Posts from the “Books” Category

Builder Levy: Humanity in the Streets

Posted on April 30, 2019

Malcolm X Speaking, Labor union/civil rights rally in support of the New York City school boycott, Upper East Side, Manhattan, 1964 © Builder Levy

Builder Levy enrolled in Brooklyn College in 1959 with the dream of becoming an Abstract Expressionist, but the work didn’t resonate the way he hoped it would. Photography, however, made perfect sense. “It allowed me to get more involved with life,” Levy says.

Growing up in Bath Beach, a predominantly Jewish and Italian neighbourhood, Levy lived in a housing development built by Donald Trump’s father, Fred. Living through the Jim Crow 1950s, fraught with the spectres of McCarthy and the Cold War, Levy was sensitive to the struggle of people of colour and the working class, becoming politically aware and engaged at a young age.

“I started taking the camera with me to street demonstrations,’ Levy remembers, recognising the importance of amplifying the fight against oppression and injustice.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Medallion Lords, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, 1965 © Builder Levy

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

SF Eyes: The Continuing Story of Life, Loss, Tragedy, and Triumph in the City of San Francisco as Captured by the All-Seeing Lens of Hamburger Eyes Photography Magazine

Posted on April 25, 2019

Back in 2001, brothers Ray and David Potes were putting out photo zines the old fashioned way. Ray would edit and art direct while Dave ran copies while working in a college copy department. The one titled Hamburger Eyes really stood out — and began attracting photographers who wanted to share their work.

Ray, who was living in Hawaii at the start, moved to San Francisco where David was, and the city became home base for a vital street photography culture that recalled the glory of Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz.

Hamburger Eyes that quickly became a cult sensation in the photo underground, as the classic black and white format made the strange and mundane scenes of daily life all the more profound. In its back to basic approach, Hamburger Eyes elevated the photo zine into a work of art.

Over the years, Hamburger Eyes has gone on to publish 37 issues, as well as over 200 titles by artists, as well as two books — their latest SF Eyes: The Continuing Story of Life, Loss, Tragedy, and Triumph in the City of San Francisco as Captured by the All-Seeing Lens of Hamburger Eyes Photography Magazine just released by Hat & Beard Press in conjunction with a documentary film produced by Aaron Rose.

SF Eyes is a picture perfect postcard of San Francisco, when it was punk AF by crew members Jason Roberts Dobrin, Kappy, Dylan Maddux, Alex Martinez, Mark Murrmann, Ted Pushinsky, Andrea Sonnenberg, Stefan Simikich, and Tobin Yelland, among others.

Hamburger Eyes spent its formative years in San Francisco, becoming an integral part of the scene. With the sweeping changes to the city, and to photography as a whole, most of the crew have decamped, but the love for the town never grows old.

To celebrate two decades of San Francisco street photography, we have brought together some of the artists at the core to share the continuing story of Hamburger Eyes.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Dave Heath: Dialogues With Solitude

Posted on April 24, 2019

Dave Heath. Elevated in Brooklyn, New York City, 1963 © Dave Heath, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath. Washington Square, New York, 1960 © Dave Heath, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

At the age of 16, Dave Heath was paging through a 1947 issue of LIFE magazine when he came upon “Bad Boy’s Story: An Unhappy Child Learns to Live at Peace with the World,” a photo essay by Ralph Crane that explored the life of an orphaned by growing up in Seattle.

Heath, who had been abandoned at the age of 4, immediately felt seen. Living in foster homes and an orphanage, Heath saw himself in both the protagonist and the journalist at the same time. Heath had already been participating in a camera club and recognized that photography could become a lifeline between himself and the world.

It was a commitment to which he would give his life, using the camera to document the political, social, and cultural events of the time, while simultaneously creating an investigation of the photograph itself. Largely self-taught, Heath made it his business to learn the craft, theory, and history of his chosen medium in order to create for himself.

Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitude, on view at The Photographers’ Gallery in London through June 2, 2019, and the accompanying monograph from Steidl, provide a deep dive into Heath’s singular oeuvre that is a poignant and powerful look at the human animal.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Dave Heath. Washington Square, New York City, 1960 © Dave Heath, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Manhattan, Photography

Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer: Art & Queer Culture

Posted on April 17, 2019

Charles ‘ Teenie’ Harris, Group portrait of four cross-dressers posing in a club or a bar in front of a piano, including Michael ‘Bronze Adonis’ Fields, on left, and possibly ‘Beulah’ on right, 1955. Collection, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

“I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy.”

New York artist and activist Donna Gottschalk memorably penned those words on a placard during the first Gay Liberation event on June 28, 1970 – the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The moment was captured in a photograph by Diana Davies, and published in the back page of Ecstasy magazine Issue 2, becoming a touchstone of the new age.

It was a statement of bold confidence, a reclamation of self from a society that had been actively criminalising and pathologising homosexuality since the word appeared in English for the first time in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1892).

Born from a repressive, regressive regime, queer art became a channel into which people could connect and express themselves. It sparked a new bohemia, one that continues to grow and bloom, which inspired the revised, updated paperback edition of Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer’s epic survey Art & Queer Culture (Phaidon).

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Jamil Hellu; Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (a.k.a. Faluda Islam) grew up in Pakistan. In Arabic poetry, a deer often symbolizes an effeminate young man. In Brazil, the word deer (‘veado’) is commonly used as slang to insult gay men, 2017. © the artist

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Painting, Photography

The Extraordinary Adventure of Becoming Different

Posted on April 9, 2019

In January 1947, French novelist, feminist, existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir boarded an airplane in Paris bound for New York ready to take the greatest adventure of her life: a road trip across America, visiting 56 cities in 19 states over 116 days.

Carrying a letter of introduction from her soulmate Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir, then 39, toured the nation giving talks at women’s colleges while detailing her experiences and observations in the masterful travel diary, America Day by Day, first published in France in 1948.

Written two years before de Beauvoir published her landmark work, The Second Sex, America Day by Day reveals a woman coming into her true self. “Usually, traveling is an attempt to annex a new object to my universe; this in itself is an undertaking: but today it’s different,” she writes.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Categories: Art, Books, Jacques Marie Mage

Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922

Posted on April 4, 2019

Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.

At the age of 20, Hugh Mangum set forth on a journey as an itinerant portraitist working in North Carolina and Virginia. The year was 1897, and the future was bleak as the peace of Reconstruction was undone by the perils of a new evil on the horizon. Jim Crow, as America has named its system of apartheid and oppression, began, bringing forth the horrors of lynching and the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan.

Over a period of 25 years, until his death in 1922, Mangum created photographs of the American South during a time when laws like 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, legalizing segregation and local Black Codes that severely limited black people’s right to vote, education, property ownership, and movement. In the 1970s, Mangum’s archive was discovered inside an old tobacco barn that had been set for demolition and saved at the last moment.

With an open-door policy at his studio, all the world who could afford it donned their Sunday best and sat before Mangum. Using a Penny Picture camera, which allowed for up to 30 exposures in a single glass plate negative, Mangum delivered the classic fine, flat-field image with a graceful fall-off on the edges. The photographer engaged his subjects to reveal slivers of themselves with each new frame, capturing moments of unassailable emotional truth that speak to the human condition on the cusp of modernity.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.

Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.

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

Ryan Vizzions: No Spiritual Surrender – A Dedication to Standing Rock

Posted on April 3, 2019

“Defend the Sacred”: Standing Rock, Cannon Ball, North Dakota, 2016 © Ryan Vizzions

From April 2016 until March 2017, one of the largest protest movements in American history took place on the plains of North Dakota at Standing Rock reservation. Over 15,000 people, including members of more than 300 recognised tribes, gathered at resistance camps to protect the water supply of more than 17 million people from the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).

Like many outsiders, photographer Ryan Vizzions first became aware of the movement that September when Democracy Now! broadcast video of the DAPL attacking unarmed Native Americans with dogs and pepper spray. “Being from Atlanta, it echoed the Civil Rights era, so I wanted to understand more,” Vizzions says.

After visiting Oceti Sakowin camp, Vizzions made the decision to quit his job and dedicate himself to the cause that October. Later that month, there was talk of a police raid on 1851 Treaty Camp, just one mile north. At 10:30 on the morning of October 27, they finally arrived. Vizzions rushed up to the front lines where he just in time to photograph a peaceful protester on her horse, watching the full display of US militarization in support of DAPL.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Milky Way and Tipi, Standing Rock, 2016 © Ryan Vizzions

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Olaf Otto Becker: Reading the Landscape

Posted on March 31, 2019

Photo: Supertree Grove, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore 10/2012 © Otto Olaf Becker

For more than 30 years, German photographer Otto Olaf Becker has been documenting the earth’s landscape. His work explores the impact of overpopulation on natural resources – including land, water, food, energy, and heavy metals – in remote corners of the earth, where few see what is happening in real time.

After completing his work in Greenland, Becker headed south to Malaysia and Indonesia to explore the devolution of forests under human stewardship. This led to his book Reading the Landscape (Hatje Cantz), selections from which will be on view at ClampArt during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD. Here, Becker shows us beauty, tragedy, and farce in a three-act narrative.

Reading the Landscape opens as the Bible does, with the sublime grandeur of nature, before introducing haunting scenes of destruction that suggest a war fought — and lost. Becker concludes with images made in Singapore, where nature is rendered impotent and reimagined as décor.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Ron Galella: Shooting Stars – The Untold Stories

Posted on March 28, 2019

What makes a legend most? Some say glamour, others scandal – or, in the case of Ron Galella, the ‘Godfather of Paparazzi’ who captured Hollywood’s most illustrious stars over a decades-long career, both.

The Bronx-born, first-generation Italian-American got his start in the early 1950s working as a US Air Force photographer during the Korean War, and took the lessons he learned on the frontlines straight to Hollywood. Armed with two cameras – no bag or coat – Galella would jump fences, crash parties, don disguises, and spend countless hours on stakeouts – all the while enduring threats, humiliation, and even violence for the opportunity to snap celebs.

Infamous for his legal battles with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, he was spat at and punched by Sean Penn; had his tooth knocked out by Richard Burton’s bodyguard; his tires slashed by Elvis Presley’s bodyguards; hosed down by Brigitte Bardot’s security; banned from Studio 54, twice; and caused Elizabeth Taylor to hiss, “I’m going to kill Ron Galella!”. It was all in a day’s work for the fearless paparazzo, who was willing to risk it all to get the shot.

Now 88, Galella has just published a new book Shooting Stars: The Untold Stories, a photographic memoir – including 22 tips for aspiring paparazzos from the man who knows. Here, on a call from his home in New Jersey, Galella recounts some of the most unforgettable moments of his career.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

Remembering the Life and Legacy of Patrick D. Pagnano, Street Photographer

Posted on March 20, 2019

On October 7, 2018, the photographer Patrick D. Pagnano died, leaving behind a treasury of classic American street photography and documentary work made over more than 50 years.

While attending Columbia College Chicago, Pagnano developed his “stream of consciousness” approach to street photography, a narrative technique inspired by Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Walker Evans. Pagnano strove to capture the essence of the moment while simultaneously indicating a larger story beyond the photograph, creating a dynamic exchange between the subject and the environment in each photograph.

In 2002, Pagnano published Shot on the Street, a collection of his color work made during the 1970s and ‘80s that evokes the visual poetry of Helen Leviitt and the intimacy of Joel Meyerowitz.

In the preface, Pagnano writes, “’Shot on the Street’ refers not only to the images having been taken on the street, but more importantly, to the psychological effect of the street. It is a place where races of people and social classes converge and vie for space and mobility with ever increasing urbanism. It can excite, anger, defeat, and inspire. The street’s influence and energy never ceases.”

That electric energy comes alive in Pagnano’s work, whether capturing candid scenes of daily life on the pavement or taking in the pleasures of Empire Roller Disco, his series documenting the legendary Brooklyn skating rink. Here, Kari Pagnano, his wife of 44 years, gives us a deep, heartfelt look at Pagnano’s life and legacy.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

Araki: Impossible Love – Vintage Photographs

Posted on March 20, 2019

For over half a century, Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki has devoted himself to plumbing the depths of that which is most intimate – the invisible, intangible spirit that animates our very flesh. In his hands, the erotic transcends the mere functionality of pornography and reveals the raw intensity of the emotional, physical, and psychological self that gives sex its power.

At 78, the prolific artist has published over 500 books, including his latest offering Araki: Impossible Love – Vintage Photographs, out today. Arranged chronologically, the book maps Araki’s oeuvre as it unfolds, transforming his photo diary into a visual autobiography of a singular, subversive life in art.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Books, Japan, Photography