Posts from the “Books” Category

Evenlyn Hofer: New York

Posted on January 15, 2019

Three boys at the front door, 1975 © Evelyn Hofer: New York, published by Steidl.

There are moments when you find yourself gazing upon a photograph feeling as though you were there. In the silence of the still image, you can feel the breeze caress your hair as the steady of flow of traffic hums along. The sun warms your back as you take it all in. It’s like you are there; of course, you are not, but the image gets transferred into your memory anyway. You now have a memory of witnessing something someone else saw, and all of the attendant emotions it caused. Can you be nostalgic about someone else’s life? It’s the question that comes up time and again in Evelyn Hofer: New York (Steidl).

The monograph itself, begins with a reference to an older time, drawing inspiration from the classic 1965 book New York Proclaimed, which features an in-depth essay by V. S. Pritchett and photos by Hofer before moving on to include a selection of previously unpublished photos made during early ‘70s throughout. Evelyn Hofer’s New York is the city of one who knows it well, who traverses its streets, parks, and bridges. It is the landscape of a True Yorker who loves it all: the glass and steel, the flesh and bone, the lives to be found everywhere you look.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Santo Domingo in New York, 1964 © Evelyn Hofer: New York, published by Steidl.

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

Patti Smith: Wing

Posted on January 15, 2019

Patti Smith (1946) Patti at William Burroughs Grave, Lawrence, Kansas, May 2013 Silver gelatin print Photo by Lenny Kaye. Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York.

In the early 1970s, Patti Smith travelled to Mexico with a Polaroid camera in hand, making photographs as components for collages, most of which have been lost to history. In the decades since, Smith returned time and again, creating a series of images and poems inspired by a feeling of kinship with the nation and its flourishing artistic community.

Now, a selection of 30 photographs is on view in Patti Smith: Wing, a celebration of creation and communion. Wing is also the title of a poem about freedom, both physical and spiritual, as well as the act of travelling independently to distant lands.

“I am not a photographer, yet taking pictures has given me a sense of unity and personal satisfaction,” Smith writes in Land 250. “They are relics of my life. Souvenirs of my wandering. All that I have learned concerning light and composition is contained within them.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Patti Smith (1946) Frida Kahlo’s corset 2, Casa Azul, Coyoacan, 2012 Gelatin silver print. Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

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

Karlheinz Weinberger: Sports

Posted on January 3, 2019

For Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006), the camera was an all-access pass into a world where men openly expressed their true selves. Best known for his photos of rebels and rockers, Weinberger pursued the masculine ideal in its many forms, including the peak athletic physiques of the sporting world. In Karlheinz Weinberger, Volume # 2, Sports (Sturm & Drang), we’re whisked away and taken into a testosterone-fueled world filled with bodybuilders, wrestlers, weightlifters, motorcyclists, and football players drenched in pools of tension and sweat.

Curator Patrik Schedler, who cared for Weinberger artistically from 2000 until his death and manages the photographic estate, explains: “Weinberger was so interested in the relationships between men, their self-expression and their beauty. With his camera, he was able to observe and work out all this very well. Weinberger said that he was able to photograph almost all the men he liked. In fact, they liked to be photographed, to show themselves, to pose.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Sheila Pree Bright: #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests

Posted on December 26, 2018

Sheila Pree Bright. 2015, Justice League NYC’s “March 2 Justice” from New York to Washington, DC, in protest of police brutality.

On November 27, Ferguson activist Bassem Masri was found unconscious on a bus in suburban St. Louis. Just 31 at the time of his death, Masri is the latest untimely death of local activists who have passed in sudden and mysterious ways.

Many will remember the murder of Deandre Joshua, just 20 years old, when his body was found with a gunshot to the head inside his car, which had been set on fire during the height of the protests against the extrajudicial assassination of Mike Brown at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson.

Then in 2016, the body of Darren Seals, 26, was found — the same manner of killing exacted upon one of the most prominent activists in the movement. But the deaths did not end there. In 2017, Edward Crawford, 27, was found shot to death in the backseat of his car, and just as recently as October 17, Ferguson activist Melissa McKinnies discovered her son, Danye Jones, 24, lynched in her backyard.

On December 3, HBO premiered Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland, a documentary film that asks, “What really happened to Black Lives Matter activist Sandra Bland?” In her death, Bland became a symbol of all that the government has done — and the ways in which the true story is hidden from view.

During the height of the protest movement, there were often photographs of men, women, and children holding signs asking, “Am I Next?” It is difficult to ignore this question paging through the book, #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests (Chronicle) by Sheila Pree Bright, a selection of which are currently on view in Radical Lens at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum through May 31, 2019.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Sheila Pree Bright. 2015, Students of Historically Black Colleges and Universities stand in solidarity with
students of University of Missouri, demanding the resignation of President Tim Wolfe.

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Chris Stein: Point of View – Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene

Posted on December 11, 2018

Legs McNeil, Anya Philips, and Debbie on the Staten Island ferry. More Punk magazine outtakes, 1976. © Chris Stein, courtesy of Rizzoli New York.

Brooklyn’s own Chris Stein took up photography in 1968, at the age of 18, and began to amass a body of work documenting New York life as the punk scene came into existence. In 1973, he met and began working with Debbie Harry, and together they founded Blondie. From this rarified position, Stein had the best view in the house, the consummate insider in the quintessential outsider scene.

His new book, Point of View: Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene (Rizzoli New York), is a visual diary of daily life during the 1970s, the rawest decade of them all. Stein takes us all the way back to his days as a student at SVA, and gives us a guided tour of a young artist coming of age in a city that was equal parts decadent and derelict, and home to characters like none before or since, be it William Burroughs, David Bowie, Divine, Andy Warhol, or the Ramones.

Much like the people who have departed the earth, Point of View is filled with iconic landmarks of the city that have since disappeared like the Fillmore East, the Women’s House of Detention, Times Square strip clubs, graffiti-covered trains, abandoned cars on the street, and the World Trade Center. They say you can’t go home again, so what’s a True Yorker to do?

Put it down in photographs and stories, so we can always remember the way we were, word to Babs. We have assembled here some of Stein’s choice photographs and stories from the book for a trip back to a time not so long ago that is so very far away.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Snuky Tate, Fab 5 Freddy, and kid punk band the Brattles, 1981. The Brattles opened for the Clash at their New York City show at Bonds on Times Square. © Chris Stein, courtesy of Rizzoli New York.

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

Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time

Posted on December 7, 2018

Eugene Richards, Grandmother, Brooklyn, New York, 1993. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

More than half a century ago: the New Journalism came of age — a style of reportage so wholly unlike what came before that made it clear the seeming “objectivity” espoused by the Western eye was blind to its own innate biases. Rather than continue to presuppose one could be disinterested in covering subjects like Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, many journalists took a stand, opting to explore the complex truths of human life during the final half of the twentieth century — including their own.

Like W. Eugene Smith before him, photographer Eugene Richards (b. 1944) used the photo essay as a means to engage with his subjects through the profound transformation that comes when human beings not only connect, but are seen, heard, understood, and able to share their lives in a holistic way.

Throughout the course of his career, Richards has focused on the essential experiences of life that are daily fodder for headlines including birth, death, poverty, prejudice, war, and terrorism. But through Richards’s lens, we come to understand just how little we know — and how deeply reliant we are upon those who do the reporting in our stead.

In Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time, now on view at the International Center of Photography through January 6, 2019, we are given a stunning trip through Richards’s life in photography. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue distributed by Yale University Press serve to remind us that we are responsible for evaluating not only the content but also the quality and caliber of the source itself. It is not enough to be talented and to have mastered technique; one must stand for something, and in doing so, use their skills in the service of the greater good.

Here, Richards shares his extraordinary journey, that includes a healthy dose of skepticism about the photograph itself.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Eugene Richards, Snow globe of the city as it once was, New York, New York, 2001. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

Eugene Richards, Wonder Bread, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1975.
Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

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

Art Kane: Harlem 1958

Posted on November 27, 2018

Photography Art Kane; Taken from Art Kane: Harlem 1958, Wall of Sound Editions

American photographer Art Kane was introduced to the idea of the “Big Picture” while serving as a member of the Ghost Army – a 1,100-man unit tasked with creating 20 battlefield deceptions, complete with dummy tanks and fake radio transmission to mislead the German Army during the 1944 invasion of Normandy. “The experience of creating something larger than life really stuck with him,” Jonathan Kane, his son, tells me.

By 1958, Kane was restless. At 27, he was the hot young art director for Seventeen magazine but he yearned to be a photographer. He got word Esquire was planning a special issue dedicated to jazz and decided to pitch his very first photography story: “A Great Day in Harlem,” which they accepted and published as the issue’s centerfold.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of this legendary group portrait, one of the most celebrated images in American history, Jonathan Kane has put together the phenomenal book, Art Kane: Harlem 1958 (out this month via Wall of Sound Editions), featuring texts by Quincy Jones, Benny Golson, and Art Kane, as well as dozens of never-before-seen photographs of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie, and Gene Krupa, among others.

“It’s exciting to see the outtakes, and also rare,” Kane reveals. “My father did not believe in outtakes. He was about his one vision. I’m normally very protective but become bigger than even his original intention. The book is a journey through that day, and a revelation of the intimacy and connections between the musicians, and what is in the mind of a young photographer doing his first major professional assignment, and how it all crystallised in the ‘Big Picture.’”

Here, in an excerpt from the book, Art Kane looks back on this moment in time, as history was being made on the streets of Harlem.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Photography Art Kane; Taken from Art Kane: Harlem 1958, Wall of Sound Editions

Categories: AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Janette Beckman & Cey Adams: The Mash-Up

Posted on November 27, 2018

Top: Janette Beckman | LADY PINK. Queen Latifah, New York City, 1990/2016

In the years leading up to the birth of hip hop, graffiti was sweeping the streets of New York and Philadelphia, reinventing itself on the cusp of a new millennium. No longer was it mere inscriptions from anonymous hands, but an emerging world filled with charismatic characters who took style to a level never before seen.

As tags hit the street and masterpieces appeared on the trains, graffiti’s vibrant style, innovative aesthetics, and transgressive nature made it the natural visual expression of a new DIY culture coming into its own. In the 45 years since Kool Herc began spinning breaks, graffiti and hip hop have linked up to collaborate in countless ways; perhaps most famously in the culture first feature film, Wild Style. The film starred some of the scene’s most influential writers at the time, including Lee Quinoñes, LADY PINK, ZEPHYR, and CRASH – each of whom were recently invited by artist and graphic designer Cey Adams to bring their talents to The Mash Up: Hip-Hop Photos Remixed by Iconic Graffiti Artists (Hat and Beard Press).

The Mash-Up is the brainchild of Adams, the former Creative Director of Def Jam, and British photographer J anette Beckman, whose portraits of hip hop’s greatest stars have graced countless album covers, magazines, and newspapers since she first encountered the artists in 1982. Here, some of the finest to ever wield spray can and marker remake Beckman’s classic images of everyone from Run DMC, Slick Rick, and Salt-N-Pepa to Grandmaster Flash, Queen Latifah, and Big Daddy Kane.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Janette Beckman | Claw Money. Salt-N-Pepa, New York City, 1987/2014

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Graffiti, Huck, Music, Photography

Nathan Benn: A Peculiar Paradise

Posted on November 25, 2018

The image of Florida is a curious mélange of palm trees and sandy beaches, gators and golfers on the green, and something darker lying in wait, ready to take the bait — best known to in the headlines as “Florida Man.” Peel back the cheerful veneer of “the happiest place on earth,” and what you find is something far more unusual.

Perhaps it is the draw of living in the Sunshine State that has cast Florida as the dream destination for people living across the Americas. “Whether they were snowbirds moving from the north into retirement or whether they were refugees, economic or political, from the Caribbean, Florida has always had this allure as a place of opportunity,” says Florida native Nathan Benn, who is showing photographs from his new book A Peculiar Paradise (powerHouse) at HistoryMiami Museum this winter.

“This is not like any other celebration of the state: other Florida picture books have sunsets, palm trees and beaches, and pink stucco,” Benn adds. Here, we have everything from Dundee’s 5th Street Gym, where Muhammad Ali famously trained, to Benn’s work with Frank White (a.k.a. “Dirty Harry”) at the Drug Enforcement Agency during the early days of the Drug War.

Drawing from an archive of more than 27,000 photographs taken of his home state while photographing for National Geographic Magazine over a period of 20 years, A Peculiar Paradise is a love letter to a most unusual land.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Marisa Scheinfeld: The Borscht Belt

Posted on November 25, 2018

Postcard, The Concord Hotel, Kiamesha Lake, NY, Undated.

The Borscht Belt, otherwise known as the Jewish Alps, was America’s premier getaway during the 20th century. Established in response to abject displays of anti-Semitism nationwide, the Borscht Belt consisted of resort hotels bungalow colonies, summer camps, and boarding houses nestled into the Catskill Mountains of New York state.

At its height, the Borscht Belt was the height of a glamour all it’s own — an all-inclusive vacation replete with indoor and outdoor pools, golf, tennis, skiing, ice-skating, dance, and live entertainment from no less than Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Billy Crystal, and Rodney Dangerfield. While many Jewish-Americans born before the ’80s know the area well, the 1987 film Dirty Dancing became the cultural touchstone for all who had never lived it for themselves.

But like the Rust Belt, the Borscht Belt has disappeared, lost to the massive socioeconomic shifts that have taken place in recent years. For photographer Marisa Scheinfeld, the shift quite literally hit home.

Read the Full story at Huck Online

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

eddie OTCHERE: Aaliyah – London, 1994

Posted on November 20, 2018

Aaliyah, photographed by Eddie OTCHERE

By the age of 12, Aaliyah Dana Houghton hit the big time. Her uncle Barry Hankerson, an entertainment lawyer formerly married to Gladys Knight, secured a distribution deal at Jive Records for his Blackground Records label – and signed his niece to a record deal.

Hankerson introduced Aaliyah to R. Kelly, the hottest new R&B star on the scene, who was taken with her voice after hearing her sing a cappella. Thirteen years her senior, Kelly positioned himself as a mentor, guiding his protégée to success, becoming the sole songwriter and producer of her 1994 debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number.

As soon as the album dropped rumours began to swirl. Talk of a secret marriage between Aaliyah and R. Kelly was everywhere. Both artists denied the allegations and it would be some time before Vibe magazine unearthed their Illinois marriage license issued in 1994, in which the 15-year-old singer gave the age of 18 for the certificate. The pair denied the allegations, while her parents arranged to have the marriage annulled in 1995. Aaliyah then severed all communication with Kelly and had all records of the marriage expunged.

The scandal of a secret marriage did not dampen Aaliyah’s debut. Her first single, “Back and Forth” went to number one on the R&B/hip hop chart and number 5 on the pop chart, with Madonna taking notice and sampling it for a track on Bedtime Stories, released just a few months later.

In the years since Aaliyah’s death, she continues to be the subject of intense fascination. We look back for clues of who this enigmatic artist truly was in the music, the videos, the films, the photographs, and the stories she left behind.

British photographer Eddie OTCHERE first crossed paths with Aaliyah in London in 1994, while in his second year of studying photography at the London College of Communication. Like Aaliyah, OTCHERE was at the start of his career – and now his time with Aaliyah can be seen in the new book Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop by Vikki Tobak (Clarkson Potter), which presents four decades of iconic photo shoots. Here, OTCHERE shares what it was like to photograph Aaliyah at her very start.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Aaliyah, photographed by Eddie OTCHERE

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Music, Photography