Posts from the “Blind” Category

Tony Vaccaro at 98

Posted on December 1, 2020

*Leslie Uggams, Gold Metal, 1963 © Tony Vaccaro / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of* Photography

After a lifetime behind the camera, Tony Vaccaro is still going strong. After recovering from COVID-19 earlier this year, the Italian-American photographer, who turns 98 on December 20, has resumed his workout routine. On an unseasonably warm late November morning, he ran a 12:54 mile; not bad for the high school athlete who shaved 42 seconds off the record in 1943. “I plan at 100 to establish a new record for running a mile,” Vaccaro says from his home in Long Island City, Queens.

It’s more than a notion; Vaccaro is a survivor par excellence. Born Michelantonio Celestino Onofrio Vaccaro in Greensburg Pennsylvania, in 1922, Vaccaro was just four years old when both his parents died while the family was relocating to Italy. The horrors of his childhood linger to this day, as the photographer recounts the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father’s brother while growing up in Italy.

“My uncle and his wife never had children and they didn’t know how handle them,” Vaccaro says. “Because of this, I was punished every day. I was black and blue for 15 years of my life, until I got in the Army. They looked and asked, ‘What happened to you, son?’ I couldn’t tell the truth, that people were beating me for everything I did wrong.”

Though the bruises have healed, the memories remain tempered by a love his discovered as a teen. After World War II broke out in Europe, Vaccaro fled to the United States, and enrolled in Isaac E. Young High School in New Rochelle, New York. The young artist dreamed of being a sculptor but fate had other plans.

“Mr. Louis, a teacher, told me, ‘Tony, these sculptures are pretty good but you are born to be a photographer.’ I had never heard the word photography before,” Vaccaro says. “He told me, ‘You will make a great life with it,’ and by God he was right. I was then 14, 15. I’ve been a photographer for 85 years and I still feel very good.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Gwen Verdon for LOOK, New York, City, 1953 © Tony Vaccaro / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography*

*After Degas, Woman and Flowers, New York City, 1960 © Tony Vaccaro / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography*

Categories: 1960s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Celebrating the Overlooked Legacy of Downtown Artist Jimmy DeSana

Posted on November 27, 2020

*Diego Cortez, Anya Phillips, 1977 © Jimmy DeSana. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.*

By the late 1970s, New York’s downtown avant garde rejected the corporate efforts to capitalize on the rebellious spirit of punk rock. Desperate to distance themselves from the horrific death of the Sex Pistols groupie Nancy Spungen at the hands of Sid Vicious at Chelsea Hotel, music industry executives attempted to rebrand the anarchistic music as “New Wave.”

In turn, art radicals adopted the moniker “No Wave” to assert the independence and integrity of the movement. No Wave became an integral part of the burgeoning East Village art scene that emerged in the 1980s as a new generation came of age. Intoxicated by the sweet elixir of fresh blood, MoMA PS1 opened New York/New Wave, a landmark group show organized by Diego Cortez showcasing the work of 118 artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Stephen Sprouse, FUTURA 2000, and DONDI in February 1981.

As soon as that show came down, Couches, Diamonds and Pie went up. Curated by Carol Squiers, the exhibition embraced the emerging photography movement known as the Pictures Generation. Featuring Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals, Sheila Metzner, Richard Prince, William Wegman, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, the show also included the work lesser-known artists like Nan Goldin and Jimmy DeSana, both of whom were name checked by Andy Grundberg in his review for The New York Times.

While most of the artists would go on to international success, Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) never quite received his proper due. Described as “anti-art,” DeSana’s work was extremely classical at a time when such a style had become démodé among vaunted members of the Pictures Generation.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Ronnie Cutrone, 1979 © Jimmy DeSana. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.*

*Eric Mitchell, 1978 © Jimmy DeSana. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.*

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

Frances F. Denny: Major Arcana – Portraits of Witches in America

Posted on November 25, 2020

*Frances F. Denny, “Sallie Ann (New Orleans, LA),” Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City*

When the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 the English Protestants separatists cast a dark shadow on the pristine land, their arrival foreboding horrors to come. By 1692, their extremist ideology reached a fevered pitch as mass hysteria gripped the town of Salem, MA and beyond. Charges of witchcraft spread like wildfire, with more than 200 men and women accused of conspiring with the devil. With no separation between church and state, the colonizers used the courts to incarcerate, try, and execute the innocent for crimes they did not commit. In total, 30 were found guilty, 19 were hung, and at least five died in jail during the ordeal. It was far from the last time the government would be on the wrong side of history.

In 2012, American photographer Frances F. Denny made a startling discovery: not only was she the direct descendant of Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, who presided over the infamous Salem Witch Trials — but Denny also had another relative, Mary Bliss Parsons, who had been accused and found not guilty of witchcraft in 1674.

“Thank goodness I wasn’t born 400 years ago because I absolutely would have been burned at the stake,” says Denny, who has just published Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America (Andrews McMeel), a captivating collection of portraits and first person accounts of witches living and practicing across the nation today. “The discovery of being a descendant of both oppressor and oppressed is a hard thing to reconcile, but it feels very appropriate because I come from a long line of privileged white people. That coincidence felt like an honest way to dig into something uncomfortable.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Frances F. Denny, “Meredith (Moretown, VT),” Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography, Women

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph

Posted on November 24, 2020

Throughout her extraordinary life, Ming Smith has blazed a trail, becoming a pioneering figure in front of and behind the camera. Hailing from Columbus, Ohio, Smith grew up amid the horrors of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. Her high school guidance counselor discouraged her to attend college, advising Smith her future lay as a domestic, scrubbing floors. Undeterred, Smith enrolled in Howard University and received a BS in microbiology before moving to New York City in 1973.

To pay the rent, Smith took up modeling and worked alongside Grace Jones, B. Smith, and Toukie Smith as part of the first generation of Black models in beauty and fashion. But the limelight held no particular charm for Smith. Possessed with acute sensitivity to joy and pain, she found solace in being alone, camera in hand, guided by a desire to bearing witness to the spirit made flesh. Whether on the streets of Harlem or Dakar, making portraits of photographer Gordon Parks, writer James Baldwin, and musician Sun Ra, or photographing a field of sunflowers in West Germany, Smith used the camera to preserve the fleeting and fragile beauty of the world.

“When I’m shooting, I usually have a sense: ‘This is the photograph that I’m going to print. This is the moment,’” Smith says in the new book, Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. “I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out…The image could be lost in a split second. I go with my intuition.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Ming Smith, Amen Corner Sisters, Harlem, New York, 1976, from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2020) © Ming Smith, courtesy the artist and Aperture*

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

Joseph Szabo: Hometown

Posted on November 19, 2020

*Hometown © Joseph Szabo, Courtesy of Damiani*

Following World War II, suburban hamlets began to spring up across the United States; like fields of dandelions they spread like weeds as the emerging middle class bought into the “American Dream” — a private home on a plot of land where they could raise a nuclear family with all the comforts of mid-century modernism. As real estate developments rolled out across previously pristine lands, acres of cookie-cutter homes dotted the landscape making it difficult to distinguish one region of the country from another.

But for American photographer Joseph Szabo, individuality found a way to make itself known, bursting through the beige like a splash of color. In his latest book, Hometown (Damiani, October 13), Szabo offers a topography of suburbia with a distinctive twist, as a sense of personal style emerges within a serene landscape replete with manicured lawns and muscle cars, sagging porches and lawn furniture.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1944, Szabo is just a touch older than the Baby Boomers whose lifestyle has come to define the image of mainstream American culture over the past seven decades. After receiving his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Szabo taught photography at Malverne High School in Long Island from 1972-1999 and began documenting his students’ lives, creating a mesmerizing portrait of teen romance, angst, adventure, and rebellion in critically acclaimed monographs including Teenage, Jones Beach,Lifeguard, Almost Grown, and Rolling Stone Fans.

“You try to capture life in the moment that speaks to you. They are fleeting—one moment it’s there and then its gone,” Szabo revealed in The Joseph Szabo Project, a 2011 documentary film that explores 1970s suburban life through his eyes.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Magnum Photographer Bruno Barbey Dies at 79

Posted on November 10, 2020

*FRANCE. Paris. French photographer, Bruno BARBEY. 1967. © Bruno Barbey / Magnum Photos*

Bruno Barbey (1941 – 2020), who died on this Monday November 9, was a citizen of the world, dedicating his life to documenting conflict and celebrating beauty with sensitivity and understanding. The Moroccan-born photographer of French and Swiss nationality studied photography and graphic arts at the École des Arts et Métiers in Vevey, Switzerland, before embarking on his first major project, The Italians (1961-1964), a career-defining series inspired by Robert Frank’s landmark monograph, The Americans.

With the understanding that “photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world,” Barbey began his relationship with Magnum Photos in 1964, becoming an associate member in 1966 and a full member in 1968, before serving as Magnum Vice President for Europe in 1978-79 and President of Magnum International from 1992-1995.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*FRANCE. Paris. 5th arrondissement. Students in a chain passing cobble stones for the barricades, Gay Lussac Street. May 10th 1968. © Bruno Barbey / Magnum Photos*

Categories: Art, Blind, Photography

A Brief Story of Homoerotic Photography in America, Part II

Posted on November 10, 2020

As the 1960s took shape, the polished veneer of polite society was stripped away and in its place came a new generation of Americans demanding the same Constitutional rights afforded to straight white men since the nation began. The Civil Rights Movement, the Sexual Revolution, and Second-wave feminism transformed the political and cultural landscape, setting the stage for the the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement.

On June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, Black and Latinx transgender people took a stand against state-sponsored violence, leading a five-day rebellion against the New York Police Department that begat a global movement for LGBTQ rights. Once the proverbial closet doors were torn off the hinge, there was no turning back. For one brief shining decade, the future was bright.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Tony Ward in String Bondage, 1996 © Rick Castro*

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

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

Susan Meiselas: Tar Beach: Life on Rooftops of Little Italy 1920-1975

Posted on November 6, 2020

*Mildred Musillo, 197 Hester Street, Summer 1940.*

Even when the city is impoverished, real estate in New York is at a premium simply because living stacked one on top of the other in apartments with the feel of a cozy shoebox lends itself visionary appropriation of one’s greater environment. The lack of public spaces, courtyards, and plazas have driven New Yorkers to new heights of creativity, perhaps none quite as ingenious as “tar beach,” building rooftops reimagined as semi-private playgrounds.

The ultimate escape — without leaving home — tar beach offers city dwellers the space to feel like they are king of the world as they survey the jagged landscape from new heights, their views unimpeded by buildings blotting out the sun. The indelible sensation of being transported to a veritable mountaintop does marvelous things to one’s mind, opening a magical portal into a world where anything is possible. For over a century, it has been common practice for residents to don their finest threads, ascend to the top of a six-floor walk up, and make vernacular portraits.

“Do people still go up to the roof? And if they do, what do they see? Because we saw heaven,” Martin Scorsese writes in the introduction to Tar Beach: Life on Rooftops of Little Italy 1920-1975 (Damiani). Magnum Photos member Susan Meiselas collaborated with Virginia Bynum and Angel Marinaccio, natives of Manhattan’s famed Little Italy to create a family photo album-style volume filled with photographs taken on neighborhood rooftops between the 1920s and early 1970s.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Peter and Michael Cirelli (aka ‘My Dee’), 242 Mulberry Street, c. 1920.*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Steve Eichner: In the Limelight – The Visual Ecstasy of NYC Nightlife in the 90s,

Posted on November 3, 2020

*Grace Jones at Palladium, 1992 © 2020 Steve Eichner*

The 1990s were the last hurrah of bohemian New York. The decade kicked off with thehighest murder rate in city history, while the draconian Rockefeller drug laws disappeared a generation of Black and Latinx youth, and the AIDS crisis continued unabated. It had been more than a decade since the federal government left the city for dead — but from the ashes of destruction the phoenix that is New York would rise once again.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” philosopher Plato sagely opined, understanding nature abhors a vacuum, as does the human mind. New Yorkers have long applied the wisdom of classical antiquity without giving it a second thought; the nature of survival demands innovative solutions to keep us afloat. As Generation X came of age, they broke all the rules, reveling in a dizzying mix of sin, spectacle, and self-expression that percolated in the non-stop extravaganza of the ‘90s New York nightlife scene.

Here, a new group of upstarts of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and economic backgrounds came together on the dance floor in a celebration of PLUR (peace, love, unity, and respect) to dance until the break of dawn. Music was the draw — house, hip hop, techno, industrial, goth, drum and bass, grunge, and just about any other permutation of the underground sound drew an inexhaustible mix of partygoers dressed to impress. On any given night, one could party alongside celebrities, club kids, drag queens, ravers, hip hop heads, models, banjees, body boys, bondage slaves, Wall Street suits, and the bridge-and-tunnel set at legendary nightclubs like Tunnel, Roxy, Palladium, Club Expo, and Webster Hall.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Susanne Bartsch (center) at the Palladium, 1995 © 2020 Steve Eichner*

*The Palladium, 1995 © 2020 Steve Eichner*

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

Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music 1972-1981 – Photographs by Henry Horenstein

Posted on October 30, 2020

*Lovers, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Nashville, TN, 1975 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

*Ponderosa, Near Pikesville, KY, 1974 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

In the 1970s, country music reached stratospheric heights by seamlessly weaving itself into the fabric of American culture by blending elements of folk and rock music into its Southern honky-tonk roots. Songs of love and loss, booze and gambling, family and country — the triumphs and struggles of everyday folks trying to make it through life — fueled a new generation of artists who reveled in a compelling mix of nostalgia, heartbreak, and pride.

The ‘70s brought talents like Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Reba McEntire, and Emmylou Harris into the ranks, their raw talent and star power shining alongside luminaries like Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, John Denver, and Charley Pride. Throughout the decade, country music could be heard on popular television shows like Hee Haw as well as on local radio from coast to coast, the stars of the Grand Ole Opry were seen as national icons — with breakout performers like Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Marie Osmond going Hollywood.

Photographer Henry Horenstein, a dyed in the wool Yankee, began photographing the country music scene as part of a final assignment for his history professor, the famed British writer and socialist E.P. Thompson, who helped Horenstein understand the importance of recording, studying, and documenting the people who were going to disappear from history unless someone preserved their role in it. He did just that, amassing an extraordinary archive of the images now on view in the new exhibition,Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music 1972-1981 – Photographs by Henry Horenstein.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Dolly Parton, Symphony Hall, Boston, MA, 1972 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

*Drunk Dancers, Merchant’s Cafe, Nashville, TN, 1974 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

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

A Brief Story of Homoerotic Photography in America, Part I

Posted on October 28, 2020

*Tom Bianchi. Fire Island Pines. Polaroids 1975-1983 (Damiani)*

It wasn’t until 2003 — nearly 40 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed — that the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) gave LGBTQ people their Constitutional rights, ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that intimate consensual conduct is a liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. For the better part of American history, same-sex activity was treated as a crime to be persecuted under the law, for which citizens could be denied healthcare, housing, education, employment, and access across the board.

The American Psychiatric Association deemed it a pathology, dedicating more than 20 years to formalizing a language to describe and behaviors to treat what they erroneously deemed a form of mental illness until the egregious diagnosis was removed from the DSM-III-R in 1973. That same year, the Supreme Court modified its definition of obscenity in the landmark case Miller v. California from the of “utterly without socially redeeming value” to that which lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” providing protections to previously censored works of art and culture under the First Amendment.

Much as same-sex activity was criminalized, so was any expression of — a practice dating back to the 1873 Comstock Laws, a set of federal acts for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” which criminalized sending “obscene” materials, contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, personal letters with sexual content, or any information related to their topics through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). In brief, to be LGBTQ in America posed life-threatening risk.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Men in Showers Series – Plastic Series, Jean Eudes Canival, Paris, 1975 © The Estate and Archive of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos*

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