Posts from the “Books” Category

Laurie Simmons: Big Camera, Little Camera

Posted on March 17, 2019

Long House (Orange and Green Lounge), 2004. © Laurie Simmons

Have you ever wanted to step into a picture and live in that world? It’s a feeling American artist Laurie Simmons knows very well. “When I was a child, I had a strong desire to enter into the drawings in the storybook,” she says. “I can remember sitting on my mother’s lap and feeling this frustration. I wanted to get inside and walk around with the characters.”

As a member of The Pictures Generation (a group of American artists from the 70s who critically analysed the media), Simmons explores the subject of womanhood through enigmatic images that subvert stereotypes, forcing viewers to question their own assumptions.

40 years in the making, Laurie Simmons: Big Camera, Little Camera, is a major retrospective exhibition and book exploring the construction of gender, identity, reality, and illusion – as well as the photograph itself. Her work stages scenes that become poems, metaphors, and meditations on much larger ideas.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Bruno Stettler: Als War’s Das Letze Mal

Posted on March 14, 2019

Siouxsie & the Banshees. Baden. 9. 7. 1979 © Bruno Stettler

Musical Youth. Zürich. 1983 © Bruno Stettler

On October 1, 1977, the Clash played Switzerland for the very first time. Their 15-track set at Kaufleuten in Zürich began with “London’s Burning” and “Complete Control” — and somewhere in the audience, 16-year-old Bruno Stettler was taking his very first concert photographs.

Over the next decade, Stettler would go on to take 20,000 photographs at nearly 100 rock concerts around town, capturing the raw intimacy of live shows long before they became overproduced spectacles.

In his new book, Als War’s Das Letze Mal (Sturm & Drang), Stettler takes us on a magical trip through the looking glass, back in the late 1970s and ’80s, when legends like Bob Marley, David Bowie. Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Nina Hagen, and Kraftwerk called the shots.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Judas Priest. Zürich 17. 4. 1980 © Bruno Stettler

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Music

Vincent Cianni: We Skate Hardcore

Posted on March 4, 2019

Welcome To Crooklyn, Walking Across the Williamsburg Bridge 1996. © Vincent Cianni

Under The Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Williamsburg Brooklyn 1996. © Vincent Cianni

In 1993, photographer Vincent Cianni moved to the south side of Williamsburg, as the next generation of Puerto Rican and Dominican teens were coming of age.

“Life was played out in so many different ways on the sidewalks, stoops, and playgrounds,” he remembers. “I started playing handball in McCarren Park and started to take my camera with me. It became part of my connection to the neighbourhood.”

After about a year and a half, Cianni came upon a scrappy group of local kids and teens who had built a skate ramp in a vacant lot by the river at North 7th Street. They were there to refine their skills, so they could get sponsored to skate professionally. “Like basketball, it was a way out of poverty and the experiences that they have growing up,” the photographer explains.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Sugeiry Touching Scarface with Knife, Bedford Avenue Williamsburg Brooklyn 1998. © Vincent Cianni

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Olivier Fatton: Coco

Posted on March 4, 2019

Coco, Copyright Olivier Fatton.

Éve-Claudine Lorétan – alias Coco – met photographer Olivier Fatton on a Sunday in November 1989, at a sauna in Bern, Switzerland. Their meeting would mark the final act of Coco’s short life, in which she was at once fashion model, performance artist, and tabloid sensation.

“We fell in love at first sight,” Fatton says, speaking through a translator from Paris. “I had the impression I just met an angel. At the time, I was really drawn to aesthetics. Coco looked so beautiful that I just wanted to take pictures of her.”

Before meeting Coco, Fatton, 32, had been photographing male nudes in staged scenes, awash with beauty but empty of love. Their connection was absolute and instantaneous. They went for coffee, then to bed, in short order.

“I want to be your model. In return, you’ll document my transformation. I’m going to have a sex change,” Coco told Fatton, as he recounts in a new book, Coco.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Coco, Copyright Olivier Fatton.

Coco, Copyright Olivier Fatton.

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

Rosalind Fox Solomon: Liberty Theater

Posted on February 27, 2019

Rosalind Fox Solomon, ‘Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1976’ in Liberty Theater (2018). © Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, ‘New Orleans, Louisiana, 1992’ in Liberty Theater (2018). © Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, American artist Rosalind Fox Solomon traveled across the South creating a powerful series of photographs that reveal the state of the nation during the first decade following the Civil Rights Movement. It is here in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina that we are privy to the complex interconnection of life rooted in the triumphs, tragedies, and traumas of the past.

At the time Fox Solomon started making these images, she had begun taking trips to New York to study photography with Lisette Model, a master of the human psyche laid bare in silver gelatin. Fox Solomon’s work bears witness to the power of photography to cut to the quick, to go beyond the luxuries and limitations of language by focusing solely on action, gesture, and expression to tell us more than word could ever say in a single, fleeting moment.

Fox Solomon’s photographs resonate with quiet grandeur, visceral eccentricity, and profound depth of ineffable emotion. Over the next two decades, she traversed the deepest reaches of the South to create Liberty Theater (MACK), an exquisitely nuanced portrait of the profound interplay of race, class, and segregation.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Rosalind Fox Solomon, ‘New Orleans, Louisiana, 1993’ in Liberty Theater (2018). © Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

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

Brenda Ann Kenneally: Upstate Girls

Posted on February 14, 2019

Kayla and James © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

In the dystopian mythos that fuels the American Dream, poverty is a mark of character upon which outrageous projections are made. Many, clinging to the illusions of living in a meritocracy, where everyone starts on a level playing field, prefer the ignorance of ideology above all, villainizing the victims of a system designed to create a permanent underclass upon which America’s Next Top Billionaire will assuredly feast.

Poverty, as it is presented to us, is a choice — the wrong one, the experts suggest. “If only these people would X, Y, or Z,” the armchair analyst adds without the slightest shame, from the comforts of their breakfast nook while scrolling the latest headlines on their news feed.

“X, Y, or Z” could be any number of conservative talking points that focus the minutiae of personal accountability while turning a blind eye to the crushing weight of living hand to mouth in country that has designed systems to profit off your demise.

Artist Brenda Ann Kenneally knows how the game is played better than most, and uses her knowledge and wisdom expose the truth — rather than perpetuate the lies told and sold. In 2002, she and author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc began collaborating on a magazine assignment in Troy, New York, a once-thriving city whose fortunes have gone dark.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Tony in the dark bedroom, looking out the window © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

Dana nursing KyLanne the day before she took her baby home © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Koto Bolofo: The Prison

Posted on February 11, 2019

At the age of four, Koto Bolofo left South Africa as a political refugee, and did not return until 1992, two years after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. The first thing Bolofo did was visit Robben Island, where Mandela had been held for the majority of his 27 years in confinement in a cell barely six square meters in size. The photographs he took with his wife have just been published in a new monograph titled The Prison (Steidl). Bolofo graciously agreed to speak with L’Oeil de la Photographie about this project.

“My parents decided to go back to South Africa after Mandela was released. My father said that the country had changed, to come back and see for myself, as there could be good opportunities. My first intention was to visit Robben Island. I had heard so much about it, but I had only seen five photos. One was taken in the early 1960s when Mandela was held there, and I wanted to see this place for myself before I discovered what South Africa was.

“I took the boat, a fisherman’s boat, that took the prisoners to the island. It wasn’t yet a Museum at that time. This was in the very early days. I had to go because I knew that when a new regime comes into power, the first thing that they do is try to eradicate all the traces of the past. They don’t want to be reminded of a bad symbol of the past.

“Fortunately humanity was on the mainland celebrating getting their country back and no one was paying attention to Robben Island. It was my wife and I. When we landed we saw an old board with paint peeling off and in Afrikaaans it said, “Welcome to Robben Island.” Then we saw the main gate with the same words and it was painted really well. The slogan really shook me. Here you are, as a black person, and they are celebrating, welcoming you. And there was a sickness in that.

“When you go there, you completely break down. You cannot believe a human being could do this to one and other because they are fighting for freedom and equal rights. How can they do this? ‘Why? was the word going through my head over and over again. You are breaking down, the tears come, you are weak at the legs.

“South Africa is a vast country with a 13% white minority. And they had the black prisoners wearing shorts and going barefoot, while the Indian prisoners got to wear long trousers, pullovers, and shoes. There were other forms of discrimination, like black prisoners received no bread. Nelson Mandela was campaigning to have equal rights on that island and it took years. There is a photo of Mandela in shorts in the courtyard breaking stones. That was designed to break the human spirit. Everything they did was to break the spirit. The post was vetted, and words were blanked out in a black pen so that the prisoners couldn’t see what their loved ones were writing. They tried to break the prisoners but little did they know that the prisoners had a nobility and a strength of intellect that was part of their survival instrument. They would never break an African person down.

“I couldn’t take photos. I couldn’t even pick up the camera. It’s a burning pain that you can’t describe; it’s so close to you. My wife was saying, ‘You have to take pictures. It can be taken away and destroyed. No one is paying attention now.’”

“We came to a harrowing thing: Mandela’s cell. You can put it on paper, but you have to experience what that space is, put yourself in that room, and say, ‘How on earth can you put a man in a space like that for so many years?’ Once you are in his cell, you are completely gone. It’s really cold in there and they were wearing shorts, and the blanket was horsehair, designed to degrade you to the lowest common denominator.

“These photos are very poetic. They are not photos that wanted to provoke. This is a peace document. You sit down and look at it in your quiet moment to have a moment of your humanity and ask yourself, ‘Why?’ and ‘How can we move forward from this?’

“The most important thing in this book is the list of all the prisoners that had been sentenced to Robben Island. No one knows about this list. Thank God we have the Internet. I asked myself, ‘Who are these people? Where are these people? Where are he rest of them?” We only knew about the main people, eight or ten of them. The impression we had was these were the only prisoners they were keeping, because that’s all the South African media focused on.

“I asked about the others. I didn’t get the information so I snooped around the Internet for two and a half months before I came to a website and a massive list popped up and it had the names of all the prisoners, the date of sentence, admittance, release, and their address. There were thousands of names on the list.

“I printed it off that night, kept it, and stored it away. I later went back to the website and the list had been taken down, like it did not exist at all. I published the list in the book. The youngest prisoner who was sentenced to Robben Island was only 15 years old. He was sentenced for 10 years! His is amongst the list of prisoners in the book. His name is Dikagang Moseneke. His current occupation is the Justice Minister of South Africa.

“This is the most important book my wife and I will do in our lifetime. This is a book of education. All schools should pay a compulsory visit to Robben Island. When you show them the instrument of evil forced upon a people, the youth can see the truth stands counter to corruption. The truth can make democracy more transparent. That’s when a nation moves forward. Go back to your past and you will find your future.”

Today, Robben Island is a museum, included on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 1999. Bolofo’s book is a monument to the past, a story of lives that will never be forgotten, lives that were given to justice, truth, and freedom.

First Published in L’Oeil de la Phootgraphie, May 2014

Categories: Africa, Art, Books

Larry Racioppo: Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971-1983

Posted on February 7, 2019

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, a movement was afoot. The media called it “white flight” and sang it from the rooftops. The cities were being abandoned as white families ran for the hills of suburban towns just as Black and Latinx populations were finding a foothold in northern climates following the Great Migration, Operation Bootstrap, and Operation Peter Pan.

By the 1970s, a new era had begun — one of fueled by urban decay that left only the most strident New Yorkers in place. It was a city of true grit, where only the strongest survive, a city filled with idiosyncratic characters that were simultaneously celebrated and vilified. It was, simply put, a “New” York in every sense of the word.

Brooklyn native Larry Racioppo headed west for two years before returning to his hometown in December 1970. He took a job at the phone company and a class at SVA, which inspired him to start photographing the world in which he lived. Then little by little, everything began to change.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Photography

New York in Photo Books

Posted on February 6, 2019

Life is Good & Good For You in New York by William Klein (1956)

There are eight million stories in the naked city — at any given time. As the years slip away, one fact remains: the only constant is change. “New” is the truth. Nothing ever stays the same, except the photographs. This, my friend, is the only time you can and will ever go home again.

At a certain point, even if you weren’t there, you know the photograph. It’s become a memory of another time and place that has now become a part of a history that ceaselessly fascinates. The city has a curious ability to romanticize the dog-eat-dog Darwinian principles that made Frank Sinatra proudly proclaim, “If I can make it there I can make it anywhere.”

It’s vast, self-aggrandizing sensibilities spring up from the bedrock upon which the city is laid, it’s towering testaments to capitalism lining the island of Manhattan like so many rows of jagged teeth, while the outer lying boroughs nestle around like kin, creating a sprawling mass of magnificent encounters that can only happen in a place like this.

New York is not just photogenic, it’s the very landscape where genres flourish and styles abound — advancing the medium as only a true muse can. In New York in Photo Books (RM/Cento José Guerrero), editor Horacio Fernández takes us on a spellbinding tour of the city that never sleeps in ink on paper.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

New York by Keizo Kitajama (1982)

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

Lili Kobielski: I Refuse for the Devil to Take My Soul: Inside Cook County Jail

Posted on January 18, 2019

Occupying 96 acres in Chicago, Illinois, the Cook County Jail is one of the largest pre-detention facilities in the nation. Most of the 8,000-or-so inmates housed there each day are awaiting trial. And according to the jail’s Office of Mental Health Policy and Advocacy, about a third of the prisoners are mentally ill.

Between the years 2009 and 2012, Illinois cut $113.7 million in mental health funding, resulting in the shutdown of two state inpatient facilities and six Chicago mental health clinics. During this same period, there was a 19 percent increase in emergency room visits for people experiencing psychiatric crises, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Instead of receiving specialized care, mentally ill Chicagoans charged with a crime are being treated behind bars, and Cook County Jail, by extension, has become the largest mental health care provider in the United States.

In late 2015, photographer Lili Kobielski began visiting inmates in Cook County Jail and documenting the plight of prisoners living with mental illness. Her new book, I Refuse for the Devil to Take My Soul: Inside Cook County Jail, is a powerful examination of the intersections between poverty, mental illness, mass incarceration, and race.

Kobielski recently spoke with VICE about the importance of amplifying the voices and circumstances of some of America’s most vulnerable citizens.

Read the Full Story at VICE

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Adreinne Waheed: Black Joy and Resistance

Posted on January 17, 2019

Hailing from Oakland, California, Adreinne Waheed took up photography at the age of 13 and never put the camera down. Inspired by the work of Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks, Waheed has dedicated her life to celebrating the beauty and resilience of the African diaspora.

In her new book Black Joy and Resistance, Waheed does just this, bringing us inside the 2015 Million Man March, #FeesMustFall, and Carnival in Bahia, as well as Brooklyn’s own West Indian Day Parade, Afropunk, Dance Africa, and Soul Summit.

“Every image in this book was photographed at a large public event,” Waheed says. “What ties them together is the celebration of black and brown cultures and the resistance of conformity, oppression patriarchy, etcetera. Music, dance, art and other forms of passionate expression are elements that are interwoven throughout.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Japan, Latin America, Photography