Posts from the “Books” Category

Mitch Epstein: In India

Posted on October 10, 2021

*Mitch Epstein. Ahmedabad, Gujarat, 1981.*

Coming of age in mid-century America, photographer Mitch Epstein was drawn to the mysticism and majesty of Indian culture. At Woodstock, he saw Ravi Shankar play sitar. In the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, he was transported half way around the globe. After seeing film clips of the Beatles visiting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Epstein paid $35.00 to be initiated into Transcendental Meditation in Schenectady, New York.

But it wasn’t until he met filmmaker Mira Nair, his girlfriend and later wife, that Epstein made the journey for himself. Between 1978 and 1989, Epstein took eight extended trips to India. “I was thrust into an unfamiliar world and in a healthy way, it was disorienting. I had to learn a new cultural language and build on it along the way,” Epstein says.

“That was humbling because I grew up in an era of great privilege and opportunity and took it for granted to a certain extent. Putting myself into a world that wasn’t my own, compelled me to let go of some of my perspectives as an American.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Mitch Epstein. Arabian Sea, Bombay, Maharashtra, 1983.*

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

Ruth Orkin: The Centennial

Posted on October 1, 2021

*People lying on Tanglewood Lawn, Lenox, Massachusetts, 1948 © Ruth Orkin*

At the age of 17, Ruth Orkin (1921–1985) decided to ride a bicycle from Los Angeles to New York in order to attend the 1939 World’s Fair. She made the trip in a matter of three weeks, photographing her journey along the way — a singular feat that spoke to Orkin’s ability to realize her greatest ambitions.

“Ruth had a big personality. She was very charismatic,” says her daughter Mary Engel, Director of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive, who is honoring the centennial of her mother’s birth with the new book Ruth Orkin: A Photo Spirit and exhibition “Ruth Orkin: Expressions of Life”. Working across genres, Orkin created a singular archive of mid-twentieth century life, capturing a feeling of optimism that defined the modern. Orkin’s empathic eye found its home whether photographing celebrities or strangers she encountered on the street.

Although Orkin was an unconventional mother, telling her children Mary and Andy to call her “Ruth” so she could hear them in a crowd, she never put work above her family. Although she always carried a camera around her neck, Orkin brilliantly integrated her practice into every aspect of her life to avoid any sense of intruding upon those she loved.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Geraldine Dent, Cover of McCall’s, New York City, 1949 © Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021*

*Famous Malted Milk, New York City, 1950 © Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Gillian Laub: Family Matters

Posted on September 29, 2021

*Gillian Laub, Grandpa helping Grandma out, 1999, from Family Matters (Aperture, 2021). © Gillian Laub*

On a brisk winter afternoon in 1999, Jewish-American photographer Gillian Laub stepped onto the streets of New York’s Upper East Side to enjoy a cigarette in between classes at the International Center of Photography. As she stood there, a Norwegian classmate spotted a gaggle of older women adorned in lavish furs and brightly colored lipstick walking down the block. He found them vulgar and called them as much. Gillian nodded along — until recognition struck.

“Gillian, oh my gawd, what are you doing up here?” her grandmother Bea screamed, the thick Bronx Yiddish accent filling the air like the full-bodied parfum of a potato knish served up piping hot from a sidewalk cart. Bea, accompanied by Gillian’s mother and her Aunt Phyllis, enveloped her with an effusive display of hugs and kisses, before rejoining a larger group of ladies making their weekly Upper East Side art crawl.

Gillian felt embarrassed, then defensive, wanting the Scandinavian student to understand and perhaps empathize with her family’s rags to riches story; their exuberant show of wealth — like their extravagant displays of affection — was evidence of their fierce determination to overcome prejudice and discrimination. Gillian fought back the urge to explain how a series of anti-Semitic pogroms during the Russian Revolution of 1905 split both sides of her family apart. Her great-grandparents fled Ukraine and headed to distant shores, arriving in the US in the early 20th century to make a better life for themselves.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Gillian Laub, Chappaqua backyard, 2000, from Family Matters (Aperture, 2021). © Gillian Laub*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, i-D, Photography

Bruce Davidson: In Color

Posted on September 14, 2021

*Central Park, 1991 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

As a teen coming of age, Bruce Davidson can remember his sense of color taking root in 1949. While working at a local camera store during his senior year of high school, Davidson was introduced to Al Cox Jr., a commercial photographer working in the town of Oak Park, Illinois. Cox invited Davidson to assist him with various tasks, including the painstaking process of making color prints in the darkroom. “It left an indelible impression on me at the age of seventeen,” Davidson wrote in Bruce Davidson: In Color, just re-released for the first time in five years.

After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Davidson enrolled in the Design Department at Yale University in the 1950s where he met artist and educator Josef Albers, one of the foremost color theorists of the twentieth century. “His demonstrations had an impact on me at the time but I was not yet committed to color as a way of life,” Davidson wrote.

After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, Davidson returned to New York in 1957 to resume his photography practice. Drawn to the Old World atmosphere of the Lower East Side, Davidson discovered among the pushcart vendors, tailors, and merchants a feeling of connection and community among people like his grandfather, a Polish émigré who arrived in the United States at the age of 14. Here he began making color photographs of the city as it was then — a world of immigrants who brought their culture to the streets of New York.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Chicago, 1989 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

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

Jill Freedman: Street Cops 1978-1981

Posted on September 8, 2021

*NYPD Police officers stop and search a car in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, 1979. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)*

By 1975, New York City was $11 billion dollars in debt. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the city could no longer afford to maintain basic municipal services. Enraged about proposed budget cuts, unions representing the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the New York Fire Department (FDNY) created a pamphlet titled “Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” which they passed out at local airports and hotels. On the cover, a black hooded skull smiled menacingly; inside were a list of nine “safety” tips for tourists such as “Stay off the streets after 6 P.M.” and “Remain in Manhattan.”

Unsuspecting recipients had no idea they were caught in a propaganda war waged against Mayor Abe Beame, who took the battle to court and secured a temporary restraining order to protect the “economic well-being of the city”. But the image of New York had already taken a nosedive as Hollywood and the media capitalized on the gritty glamour of a city struggling to survive.

Taking a page from the new wave of neo-realist Hollywood films, including The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the Fear City pamphlet cast New York as a den of sin, doomed but for the heroism of the boys in blue. Copaganda, as it is popularly known, is a long-standing American trope, one which found increasing popularity with the arrival of television in the 1950s with shows like Dragnet, Naked City and Peter Gunn.

By the 1970s, copaganda was everywhere, slickly produced to package violence to the masses. American photographer Jill Freedman (1939–2019) was not impressed. “I hate the violence you see on TV and in the movies. I wanted to show it straight, violence without commercial interruption, sleazy and not so pretty without its make-up,” she wrote in the introduction to her 1982 monograph Street Cops, which is being republished and exhibited this month.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*A group of boys sit on a police patrol car in Alphabet City, New York City, 1980. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)*

*Two drug dealers are arrested on 42nd Street, New York City, 1979. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, i-D, Manhattan, Photography

Sarah Schulman: Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

Posted on September 7, 2021

*The House of Color video collective. From left to right: Pamela Sneed, Robert Garcia, Julie Tolentino, Jocelyn Taylor, Wellington Love, Idris Mingott, Jeff Nunokawa © T. L. Litt*

*Kissing Doesn’t Kill © Courtesy of Gran Fury*

In 1987, the American government’s impassivity facing the AIDS pandemic led people to organize themselves in order to act. A broad coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds came together as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) — and in just six years, they changed the world.

“Five people cannot do a paradigm shift in America — you need coalitions to make change,” says Sarah Schulman, author of the new book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, which brings together more than 200 interviews with ACT UP members to create a masterpiece of activist history and tactics.

Together the members of ACT UP waged a multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They played offense, taking charge in a wide array of actions that included storming the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Washington, DC, and battling The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry to get results.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Mark Lowe Fisher’s funeral. From left to right: Tim Lunceford, Joy Episalla, BC Craig, Vincent Gagliostro, Scott Morgan, Eric Sawyer (partial) (Photographer unknown)*

*Tim Bailey’s political funeral, with Joy Episalla in the van, June 30, 1993 © Donna Binder*

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

John Benton Harris: Walking London 1965-1988

Posted on September 6, 2021

Hailing from the South Bronx, John Benton-Harris dreamed of being a pilot or a Method actor – then he discovered photography at age 14 and found his calling.

Now 81, the photographer traces his foundation to Edward Steichen’s seminal photography exhibition, Family of Man, which he saw at Museum of Modern Art in 1955. “It motivated me to focus on the human condition and to try to explain men to men, and to myself, at the same time,” he says.

In 1962, Benton-Harris “sort of gate-crashed” art director Alexey Brodovitch’s evening classes at the New York Institute of Photography. “He was criticizing everyone’s work,” Benton-Harris remembers. “He picked up my work and said, ‘He understood what this project was about.’ Then he looked up to say, ‘Who the hell are you?’”

Read the Story at Huck

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

Ernest C. Withers: I’ll Take You There

Posted on August 30, 2021

*Double Exposure of a Nighttime March © The Ernest C. Withers Family Trust; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles*

Working at a time when mainstream American publications rarely hired Black photographers,Dr. Ernest C. Withers, Sr. (1922 – 2007) made a way. His work, on view in the exhibition “I’ll Take You There” and new book The Revolution in Black and White: Photographs of the Civil Rights Era by Ernest C. Withers (CityFiles Press) provides a look at Black life in the American South during the height of Civil Rights Movement.

Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, Williams became one of the first nine Black police officers to join the force in 1948 after serving in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Although Withers was given a uniform, patrol car, and gun, he was forbidden to patrol white communities or arrest white folks. His power was proscribed strictly within the confines of Black Memphis, during the height of segregation.

Off duty, Withers photographed the same community, documenting the fabled Beale Street music scene, the birthplace of Memphis Blues icons like B. B. King. After getting caught selling liquor illegally, Withers left the force to work as a freelance photographer. He shot for the Tri-State Defender, the Memphis offshoot of Chicago’s famed Black newspaper and legendary photo magazines Ebony and Jet, while also working as Stax Records’ official photographer for 20 years.

Withers’ business cards bore the slogan “Pictures Tell The Story” — a philosophy he used over the course of six decades to create more than one million images. But it wasn’t until years after his death that the bombshell dropped — documents revealed Withers worked as a paid FBI informant.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Ernest Withers’s Beal Street Studio © The Ernest C. Withers Family Trust; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles*

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

Irina Rozovsky: In Plain Air

Posted on August 26, 2021

*Irina Rozovsky. Image from In Plain Air (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.*

Throughout its existence, Prospect Park’s fate has mirrored that of the city, rising and falling with the economic tides, eventually being designated a New York City Historic Landmark in 1975 and listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Most, knowing little of its extraordinary history, simply partaking in the pleasures of an oasis nestled inside the eye of the storm, a quiet escape from the madness that churns in the streets beyond its walls.

“I came to New York like millions of others, lured by a city pulsing with possibilities, where it’s not who you are or where you’re from but what you work to become,” writes Russia-born, America-raised photographer Irina Rozovsky in her book, In Plain Air (MACK), a collection of lyrical photographs made in Prospect Park between 2011–2020.

Some 17,000 years ago, Brooklyn’s luminous Prospect Park took shape as the Wisconsin Glacier receded, leaving a string of hills, kettles, and plains in its wake. At the very northeastern tip, Mount Prospect took shape, forming one of the tallest hills in Brooklyn, rising some 200 feet about sea level and providing its own private oasis just a few miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean.

During her first scorching summer in the city, where the air is so thick from pollution and humidity, it starts to bend light, Rozovsky escapes to the park where she can breathe easily among the trees and grass.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

Marvel Harris: MARVEL

Posted on August 24, 2021

*Marvel Harris. Image from MARVEL (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.*

As a teen, Dutch photographer Marvel Harris struggled with disordered eating and profound feelings of insecurity and aversion towards his body. Not understanding the root of his conflict, therapists trotted out textbook analysis, telling him: “Not wanting to gain weight, when struggling with an eating disorder, is associated with not wanting to grow up and take responsibilities.”

Recognizing this was not the source of his distress, Marvel dug deeper in search of understanding. When he gained weight, people offered compliments like, “Real women have curves,” which inadvertently got at the crux of the matter: Marvel was not a woman.

While reading about gender dysphoria in 2016, Marvel began to recognize himself and embarked on a journey to live his truth. A year later, he picked up the camera and began making a series of self-portraits documenting his experiences as a non-binary transgender artist transitioning to manhood. But something happened as he created a space for silent reflection of himself — Marvel found the path to his lifelong search for self-love and self-acceptance.

Read the Full Story at i-D

Categories: Books, i-D, Photography

Albert Watson: Creating Photographs

Posted on August 23, 2021

*Divine, New York City, 1978 © Albert Watson*

On the cusp of his 80th birthday, Scottish photographer Albert Watson has become one of the greatest photographers of our time. With more than 100 covers for Vogue, 40 covers forRolling Stone, and 100 album covers for Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Sade, Aaliyah, and Jay-Z, Watson stands alongside Irving Penn and Richard Avedon as an artist whose work has transformed the very way we see.

Since publishing his iconic photograph of Alfred Hitchcock holding a cooked goose by the neck for the 1973 Christmas issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Watson has become a veritable force of nature. Whether shooting fashion, celebrity, portraiture, advertising, landscape, still life, or fine art, Watson is equally comfortable photographing Queen Elizabeth II or Tupac Shakur.

With the recent publication of Creating Photographs, Watson offers an affordable and accessible guide to the secrets of his photography career, including, “Be bold,” “Capture the geography of the face,” “See the beauty and charisma of objects,” and “Surround yourself with good people.”

The book opens with a chapter titled, “Learning from the journey,” Watson looks back on half a century behind the camera. “I wasn’t trying to be a photographer so there was a lot I had to learn. I assumed that I should be learning technical things in the same way you learn to drive a car,” he reveals. Learning on the job, Watson discovered how things worked, what made them good or bad, and how he could make them better through the fusion of technique and creativity.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Mick Jagger in Car with Leopard, Los Angeles, 1992 © Albert Watson*

*Gabrielle Reece in Vivienne Westwood, Paris, 1989 © Albert Watson*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Fashion, Photography