Posts from the “Books” Category

April Dawn Alison

Posted on August 8, 2019

“Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life,” the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez knowingly remarked, reminding us that what we see and what we believe is often just an illusion of sorts. Beneath it all, lays the true self, an identity we often keep hidden from the world — including ourselves.

But there are those who dare to delve into the person they are we no one else is there to witness it. These moments are a manifestation of something beyond the person others see: it is the self that exists within our deepest being. To record this, to document it, to create evidence of that which exists for no one else — this takes nerve. It is here our story of April Dawn Alison begins.

In 2017, a painter named Andrew Masulio donated an archive of over 8,000 Polaroids to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) — previously unseen self-portraits of April Dawn Alison, the female persona of Alan Schaefer (1941-2008), an Oakland-based photographer who lived in the world as a man. The archive reveals to us a fully-realized secret life beautifully revealed in the exquisite monograph, April Dawn Alison (MACK), selections from which are currently on view at SFMOMA through December 1, 2019.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Patrick Waterhouse: Restricted Images – Made with the Warlpiri of Central Australia

Posted on August 6, 2019

In 1899, British/Australian biologist and anthropologist Sir Baldwin Spencer and telegraph-station master Francis J. Gillen published The Native Tribes of Central Australia, an in-depth study of the customs and traditions of the Aboriginal groups living near Alice Springs. Initiated as members of the Arunta tribe, the authors were the first Europeans to witness the customs and social structures of a people that the state of Australia did not recognize.

The book featured 119 photographs, many of sacred rituals and ceremonies never seen by the Western world before. While the book caused a sensation in Europe, it failed to take into account the impact it had on those it documented — quite literally as such encounters with the disease-carrying Europeans often resulted in death:

“The very kindness of the white man who supplies him, in outlying parts, with stray bits of clothing is by no means conducive to the longevity of the native. If you give a black fellow, say a woollen shirt, he will perhaps wear it for a day or two, after that his wife will be adorned with it, and then, in return for perhaps a little food, it will be passed on to a friend. The natural result is that, no sooner do the natives come into contact with white men, than phthisis and other diseases soon make their appearance, and, after a comparatively short time, all that can be done is to gather the few remnants of the tribe into some mission station where the path to final extinction may be made as pleasant as possible.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Shunk-Kender: Art Through the Eye of the Camera 1957–1983

Posted on July 30, 2019

Harry Alexander Shunk (1924-2006) and János Kender (1938-2009), Self-Portrait, Italy, 1956.

Between 1958 and 1973, German Harry Alexander Shunk (1924-2006) and his Hungarian partner János Kender (1938-2009) collaborated with nearly 300 European and American artists to document some of the most iconic moments in modern art.

Together, they produced some 190,000 images in collaboration with artists including Man Ray, Roy Lichtenstein, Lou Reed, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, William Klein, and Yayoi Kusama — many of which have become an integral part of the history of art, and works worthy of veneration themselves.

“In the history of photography, ‘documents for artists’ exist in the shade, with a few rare exceptions,” writes Florian Ebner in an essay that appears in the new book, Shunk-Kender: Art Through the Eye of the Camera 1957–1983 (Éditions Xavier Barral), which accompanies the first exhibition of their work, now on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through August 5, 2019.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

John Baldessari, Pier 18, New York, 1971 © Shunk-Kender

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Roy DeCarava & Langston Hughes: The Sweet Flypaper of Life

Posted on June 18, 2019

“We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” Langston Hughes said of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his landmark art book collaboration with Roy DeCarava recently republished by David Zwirner Books.

In 1952, DeCarava became the first African-American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He used the one-year grant of $3,200 to make the photographs that would appear in the book, a tribute to Harlem glowing in the final years of its legendary Renaissance.

DeCarava gave Hughes a selection of prints from which the poet wrote the story of Mecca through the eyes of Sister Mary Bradley, a fictional grandmother who knows everybody’s business and will put you on if you listen.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Manhattan, Photography

Vivien Goldman: Revenge of the She-Punks

Posted on May 29, 2019

Debbie Harry, London 1979. © Janette Beckman

Vivien Goldman still remembers what it was like to be the only woman in the room when she began working as a music journalist in London during the early 1970s. “My whole generation was very into music and there was a very vibrant music press known as ‘the inkies,’” Goldman recalls. “It’s a relic now, but it was started by young rebels.”

“There were hardly any women in the field. When you look back it’s insane. I remember big battles at editorial meetings. There was real hostility to my ideas of covering more women and encouraging women. People would say things like, ‘Women don’t make music. Women aren’t into music.’ I was like, ‘Look at me! I’m here in front of you!’ But it was a phalanx of the patriarchy.”

For Goldman, punk was and forever will be a liberating force for women – one which she explores across time and around the globe in the captivating new book Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot (University of Texas Press). Taking a lateral approach, Goldman weaves a fascinating tapestry that threads together themes of identity, money, love, and protest over five decades.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Poison Ivy, The Cramps © Janette Beckman

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Jerry Hsu: The Beautiful Flower is the World

Posted on May 28, 2019

Back in 2006, skateboarder Jerry Hsu got a Blackberry. He began taking notes, snapping visual one-liners, jotting down locations and references that he’d send by BBM to friends.

“By today’s standards, those photos are really bad but back then it was like, ‘Ohh these are pretty good!’” Hsu remembers. “It was a fun new technology. Many of the photos are personal messages for specific people or a specific group of people. It’s that shorthand language of photos that we use now.”

Three years later, Hsu started his blog, NAZI GOLD, a chronological feed of work curated from the thousands of photographs he was taking on his phone. He has no clue exactly how many there are in all: “On the phone I’m holding right now there are 45,000 photos. Over a 10-year period, it might be double that, or more.”

From this vast archive, a vision emerged, one that became shaped into the new book, The Beautiful Flower Is the World (Anthology Editions). The publication takes its name from a photograph of a t-shirt made in Asia. “The t-shirt is obviously mistranslated,” Hsu says.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Tom Bianchi: 63 E. 9th Street. NYC Polaroids 1975–1983

Posted on May 15, 2019

untitled, nyc099 by Tom Bianchi

After discovering the Pines on Fire Island in 1972, Tom Bianchi found himself drawn into New York’s flourishing gay scene which emerged in the years following Stonewall.

“I was having an affair with the playwright Edward Albee, which brought me in and out of New York,” Bianchi says from his home in Los Angeles. “I thought New York was too difficult a place to live – too expensive and too crazy – but my contacts lead me to imagine I could live there and be a New Yorker. What was thrilling was the sexual availability of the gay community at that time: we were just bursting at the seams.”

In 1975, Bianchi moved to the heart of Greenwich Village and took a job as in-house counsel at Columbia Pictures. That year, Bianchi received a Polaroid SX-70 camera during a corporate conference and began documenting the lives of his friends and lovers in the early years of Gay Liberation – images which are now compiled in the new book, 63 E. 9th Street. NYC Polaroids 1975–1983.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

untitled, nyc079 by Tom Bianchi

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Thee Almighty & Insane: Chicago Gang Business Cards From the 1960s & 1970s

Posted on May 15, 2019

Brandon Johnson, Courtesy Almighty & Insane Books

Long before digital media took hold, people built their reputations through business cards. Offering the perfect balance of professionalism and panache, these cards communicated the holder’s identity to friends, associates, and enemies with bold, blackletter typefaces.

On Chicago’s North and West Sides during the 1960s and 70s, business cards were one of the ultimate status symbols for gangs like the Royal Capris, the Almighty Playboys, and the Imperial Gangsters, who used these discreet slips of paper to rep their set.

“The practice carried over from membership cards of social athletic clubs in Chicago that many gangs evolved from,” says Brandon Johnson, author of Thee Almighty & Insane: Chicago Gang Business Cards From the 1960s & 1970s – his second in-depth volume documenting the long-underground culture. “In my opinion, these cards offered the gangs a sense of validation as official organisations.”

Read the Full Story st Huck Online

Brandon Johnson, Courtesy Almighty & Insane Books

Brandon Johnson, Courtesy Almighty & Insane Books

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

Gustav Mesmer: Icarus of Lautertal

Posted on May 10, 2019

The call to make art isn’t so much a choice as a force compelling creation, no matter the price. Few can resist the possibility that something lays beyond the sheer will it takes to render something out of nothing at all. For all that is given, the possibility of return is a draw: fame, wealth, and legacy.

But for the outsider artist, the reward is the act itself, creating a cycle of momentum nothing short of phenomenal. For Gustav Mesmer, the “Icarus of Lautertal”, as he came to be called, art was a way the medium through which he could express and resolve the conflict of being on earth and off at the same time. And that was enough.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot

Richard Corman: Basquiat – A Portrait

Posted on May 3, 2019

In June 1984, Jean-Michel Basquiat was flying high in his downtown studio at 57 Great Jones Street. He had just come off his first solo exhibition at Marry Boone and featured in the MoMA’s inaugural re-opening show, an international survey of the most important painters and sculptors of the moment.

Enter the then 30-year-old photographer Richard Corman, who had completed a two-year apprenticeship with Richard Avedon. On assignment for L’Uomo Vogue, Corman would spend an hour with Basquiat creating a series of incisive portraits of the artist as a young icon, just published in a new, limited edition book titled BASQUIAT: A PORTRAIT,

This was Corman’s first encounter with Basquiat, who started leasing the studio from Andy Warhol in 1983. “I hope it works out,” Warhol says in his diaries on August 26. “Jean Michel is trying to get on a regular painting schedule. If he doesn’t and he can‘t pay his rent it’ll be so hard to evict him. It’s always hard to get people out.”

Spoken like a true Factory owner.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

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

Gavin Watson: Oh What Fun We Had!

Posted on May 1, 2019

By the time Gavin Watson had left school at the age of 16, he had already amassed more than 10,000 photographs of his friends, taken at a council estate in High Wycombe, during the time the second generation of British skinheads were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Watson first encounted the Two-tone movement – which fuses ska, punk, and new wave – when he was 14, when he caught Madness on TV in 1979. 40 years on, Watson has come full circle with his new book Oh! What Fun We Had (Damiani), which launches at Donlon Books tonight and features never-before-seen photographs chronicling the rough-hewn kids who transformed skinhead culture into a global phenomenon.

“What’s crazy to me is I took so many pictures,” Watson says on the phone from his London studio. “I couldn’t afford to do it. No one ever paid me to do it. No one ever saw the pictures. I just took them for no real reason, except that I enjoyed taking them.”

Watson’s images have stood the test of time, and reflect the truth of skinheads – one which contradicts the mainstream media’s conflation of the subculture with the National Front. Here, the photographer talks us through his new book, transporting us back to a time when a group of marginalised youth became a threat to Thatcherite Britain because they refused to kowtow to the status quo.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography