Nan Goldin: The Beautiful Smile

Posted on April 13, 2018

Nan Goldin’s photographs are filled with spirits and ghosts, becoming vestiges of lives lived, loved, and lost. They are evidence of we who once were and no longer are, here today, gone tomorrow – were it not for her art.

Over the past five decades, Goldin has created a body of work so iconoclastic and powerful that she has spawned generations of artists who follow in her footsteps, from Juergen Teller to Wolfgang Tillmans and Corinne Day. Goldin first picked up the camera in 1968 at the age of 15, using photography as a means to deal with life following her older sister Barbara’s suicide just four years earlier.

By 1973, she had her first solo exhibition in Boston, wherein she showed the world her travels through the city’s gay and transsexual communities in a series of black and white photographs that are stunningly timeless – yet prescient, as Goldin always is.

“My desire was to show them as a third gender, as another sexual option, a gender option,” Goldin told Stephen Westfall in a 2015 interview for BOMB magazine. “And to show them with a lot of respect and love, to kind of glorify them because I really admire people who can recreate themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly. I think it’s brave.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

George Rodriguez: Double Vision

Posted on April 11, 2018

L: Los Angeles, 1992. R: Eazy-E, Burbank, 1980s. “He was a cute little guy but was real solid. He looked very powerful. The times I saw him he was always with a different pretty girl. Whenever N.W.A. would come to my studio in Burbank, across from NBC, they’d come by way of Taco Bell.” © George Rodriguez

There are many sides to LA. But few people travel between the realms that were separated during the first half of the 20th century when the Great Migration and post-war Mexican immigration changed the face of the city.

Photographer George Rodriguez is the rare artist who has thrived between Hollywood and Chicano LA for more than half a century. Born in 1937 to a Mexican immigrant father and a Mexican-American mother, Rodriguez has spent his life creating a body of work that captures the many facets of life in LA—from the glittering stars of music, TV, and film to the leaders and activists of the Civil Rights, United Farm Workers, and Chicano movements.

From an archive that includes everyone from Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the Brown Berets to Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, and N.W.A., Rodriguez has partnered with author Josh Kun to publish his first career retrospective Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez (Hat & Beard Press, April 10). An exhibition of photographs from Double Vision will open at The Lodge in Los Angeles on May 26. I spoke with Rodriguez about creating art of the fabled city during some of its most incendiary years.

Read the Full Story at Vice Online

L: Lincoln Heights, 1969. R: Cesar Chavez , Delano, 1969. © George Rodriguez

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Photography, Vice

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick: Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex

Posted on April 9, 2018

Chandra McCormick. YOUNG MAN, ANGOLA STATE PENITENTIARY, 2013. © Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun

At 7,300 hectares, the Louisiana State Penitentiary – the largest maximum-security prison in the United States – is home to 6,300 prisoners. The inmates are forced to work the land under the 13th Amendment of the constitution, which legalises slavery in the case of incarceration.

The penitentiary is one of the most prominent examples of how slavery has evolved in the United States, a nation that leads the world in profiting off the prison industrial complex. With more than 2.2 million people living behind bars, America accounts for 25 per cent of the prisoners on earth, despite having just 5 per cent of the world’s population.

Commonly known as “Angola,” the penitentiary took its name after the country of origin for countless men, women, and children who were brutally enslaved and brought against their will to work on the pre-Civil War plantation where the prison now sits. The prison has another nickname, just as evocative: it is called “The Farm” to describe the labour inmates are forced to work, generating as much as 1,814 metric tons of cash crops every year.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Chandra McCormick. MEN GOING TO WORK IN THE FIELDS OF ANGOLA, 2004. © Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun

Keith Calhoun. OUR CHILDREN ENDANGERED, THE NEW PREY FOR PRISON BEDS, NEW ORLEANS, 1982. © Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun

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

Lukas Birk: Burmese Photographers

Posted on April 5, 2018

Actor Kyaw Thu. Taken by U Sann Aung, USA Photo Studio, Yangon 1989/1990

Calendar photographs taken by Har Si Yone, Bellay Photo Studio, Yangon 1970s

The Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar has long been shrouded in mystery and intrigue. Formerly known as Burma, the country sits on the Bay of Bengal where it lies nestled between India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, and China, and has been subject to invasions for the better part of the past millennia.

For the past six decades, it has been ruled by a military dictatorship that has worked to keep its borders closed. “We have this idea that the country was closed off from the world and to some extent it was – but certain things always come through,” Austrian photographer and archivist Lukas Birk reveals.

In 2013, Birk launched the Myanmar Photo Archive (MPA) to create a comprehensive archive of Burmese photographers working between 1890 and 1995. Featuring some 10,000 photographs, it provides an inside look at the nation through the eyes of its citizens. A selection of the work is showcased in the new book, Burmese Photographers (Goethe Institut Yangon), which includes fascinating chapters on youth culture between 1970 and 1990.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Calendar photographs taken by Har Si Yone, Bellay Photo Studio, Yangon 1970s

Actors Kyaw Thu & Moh Moh Myint Aung. Taken by U Sann Aung, USA Photo Studio, Yangon 1989/1990

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

A Portrait of Mickalene Thomas

Posted on April 5, 2018

“Lovely Six Foota” (2007). C-Print 61.6 x 76.2 cm, Edition 1 of 6, with 2 APs© Mickalene Thomas

Imagine a radiant black woman pictured larger than life, her eyes, lips, and afro exquisitely detailed in rhinestones so that she sparkles and shines. She is a vision of luminosity that draws you in, set upon a pastiche of vintage patterns that evoke the spirit of the 1970s. She is the Foxy Brown and Beverly Johnson residing within black women everywhere.

She is the vision of African-American artist Mickalene Thomas, whose magnificent portraits have been taking the art world by storm for the past two decades. Drawing from a wealth of art historical and pop culture sources, Thomas creates mesmerising paintings, collages, photographs, videos, or installations that stand as a testament to female beauty, sexuality, and power.

Thomas’ layered portraits, interiors, and landscape works explore the relationship between representation, identity, and gender, providing a dynamic space for reflection, contemplation, and celebration of the female form – one that is infinitely attuned to the ways in which a work of art can become both a public and private space for communion.

Here, Thomas shares the people and experiences that informed her work, providing insight into her process and perspective that has made her one of the most influential artists of our time.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

“Portrait of Lovely Six Foota” (2007). Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel 152.4 x 121.9 cm. © Mickalene Thomas

Hair Portrait #9” (2013). Rhinestones and acrylic on wood panel, 121.92 x 101.60 cm. © Mickalene Thomas

Categories: Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Women

Stranded in the Jungle: Jerry Nolan’s Wild Ride

Posted on April 4, 2018

L.A.M.F. cover sessions. Left to right: Billy Rath, Walter Lure, Jerry Nolan, Johnny Thunders, August 1977© Roberta Bayley

Hailing from Brooklyn, back when it was still a gang town, Jerry Nolan (1946-1992) was an indisputable force in shaping the look and sound of the city’s biggest glam and punk rock bands. As the drummer for The New York Dolls and The Heartbreakers, Nolan set the pace, crafting the face of hard rock during the 1970s – a distinctive combination that was at once raw, rough and rugged, yet highly dandified and charismatic.

“Jerry saw Elvis when he was really young, back in 1956. It reminded him of the gangs he saw in New York,” says Curt Weiss, author of Stranded in the Jungle: Jerry Nolan’s Wild Ride – a Tale of Drugs, Fashion, The New York Dolls, and Punk Rock (BackBeat Books), which released its Kindle edition yesterday. “For Jerry, gangs and rock and roll were interchangeable. It was a secondary family. He never had a dad; his mother kept divorcing, remarrying, and moving around. The only constant men in his life came through gangs or music.”

Nolan, who had learned to sew and cut hair, created what he described as a “profile,” which allowed him to stand above the crowd. “People thought he was in a band even when he wasn’t,” Weiss notes. But soon enough, he was. He joined The New York Dolls in 1972 after drummer Billy Murcia died of asphyxiation following efforts to revive him after a drug overdose while on tour in England.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Dolls “reunion” at Gem Spa, left to right, Johnny Thunders, Sylvain Sylvain, Jerry Nolan, Arthur Kane, David Johansen, August 1977© Roberta Bayley

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Books, Music

David Goldblatt: Structures of Dominion and Democracy

Posted on March 29, 2018

Soweto: Young men with dompas, White City, Jabavu. © David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt was just 18 years old when the National Party was elected to power in South Africa – a group which institutionalised legal segregation that systematically exploited and oppressed the majority black nation. His new book, Structures of Dominion and Democracy (Steidl) begins in 1949 and continues through 2016, taking us across a sweeping arc of history that is sensitive to the ways in which apartheid penetrated every aspect of life for men, women, and children, both black and white.

In Goldblatt’s hands, the camera became a tool that allows him to not only record the moment, but to be an extension of the event itself. “This strange property of the photograph… creates tension,” he writes in an essay titled “Why and What” at the beginning of the book. “It pulls between a heightened awareness of reality and a growing recognition of its possible photograph. For me, this tension is part of the excitement.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Soweto: Margaret Mcingana at home on a Sunday afternoon, Zola. As Margaret Singana she became a famous singer. She died on 22 April 2000 at the age of 63. © David Goldblatt

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Photography

Ed Templeton: Hairdos of Defiance

Posted on March 23, 2018

Californian photographer Ed Templeton gives us a preview of his upcoming exhibition featuring 20 years worth of photos of the Mohawk

Hailing from southern California, Ed Templeton got into the punk and skateboard scene in 1985. At that time, the aesthetics of rebellion were becoming codified as politics and style become strongly intertwined. Perhaps the most visible symbol of rebellion was Mohawk, a hairstyle that took its name and style from an Iroquois tribe residing in Quebec and New York.

Composed of a series of carefully crafted spikes of hair running down the center of a shaved head, often dyed bright colors like orange, blue, and green, the Mohawk brazenly respectability politics and polite society. By radically altering their appearances to signify displeasure, disgust, and rejection of the status quo, punks firmly drew a line in the sand, one that squares found intolerable and rude.

Templeton, however, understood that Mohawks were a message about authenticity in a fake world. In celebration, Roberts Projects in Culver City, CA, presents Hairdos of Defiance, an exhibition of 42 photos made in the U.S. and Europe over the past 20 years accompanied by a book from Deadbeat Club. Like his 1999 book and exhibition Teenage Smokers (Alleged Press), Templeton looks at the ways that kids revel in acts of disobedience to establish their independence and refusal to conform. Here, Templeton speaks about how the Mohawk has become a symbol of opposition, integrity, and self-determination for more than forty years.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Morgan Ashcom: What the Living Carry

Posted on March 19, 2018

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” American writer William Faulkner wrote in the 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, recognising the long shadows that hang over us. A Mississippi native and Nobel Prize laureate, Faulkner’s words speak a profound truth about the American South, a land shrouded in myth and mystery, where illusion and reality are forever intertwined in the tales people tell.

Photographer Morgan Ashcom, a native of Free Union, Virginia, understands this underlying truth: our stories have just as much (if not more) influence on our identity than the facts themselves. Like Faulkner, Ashcom understands that the South is not so much a “geographical place” as it is an “emotional idea,” one which he deftly explores in What the Living Carry, a new exhibition currently on view at Candela Books + Gallery to time with the publication of a monograph by the same name from MACK Books.

What the Living Carry tells the story of life in a fictional Southern town named Hoys Fork, where memories of the past perfume the air like bouquets of magnolias blossoming on the trees. The town is nestled in the landscape, a timeless space that evokes the myths of how the country was formed, driven by a belief in Manifest Destiny: that people are entitled to take what is not rightfully theirs.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Duncan Hannah: Twentieth Century Boy

Posted on March 15, 2018

Duncan Hannah with his painting My Funny Valentine, 1981

When Duncan Hannah arrived in New York in 1971, he could have walked out of the pages of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. With big eyes and high cheekbones, Hannah’s androgynous beauty attracted the attention of the city’s prominent women and gay men, who didn’t let his resolute heterosexuality get in the way of their relentless pursuit.

As an aspiring artist coming of age during a mythical time when glam rock, punk, and new wave transformed the underground, Hannah found himself at the center of it all, feeding an insatiable appetite for the finer things in life: sex, drugs, alcohol, parties, and art. Whether partying with Television at CBGB, starring in Amos Poe’s underground film Unmade Beds, or serving as a muse to Patti Smith, Hannah was always in the mix.

Throughout it all, he kept a series of handwritten journals filled with cameos by everyone from David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, and Debbie Harry to Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Nico, and Lou Reed. Their pages, filled with gritty, evocative memories from the 70s, were collected and edited into Hannah’s new book, Twentieth Century Boy: Notebooks of the 1970s (Knopf, March 13).

VICE asked Hannah to take us on a tour of New York through its most debauched decade—an era when punk became a catalyst for cultural revolution.

Read the Full Story at Vice

The Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and Duncan Hannah (second from right) at The Factory. Photographed by Lance Loud, 1976

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Manhattan, Vice

Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself

Posted on March 9, 2018

At 80 years old, American photographer Joel Meyerowitz is still going strong, forging a singular path that has taken him around the globe several times over. Hailing from East Bronx, Meyerowitz began his career as a street photographer, capturing the curious, quirky moments that reveal themselves as quickly as they disappear.

Today, Meyerowitz now finds himself living on a farm in Tuscany, amassing an archive of 50,000 photographs in just about every genre imaginable. “How come I found myself here, living in Italy and making still lifes when I am a street photographer Jew form New York City? What am I doing here?” Meyerowitz laughs.

He set out to answer this question in Where I Find Myself (Laurence King), a career retrospective presented in reverse chronological order. Here, Meyerowitz takes us on a magical journey from the present into the past, guiding us through the many chapters of his well-lived life.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online