Posts from the “Books” Category

Glen E. Friedman: DogTown – The Legend of Z-Boys

Posted on September 12, 2019

Glen E. Friedman. Marty Grimes, Krypto bowl—1978, © Glen E. Friedman

When Glen E. Friedman moved to California in the early ’70s, the first gift he received was a skateboard with clay wheels. “It was a fad at first,” he recalls. “We got into BMX bikes. Then the urethane wheel was invented, and we got back on our skateboards because you could ride without falling down or getting hurt as easily.”

Growing up in Los Angeles, Friedman was literally at the right time and place to witness the rise of skateboard culture during the ’70s. He attended Kenter Canyon Elementary School, Paul Revere Junior High School, and Bellagio School: three of the most well-known places for skaters because of the embanked playgrounds for rain drainage. “We rode them like they were asphalt waves,” Friedman says.

Here he met the original members of the Zephyr Skateboard Team (Z-Boys) – including Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, and C.R. Stecyk III, among others – in the DogTown area of the city. Friedman carried an Instamatic camera he could fit in his back pocket while he skated, and began taking shots of the scene.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Glen E. Friedman. Jay Adams, Krypto Bowl, 1978 © Glen E. Friedman

Categories: 1970s, Books, Huck, Photography

Godlis: On the Inspiration of Brassaï

Posted on September 10, 2019

Lydia Lunch, Delancey Street Loft, 1977 © Godlis

In the summer of 1976, two events occurred, forever transforming the course of American photographer Godlis’ life and the history of punk. It began when he purchased a copy of The Secret Paris of the 30s, Brassaï’s evocative memoir from his youth featuring his adventures through the brothels and opium dens of the bas monde.

“During my first years in Paris, beginning in 1924, I lived at night, going to bed at sunrise, getting up at sunset, wandering about the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre,” Brassaï, then in his seventies, wrote. “I was inspired to become a photographer by my desire to translate all the things that enchanted me in the nocturnal Paris I was experiencing.”

On one of these nightly jaunts, Brassaï happened upon the Bals-Musette, a shady dance hall where Paris’s high society mingled with its underground. Here, he made pictures too scandalous to include in Paris by Night, the groundbreaking 1933 monograph that brought the Hungarian photographer to the world stage. But by the 1970s, in the wake of Free Love and the Gay Liberation movement, a new hunger for the lives of sexual libertines was in the air, and Brassaï published these images of the darker side of the French capital in The Secret Paris of the 30s in 1976.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Stiv Bators and Divine, Blitz Benefit, CBGB, 1978 © Godlis

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

New York: Club Kids by Waltpaper

Posted on September 10, 2019

“When the Club Kids came along, we brought this idea that our identity was enough; we didn’t have to do anything else,” Walt Cassidy tells Another Man. “It’s very much ahead of the time. We were criticised at the same time the way people criticise the Kardashians: ‘You’re interesting looking but what do you do?’”

Cassidy puts that question firmly to rest in his magnificent new book, New York: Club Kids (Damiani), which charts the history of the last underground subculture of the analogue age. Cassidy, also known as Waltpaper, was an integral figure in the groundbreaking New York nightlife scene of the 1990s, when a new group of upstarts transgressed boundaries with singular aplomb, deconstructing the realms of fashion, music, drugs, gender, pop culture, and media to recreate themselves anew every week.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

SKID, King and Queen of Manhattan pageant at Limelight, 1993. (Left to right) Bella Bolski, Lady Bunny, Aphrodita, Amanda Lepore, Olympia, Arman Ra
Copyright SKID. All Rights Reserved

SKID, Keda and Kabuki at the opening of Webster Hall, 1992
Copyright SKID. All Rights Reserved

Categories: 1990s, AnOther Man, Books, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Andrew Kung: The All-American

Posted on September 3, 2019

Austin © Andrew Kung, styling by Carolyn Son

Lim © Andrew Kung, styling by Carolyn Son

The “American Dream” is a myth packaged, peddled, and sold to those who prefer appearance to truth. Scratch the surface of the fantasy, and the horrors of systemic oppression emerge. No one is truly safe from the nightmare, despite how much they may choose to assimilate into a culture that is not their own. In the words of African-American writer and activist Audre Lorde: “Your silence will not protect you.”

First-generation Chinese-American photographer Andrew Kung is speaking out with The All-American, a limited edition book that features portraits, made in NYC and LA in 2018 and 2019, of his friends, like Alexander Hodge from HBO’s Insecure, wearing clothing made exclusively Asian fashion brands like sundae school, Prabal Gurung, PRIVATE POLICY.

“When you think about an ‘All-American,’ you think about a prototypical white man who is an attractive, built, outspoken, confident man who plays sports and is admired by all women – the model American citizen representing what ‘success’ looks like,” Kung tells Dazed.

“Asian-American men, on the other hand, have always been classified as ‘other’ – desexualised, emasculated, perceived as passive or weak, and most of all, invisible. No matter how hard we try to fit in, we are never ‘American’ enough — reinforced with questions and statements from everyday people like ‘Where are you really from?’ ‘Your English is actually really good,’ and, “You’re really good looking for an Asian guy.’”

Kung has had enough. Inspired by photographers like Larry Sultan, Kung began to create narrative images exploring universal themes of the human condition. He added a fashion component to the project as a reminder of how rare it is to see Asian-American men modelling ideals of beauty and style in our image-driven world. Here, Kung reflects on the importance of controlling the narrative to create images the offer a new space for exploration of Asian-American identity today.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Kris © Andrew Kung, styling by Carolyn Son

Categories: Art, Books, Dazed, Fashion, Photography

Out of the Shadows — Marcus Leatherdale: Photographs New York City 1980-1992

Posted on August 29, 2019

Marcus Leatherdale. Larissa, Issey Miyake, 1983.

Hailing from Montreal, photographer Marcus Leatherdale remembers paging through Interview magazine and coming upon a photograph that spoke to his soul. “The picture of Edwige with blonde hair sitting on a couch was the epitome of where and what I wanted to be and do in New York,” he says.

In spring 1978, Leatherdale, then 25 years old, finally arrived in New York after completing his photographic training at the San Francisco Art Institute. Though SFAI didn’t focus on studio photography at the time, the young punk was determined to pursue his dream, beginning his practice by placing people in front of walls to simulate a controlled environment.

“I didn’t realize I was archiving an era that was going to be extinct; I was just photographing my friends,” Leatherdale says, reflecting on the release of his magnificent monograph, Out of the Shadows—Marcus Leatherdale: Photographs New York City 1980-1992. Leatherdale’s timeless black and white portraits of icons including Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Madonna, Iman, Suzanne Bartsch, Debbie Harry, Joey Arias, and Kathy Acker offer an elegiac epitaph to Downtown at its height.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Marcus Leatherdale. Tina Chow, Issey Miyake, 1983.

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

Tanya Marcuse: Fruitless|Fallen|Woven

Posted on August 29, 2019

© Tanya Marcuse, courtesy of Radius Books. Conceptual catalogue of fruit trees photographed over a 4 year period in the Hudson Valley, NY by artist, Tanya Marcuse. Many of the trees grow on land that is for sale and in danger of development.

Nature is our greatest teacher, providing ample evidence of the wisdom of the earth, the cycles of life and death ever flowing from one into the next. It is here in nature that we learn the truth: the beauty and power of the sublime, the ineffable, unspeakable grandeur that existence inspires.

But with the words written in Genesis 1:26, the world has lost its way, for the very idea that we have dominion over what does not belong to us is a sin of the worst kind. We are stewards and our role is to preserve and conserve so that nature continues to provide abundance, rather than wipe us off the earth as payback for the abuses of greed, gluttony, wrath, sloth and pride that have wrought the horrors of climate change to our doorstep.

The further we remove ourselves from nature, stashed indoors and stuck behind screens, in a state of constant consumption, always needing more and never satisfied, the more perilous the payback will be, according to Newton’s Third Law: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Yet it is entirely too easy to forget, to lose ourselves in the conveniences and conventions of the postmodern world, to presume that there are no consequences for our choices just because we cannot see them yet. We can rationalize the irrational until such a day the center can no longer hold, and the weight of our delusions shall break the dam, a deluge of glacial proportions.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park

Posted on August 22, 2019

Under the cover of darkness, Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki crept through Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama Parks during the 1970s, in search of an illicit world known to a select few. Moving like a hunter on the prowl, Yoshiyuki used infrared film and flash to capture public displays of sex between heterosexual and homosexual couples—and, perhaps more shockingly, the voyeurs who gathered to watch.

“One day I stumbled on the scene—and [an] incredible scene [Laughs]. That was when I was still an amateur,” Yoshiyuki tells Nobouyoshi Araki in a conversation titled “Tiptoeing into the Darkness…With Love,” featured in the new book Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park.

“I was shocked. They were actually fucking,” Yoshiyuki says. “When I saw them I knew this was something I had to photograph.”

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Document Journal, Japan, Photography

Mike Osborne: Federal Triangle

Posted on August 22, 2019

Many Americans profess surprise at the inhumane social practices coming from the present White House. Perhaps they are comforted that they once had the luxury to have never been concerned about the forces of the military and prison industrial complexes weighted against foreign lands and U.S. citizens alike.

Perhaps the carnage of AIDS never touched their families. Perhaps they were never the victim of land grabs, medical experimentation, or any number of the genocidal acts waged by this nation that are documented in the annals of history and the on-going subject of current events.

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them,” poet Charles Bukowski opined, summing up the new wave of “Not my country!” that greets those who have chosen denial over truth up until it finally affected them.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Vivian Maier: The Color Photographs

Posted on August 22, 2019

Chicago, April 1977 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

Self-Portrait, Chicagoland, October 1975 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

When legendary American photographer Vivian Maier died in 2009 at the age of 83, she left behind some 40,000 Ektachrome colour slides that had gone unseen and unpublished. Thankfully, a new exhibition and monograph – titled Vivian Maier: Colour Photographs – showcase the stunning works made by the artist, who worked in total seclusion throughout her life.

For more than 40 years, Maier work as a nanny on Chicago’s wealthy North Side. Her job gave her the ability to hit the streets with her camera and take portraits of modern life during the second half of the 20th century.

“Look closely art the many self-portraits Vivian Maier made, and you will see her disguises, her cloak of invisibility,” photographer Joel Meyerowitz writes in the book’s foreword. “She’s as plain as an old-fashioned school marm. She’s the wallflower, the spinster aunt, the ungainly tourist in the big city… except… she isn’t!”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Untitled, c. 1977 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

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

Elspeth H. Brown: Work! A Queer History of Modeling

Posted on August 19, 2019

Ruth Ford, c. 1930s. Portrait by George Platt Lynes

Lily Yuen with fellow performers, in Lily Yuen Collection, Schomburg, Folder 6: scrapbook 1926-1930. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Fashion models, first described as “mannequins” arrived in New York via London in 1909. Their purpose, as their name denotes, was to sell merchandise to a burgeoning consumer class — while simultaneously advertising archetypes that simulated insatiable desire.

This desire was cultivated within something the product could never supply — a psychological state of want and aspiration designed to heighten insecurity and anxiety through the creation of a state of constant craving. Tapping into the psychological underpinnings that can only exist when survival is no longer the mainstay of one’s being, merchandisers understood the link between consumption and identity necessary to maintain the capitalist enterprise.

Glamour, romance, sex, and pleasure became the foundation upon which the mannequin was based — making the very spectacle of the human body and visage an object available for purchase. In the creation of the model, the individual was reduced to a thing that could be commodified and exploited for the express purpose of profits.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

George Platt Lynes with Paul Cadmus, on the set, c. 1941 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Categories: Books, Fashion, Feature Shoot, Photography

The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop

Posted on August 8, 2019

Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (male couple), n.d. (1975-1986)

In the brief window between the Stonewall Rebellion and the advent of AIDS, New York City became a wonderland for the sexually adventurous. As the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, the spirit of anarchy arose among the dilapidated ruins of the bustling metropolis. Raised on free love, a new gay underground emerged in the bars and clubs, as well as on Manhattan’s West Side Piers where encounters with rough trade in derelict warehouses flourished in broad daylight.

From 1975 to 1986, African-American artist and Bronx native Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) dedicated his life to documenting this little-known chapter of gay history, amassing a singular archive of work that preserves the era perfectly. At a time when the nearby Meatpacking District still ran red with fresh blood, Baltrop captured the grit, grime, and humanity that thrived in an enclave of illicit pleasures of the flesh.

Largely excluded from the art world during his life, Baltrop is finally receiving his due with a major exhibition, The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop, opening August 7 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The museum is home to the Baltrop Archive, a trove of personal documents, photographs, and ephemera that provides a first-hand account of the challenges he faced throughout his life.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (male portrait), n.d. (1975-1986)

Bottom: Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (sunbathing platform with Tava mural), n.d. (1975-1986)

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Document Journal, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography