail out, effectively telling New York to drop dead.

Though the city had been abandoned, those who remained were shaped and molded by the struggle for survival. They were the poor, the working class, the artists and eccentrics who understood nature abhors a vacuum and remade New York into a landscape of art, culture, and music unseen before or since. Though many had fled, some like city native Godlis returned with dreams of becoming a street photographer.

Godlis got his start in photography in 1972 after seeing the Diane Arbus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art during his sophomore year at Boston University. After graduating, he studied at ImageWorks alongside famous photographers Nan Goldin and Stanley Greene, and began walking the streets of Boston — but he quickly realized the photographs he was making did not have the grit and glamour of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, or Arbus. After getting robbed, Godlis realized, of the two cities New York was clearly the safer option.

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

New Queer Photography: Focus on the Margins

Posted on January 21, 2021

As the first generation raised on the Internet, schooled by social media, and fluent in digital technology comes of age, they possess an innate understanding of how images can be used to explore and express the intricate construction of identity and selfhood. With the democratization of photography, people from around the globe are now able to author and distribute their own visual language to tell stories on their own terms, helping to usher in a new age of liberation movements.

For LGBTQ photographers working at a time when laws against homosexuality and trans rights are finally being repealed in many countries around the globe, we are entering a renaissance comparable to the Stonewall era half a century ago. By smashing the binary precepts that have plagued Western thinking for thousands of years, a new generation of queer image-makers are introducing new ways to consider the complex expression of sexuality and gender in their works.

With the recent publication of New Queer Photography: Focus on the Margins (Gingko Press), editor Benjamin Wolbergs brings together 52 international contemporary artists who use photography as a tool of activism and self-actualization. Featuring works by Dustin Thierry, Pauliana Valente Pimentel, Laurence Rasti, and Lissa Rivera, among others, the book offers a panoply of perspectives at the edges of a new frontier, pushing the boundaries of the word “queer.”

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Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Brooklyn Street Art: Documenting the Art of Protest

Posted on January 20, 2021

*BLM. Manhattan, NYC. July 05, 2020. Photo © BSA/Jaime Rojo*

Though we are surrounded by omens portending the future before it occurs, many refuse to read “the writing on the wall.” The confluence of graffiti and political action dates back to the Biblical story of Belshazzar’s feast when a disembodied hand scrawled words on the palace wall in a language no one could understand. According to the Book of Daniel, the young hero deciphered the message and warned the king the great empire of Babylon was going to fall.

The parable, contained within the larger story of apocalypse, is uncannily timely given the resurgence of graffiti and street art, two of the most vital, viral forms of contemporary art. Long intertwined with photography and activism, today’s “writing on the wall” has become the medium of the proletariat in the fight against the oppressive power structures dominating everyday life around the globe.

Throughout history artists have taken to the streets to draw attention to the issues at stake in the hopes of radicalizing the populace. From the use of wheat-pasted posters in the 1910 Mexican Revolution and John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi and anti-Stalinist crusades of the 1930s to 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Mexico City, artists have long taken to the streets to expose the corruption of political institutions. Although their works are local and temporal, photography has played an integral role in preserving and distributing their messages far and wide.

“Humans have always had the urgency to leave their mark behind. Walls and rocks have been their canvases for millennia,” say photographer Jamie Rojo and editor Steven P. Harrington of Brooklyn Street Art. “By the 1980s, graffiti writers like Lee Quiñones routinely addressed social and political topics when using New York City subway trains as canvasses. Likewise, street art in 2020 has referenced police brutality, structural racism, feelings of alienation, disgust with politicians and a vast economic chasm that is shredding the fabric of society.”

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*The Heart Of Will Power. Manhattan, NYC. October 11, 2020. Photo © BSA/Jaime Rojo*

*Nick C Kirk. Manhattan, NYC. June 26, 2020. Photo © BSA/Jaime Rojo*

Categories: Art, Blind, Photography

Jim Goldberg: Fingerprints

Posted on January 18, 2021

*Untitled Polaroid from Raised By Wolves © Jim Goldberg*

A century after photographer Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, a harrowing portrait of urban poverty, Jim Goldberg took to the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco where he met a cadre of homeless children fending for themselves. From 1985–1995, Goldberg bore witness to chaotic reality of street life to create Raised by Wolves, a collection of photographs, snippets of conversation, handwritten notes, drawings, snapshots, and the detritus of daily life, which the Washington Post called, “A heartbreaking novel with pictures.”

The protagonists, Tweaky Dave and Echo, were charismatic but troubled youth, whose personalities, histories, and dreams leap from the page and grab you by the throat. With Raised by Wolves, Goldberg found a way inside a band of outsiders whose existence has been alternately vilified, marginalized, or erased, and restored to them a humanity that had been stripped by addiction, violence, and abuse.

The book transformed the role that photography could play as it collapsed the space between documentary and narrative fiction, revealing the endless interplay between myth, history, and identity. The people were real, their circumstances harrowing, but their stories contained half-truths and falsehoods constructed to reflect what they want or need to believe. Tweeky Dave described his devout Christian parents as a junkie slut and a biker from Hell; while untrue the slanderous depictions seemed befitting for a couple who later turned their back on their dying son.

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

Guzman: Newark in the 1970s

Posted on January 12, 2021

Newark in the 1970s was synonymous with urban despair. During the “Long Hot Summer of 1967,” Newark became the site of one of the race riots sweeping across some 159 American cities. The four-day uprising, sparked by police brutality against Black cab driver John William Smith, resulted in 26 dead, 15,000 wounded, 1,600 arrested, and $10 million in property damages.

Soon thereafter, the Nixon White House instituted a policy of “benign neglect,” denying basic government services to Black and Latinx communities as a means to further systemically oppress the poverty-stricken underclass. By the mid-1970s, Newark had fallen on hard times. The January 1975 issue of Harper’s Magazine ranked the 50 largest American cities in 24 categories, from parking space to crime. The article concluded, “The city of Newark stands without serious challenge as the worst city of all… Newark is a city that desperately needs help.”

Despite it all, Newark maintained a style and identity all its own, perfectly exemplified by Arts High School, a public school dedicated to nurturing the talents of inner city youth. Established in 1931, Arts High School was the first visual and performing arts high school in the United States, and counts Black Panther’s Michael B. Jordan, Pose’s MJ Rodriguez, jazz icons Sarah Vaughan and Wayne Shorter, and Broadway stars Melba Moore and Savion Glover among its alumni.

At the outset of her career, Constance Hansen, now one half of the husband and wife photography team Guzman, arrived at Arts High School after graduating from Pratt Institute with an art education degree in art therapy in 1971. Hansen remembers, “Newark was still fresh from the riots. It was pretty rough. Everything was falling apart. The city was underfunded, as was the school. There was a recession, money was tight, but I never thought about any of that.”

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Categories: 1970s, Art, Blind, Photography

Michael Brennan: They Must Fall – Muhammad Ali and the Men He Fought

Posted on January 8, 2021

*The Deafening Silence. Muhammad Ali in retirement, Los Angeles, Wednesday February 23, 1983 © Michael Brennan*

To be a world champion boxer, you must be a warrior in and out of the ring, a master of both the sport and the psychology that allows one man to dominate another. Muhammad Ali, the G.O.A.T. (“Greatest of All Time”), learned this lesson at the start of his career, when he converted to Islam and faced the rage of the mainstream press during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

But it didn’t stop there. On April 28, 1967, Ali refused to be inducted into the Armed Services to fight into the Vietnam War on religious grounds. The following day, the U.S. government stripped him of the World Heavyweight title and had his boxing license suspended. Sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, so he did what any fighter would do — he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was overturned in an unanimous decision in 1970. Ali immediately set forth to restore his reputation and his career, training harder than ever before and taking on all contenders in the ring.

As it so happened, Ali unknowingly crossed paths with Michael Brennan that same year while the British photographer sat in an airport outside Glasglow, Scotland on a quiet Saturday afternoon. “Suddenly the departure lounge doors opened and five or six big Black guys lead by Ali came running through the airport, chanting,” Brennan says. “They went out [on to the tarmac] and up the stairs of the airplane. The door closed and the airplane took off.”

A member of Ali’s camp was seated near Brennan and they began to chat. He gave the photographer his card and invited him to call whenever he was in the states. Three years later Brennan did just that when he moved to New York City. “In the early days, I wasn’t getting much work and I knew that if I took the bus to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, walked to Ali’s camp, and knocked on the door, he would come out. I would take a picture and that was the rent paid for the next month,” he remembers.

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*Sonny Liston. Fought Ali twice: February 25, 1964, title fight, Miami Beach; RTD after 6thround, and 25 May 1965, Lewiston, Maine; KO’d in the 1st round © Michael Brennan*

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

Erik Madigan Heck: The Garden

Posted on January 6, 2021

Umbrella, The Garden © Erik Madigan Heck

At a time where many have fled cities in search of seclusion amid the verdant reassures of the natural world and become family photographers out of cheer necessity, their options limited by the strictures of social isolation, American artist and fashion photographer Erik Madigan Heck has been years ahead of the curve.

The Garden, Heck’s four-gallery exhibition and forthcoming book, is an ongoing body of work depicting the artist’s wife and two sons set amid a landscape that evokes the myth and majesty of childhood fairytales. Describing himself as “a painter who uses a camera,” Heck transforms the original photographs into storybook scenes through the meticulous process of adding luminous layers of color and exquisite patterns while simultaneously flattening the images by removing shadows and depth of field.

Like Edouard Vuillard, the French Impressionist painter he admired as a child, Heck transforms the picture plane into a dreamscape where reality and fantasy become one. Where he once altered the photograph in the darkroom, Heck now does it digitally to produce the same effect: a photograph that transcends notions of the documentary nature of the medium.

“The original photographs I take don’t really resemble the end results,” Heck reveals. “When everything is so immediate, there’s a real luxury in being able to put something aside, come back to it. There are photographs taken years ago and I’ll go through the archive and pull something out and then start reworking it. Sometimes I will spend weeks where I will do a little color, put it aside, and come back to it, which is basically the same way you would approach painting on a canvas. Time with the piece erases the moment when you took the picture first in because it’s no longer about that day you took the photograph.”

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*Eniko in Flowers, 2020 © Erik Madigan Heck*

*Untitled, The Garden, 2019 © Erik Madigan Heck*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Patty Carroll: Collapse and Calamity

Posted on December 29, 2020

Home is the ultimate escape from the pressures of daily life, a private getaway where we can unwind and be our true selves. But it’s not always that simple. At a time when people are practicing social isolation in a Sisyphean attempt to stanch the exponential spread of COVID-19 across the United States, homes have been transformed into offices, schools, restaurants, and gyms — spaces that are constricting, even claustrophobic, in their limitations.

In challenging times, humor can be the best medicine. A little levity goes a long way when the weight of the world sends us climbing the walls. In the world of American photographer Patty Carroll those walls bite back is a series of Baroque horrors taken from the on-going series, “Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise.” Her exhibition, Collapse and Calamity, presents delightfully decadent scenes of death that come about in an ill-fated quest to create the “perfect home.”

Inspired in part by the board game “Clue,” Carroll crafts melodramatic moments of domesticity gone awry. Every corner of the home becomes suspect, the setting for a disaster so luxurious it’s hard to do anything but laugh. Nestled deep in the desire for an opulent oasis are the very seeds of demise. “The perfect home is a blessing, a joy, and a burden that you want to have this thing and it’s never going to be perfect but you keep trying,” says Carroll, who came of age in the 1950s and ‘60s, at a time when the consumerist lifestyle was being perfectly crystallized.

“Mid-century design is almost mythical in its idea about perfection. It was a time of hope. It all happened after the big war and everyone was becoming prosperous. It was a magical, glamorous time. People dressed up for dinner in their perfect homes where the drapes matched the wallpaper and the sofa. My mother’s house was never that good; it wasn’t even close. Later on you tell yourself, ‘I’m going to give myself the perfect life I never had.’”

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*A Shadow of Her Former Self, 2019 © Patty Carroll*

Categories: Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait

Posted on December 15, 2020

In the mid-1970s, at the same time Cindy Sherman started making self portraits to explore the construction of white female identity, half way around the globe, Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso opened his own studio at the tender age of 13. Casting himself as the subject of his work, Fosso used photography to stake his claim in the world.

Born in 1962, Fosso was sick and partly paralyzed as a child. Although Nigerians traditionally commission a portrait of their child at three months, his father saw it as a waste of money. Fosso wasn’t photographed until he was 10 — a void that shaped his vision from the very beginning. Growing up in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, Fosso fled to Bangui, Central African Republic, to live with an uncle after his mother died. He apprenticed at a local photo studio for just five months before opening Studio Photo National in 1975.

“In Africa we say to become a real photographer you have to take the picture and then make the print yourself; that’s how you establish your professional credentials,” Fosso says in the new book, Autoportrait (The Walther Collection/Steidl), which brings together five decades of Fosso’s self portraiture.

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

Janette Beckman: The MashUp 2: Punk Photographs Remixed

Posted on December 14, 2020

Tim Kerr – Don’t let your heroes get your kicks for you © Janette Beckman

Many people associate graffiti with hip hop because of Charlie Ahearn’s 1982 film,Wild Style, which brought the underground art to the global stage for the very first time. Fab 5 Freddy, who starred in the film, understood the importance of introducing a codified culture to the world. In a series of vibrant tableaux, Wild Style presents what is now referred to as the “four elements of hip hop”: DJs (music), MCs (literature), B-boy (dance), and graffiti writers (visual art).

But true graffiti heads know the art predates the advent of hip-hop by half a decade, developing in tandem with but often times separate from rap music, Early graffiti writers were huge fans of rock and funk music. Some fell in love with the emerging punk scene of the mid-70s, as it encapsulated the same raw, anti-establishment ethos that graffiti required of its practitioners.

By the late 1970s, graffiti transformed the New York City landscape as writers painted masterpieces across the side of an entire subway car, simultaneously filing the insides with marker tags, turning every bare surface into a page from an autograph book. Meanwhile across the pond, British photographer Janette Beckman was getting her start at the Kingsway Princeton School for Further Education, teaching photography to a group of teen just a few years younger than she was. The year was 1976 and a student named John Lydon had just left the school and joined the Sex Pistols. Change was in the air.

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

Dustin Thierry: Opulence

Posted on December 2, 2020

*Opulence, Wolkoff and Wickid from the House of Garçon with the Grand Prize for Tag Team All American Runway at The United States of Africa Ball Pt.III © Dustin Thierry*

“O-P-U-L-E-N-C-E: Opulence! You own everything. Everything is yours,”Junior LaBeija declares with a heady mix of authority and aplomb, delivering one of the most iconic lines Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingstone’s landmark 1991 film documenting the New York City Ballroom scene. His words evoke the spirit of the culture — one that first took root in Black American culture after the Civil War, when William Dorsey Swann, known to his friends as “the Queen” began organizing drag balls — and has since gone on to become a global phenomenon celebrating Black queer pride, resistance, and style.

Opulence is not a luxury; it’s a necessity in a world that systematically denies Black LGBTQ people their universal human rights. It is a state of mind born of desire and dreams, an inspiration to folks determined to make a dollar out of fifteen cents; Opulence is the spirit of Ballroom, a place where Black queer youth gather to celebrate themselves, a space for love and healing in a world that would sooner see them dead. To do anything less would be a denial of the grandeur that lies within.

The beauty of the Ballroom, of the majestic people who walk its hallowed floors, is the subject of self-taught photographer Dustin Thierry’s new exhibition Opulence. His luxurious portraits occupy the extraordinary place where fashion and documentary photography intersect, creating a space for contemplation, veneration, and exaltation of Black queer identity

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Categories: Blind, Exhibitions, Photography