Posts from the “Books” Category

Kerry James Marshall

Posted on September 19, 2017

Untitled (Curtain Girl), 2016, acrylic on PVC panel, 76 x 61 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

“Extreme blackness plus grace equals power,” Kerry James Marshall observed, revealing an essential truth of the nature of the world. From a purely aesthetic sense, black is a color and it is something more. It is both the complete absence or absorption of light. It takes in all colors of the visible spectrum becoming the amalgamation all that we know, becoming the alpha and the omega: from where we begin and to where we return.

In this way, Africa as the birthplace of humanity makes perfect sense: from blackness all colors of wo/mankind have been birthed. Black is one of the first colors used by artists painting in the caves of Europe, those prehistoric beings who intuitively understood that essential power of the hue rested in both its immediate impact and its longevity.

With homo sapiens dating back nearly 200,000 years in Africa, in the grand scheme of history it is only in recent times that some have chosen to vilify blackness. Europeans became obsessed with framing it in a negative light, crafting the idea of race as a justification for a campaign of global imperialism that systematically pillaged, enslaved, and decimated peoples of a darker hue across Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

From this we have inherited trauma rooted in profound psychosis that posits us in a position to spread truth to power. Giving voice to that which has been silenced, giving sight to that which has been distorted or erases, giving sanctuary to that which has been targeted for destruction: this is our shared responsibility. Each of us brings talents and gifts, wisdom and understanding, experiences and insights that fill in the blanks, fitting together like a puzzle of billions of pieces that reveal the image of God.

But… such a picture may never appear but that’s no reason to do what we must, for it is in our individual efforts that we light the spark of inspiration and fuel the flames of action. American artist Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama) leads by example, dedicating his life to the creation of a body of work that restores black to its rightful place.

His recent touring exhibition Mastry has claimed the space that it deserves, in the highest echelons of wealth, power, and history: the realm of fine art. In conjunction with the exhibitions, Phaidon has just released Kerry James Marshall, the most comprehensive book published on the artist.

The book is a tour-de-force, providing a comprehensive look at Marshall’s singular career and the ways in which he has used painting as a site for the writing of history. Marshall’s life itself traces the course of America over the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with the artist’s formative years deep in the heart of Dixie under the apartheid system of Jim Crow.

In 1963, his family joined the final wave of the Great Migration, moving to South Central Los Angeles, just in time to experience the horrors of the Watts riots in 1965. “By the time the riots got to where we were, it was like a carnival,” Marshall tells Charles Gaines in the book. “The violence that took place was confusing to me.… I started to see that the responsibility for my needs shifted to me as opposed to a collective. I try never to approach a thing as if I’m one hundred percent certain about what it is or what the proper response to it is supposed to be.”

Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, egg tempera on paper, 20 x 16 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, photo: Matthew Fried, © MCA Chicago

With a perspective rooted in openness and self-reliance, Marshall set forth on a journey rooted in discovery. His purpose began to take shape in 1980, when he painted A Portrait of the Artists as a Shadow of His Former Self, a work that recalls the influence of the great African American painter Horace Pippin (1888–1946). But here, Marshall began his exploration of the power of black, of the color that would come to be a signature element in his work.

He told Gaines, “This was when it started to look like there was something that could be done with the black figure, that it could be used to explore ideas that are not only relevant to picture making by itself but also to convey some of those ideas that I’d been developing about where black people fit in. Before then, apart from the self-portraits, which I’d do as an exercise, I was still doing still lifes and paintings of inanimate objects in order to figure out how to paint…. [The issue of race] really came into focus with that one painting.”

With his focus honed and his skills at the ready Marshall set forth to create a body of work depicting the African American experience in all of its complexities, a profound portrait of a people that embraces the heroism of daily life, while also underscoring the culture and its relationship to the individual.

“To recognize the diversity of Blackness (to use Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s militantly colloquial spelling) would be to recognize that there is such a place as the interzone that poet Elizabeth Alexander once termed The Black Interior – primarily a psychic space where flocks of self-actualized black subjectivites freely roam about, walkabout and roust about, “Greg Tate writes in the book.

“If you happen to own the Black Interior that belongs to Kerry James Marshall and you dare to take up the ambitious mission of rendering the interiors of the Black Whole – that loud, proud, obsidian realm saturated with oscillating frequencies, swooping modalities, spiky plateaus, swampy valleys, funky declensions, cosmic ascents, elaborate head rooms, and wickedly salty tall-tales – you have already reckoned with apprehending the liminality of American Blackness: the half hidden/half revealed qualities of that Free Bloack Thang that Duke Ellignotn believed imbued all truly black expression with a lofty and iridescent aura of transluesency, “Tate explained.

And, indeed, that one magnificent sentence is as much as masterpiece as the paintings it describes, so perfectly modulated in its nuances that the complexities of its content simply dissolve before your very eyes. It is what it is, as the classic African-American proverb recognizes.

And what it is restores balance to the earth, the soul and the spirit, the present moment and the history books. The mastry of Kerry James Marshall is a vision to behold, a marvel of necessity, desire, and self determination that leads by example and keeps the promise that possibility, when realized, is God made manifest on earth.

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

Stephen Dupont: Piksa Niugini Portraits and Diaries

Posted on September 16, 2017

Photo: Sing-Sing Performers, Goroka Show, Eastern Highlands © Stephen Dupont

It is estimated that ancient inhabitants first migrated from Africa by way of Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea (PNG) between 50,000-70,000 years. Around 7000 BC, agriculture developed in the highlands, making it one of the few areas in the world where people independently domesticated plants, and by 3000 BC, traders from Southeast Asia began to collect bird of paradise plumes native to the island.

Sharing an island with Indonesia, PNG rests just TK miles from Australia. Home to 6.3 million people, PNG is considered one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world with 848 different languages listed for the country, of which 12 have no known living speakers. PNG is also one of the most rural counties, with only 18% of its population living in urban centers. Although the nation has the sixth fastest-growing economy in the world, as of 2011, at least one third of the population lives on less than $1.25USD per day.

PNG is one of the world’s least explored countries, both geographically and culturally, making the work of Stephen Dupont even more salient and prescient in ways we cannot yet fully comprehend. His newest book, Piksa Niugini Portraits and Diaries (Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press) is a two-volume slipcased set that documents PNG’s most important cultural and historical zones: the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville, and the capital city of Port Moresby.

PNG is one of the world’s last frontiers, and Dupont’s photographs reveal a people and a place that is on the brink of detribalization. As Dupont notes, “I love this country. I didn’t think I ever would, but something here gets into your blood…. The Gardener Fellowship handed me the opportunity to take my camera, diaries, and sketchbooks into some very wild and remote places—a chance to do what I do best, be a nomad, a storyteller, and capture the beauty, mystery, and the trauma of this strange and epic land.”

Photo; Sing-Sing Performers, Goroka Show, Eastern Highlands © Stephen Dupont

Indeed, epic is the perfect word to describe the world Dupont depicts, a world that dissolves at our fingertips. With each turn of the page we venture further inside a place that is unknown from the outside. These two volumes read as a visual poem of great depth and breadth, a poem of an ancient tradition that is spoken in languages entirely too original as to be understood upon a cursory glance. Each of Dupont’s photographs requires inner stillness and silence of the mind to absorb the brilliance of a nation that has maintained a distinct identity over millennia.

The portraits, collected in a single volume, give us a look at the finished work as a cohesive whole, but it is the diaries that give us an understanding and a feeling for Dupont’s travels. We see his Moleskine notebook scanned with handwritten notes, his full contact sheets, newspaper stories, snapshots, aerial views, landscapes, all of which provide a larger context for the space the portraits occupy in the larger frame. Dupont’s typewritten journals, which appear at the end of the book, give us a means by which to situate his work. Too often we only see the finished work, never knowing the means to which the photographer had to achieve his goals. Dupont’s journals change this, and give us a greater understanding to the commitment he brings to documenting PNG.

As he explains, “I’m no anthropologist or historian; my intentions are more personal, artistic, even experimental. Through my photography and in these books I hope to capture a passing footprint of society here, to highlight detribalization and the cultural changes taking place in Papua New Guinea in 2011. It’s not just art. It’s a piece of history—photographs, observations, notes, drawings, and reflections that offer an alternative window into on one of the most intriguing and inspiring places I have ever experienced.”

First published at L’Oeil de la Photographie
April 1, 2014

Photo: Sing-Sing Performers, Goroka Show, Eastern Highlands © Stephen Dupont

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Richard Boch: The Mudd Club

Posted on September 15, 2017

Photo: Mudd Club Fashion Show, 1980. Photography Nick Taylor.

Photo: Jackie Curtis and Bowie. Photography Bobby Grossman.

The Mudd Club: the name alone embodies the mystical, mythical essence of Old York – a city where you could reinvent yourself from the ground up. All it took was ingenuity, desire, and nerve to do-it-yourself, take it to the streets and show out on the world stage.

In the fall of 1978, the Mudd Club opened its doors at 77 White Street, long before anyone referred to the triangle below Canal as “Tribeca.” Back then it was an outpost on the frontier of downtown. As manufacturing shops packed up and left town, huge industrial buildings stood bare, attracting artists who transformed these commercial spaces into studios and homes. When they needed a break, they hit the Mudd, a tiny spot that became the ultimate nightclub, bringing together people from all walks of life.

Here the No Wave rubbed shoulders with Hip Hop, while graffiti writers and post punk musicians filled the joint. Everyone from Halston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and David Bowie to Nan Goldin, Lydia Lunch, and Dee Dee Ramone could be found in the mix. This is the place where Fab 5 Freddy taught Debbie Harry to rap and no one thought twice about a white woman dropping rhymes on the mic.

From 1979 to 1983, the Mudd Club was the place to be, the ultimate scene for insiders and outsiders alike, a place where art, music, fashion, and culture completely reinvented itself with luminaries like trans model Teri Toye, drag legend Joey Arias, and performance artist Klaus Nomi sharpening the cutting edge. On any given night, something wild and wonderful was going down, whether it was a theme party like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Funeral Ball,” a reading by William S. Burroughs, or a live performance by Nico.

For two years, at the Mudd Club’s height, Richard Boch manned the door, deciding who would make it past the legendary ropes and enter the delirious den of iniquity that embodied the downtown scene at its height. As a doorman, Boch played a critical role in casting the characters you would see inside, a glorious mélange of celebrities, local legends, and underground superstars. He has just released his memoir The Mudd Club (Feral House) and speaks with us about how to throw the hottest party in New York.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Ivy crash out at Mudd Club on the second floor, 1979. Photography Alan Kleinberg

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Jeanine Michna-Bales: Through Darkness to Light – Photographs Along the Underground Railroad

Posted on September 6, 2017

Stopover. Frogmore Plantation, Concordia Parish, Louisiana, 2014

Last Fall, I found myself sitting alone in a private coach driving along a quiet road through Fort Myers, Florida. It was late in the evening, and the sky had gone dark. There were no buildings, no traffic, and very few street lights as the coach drove along through the backwoods and deep thickets of the town. I gazed out the window and was suddenly a vision called from somewhere deep within the land overcame me. I shuddered but couldn’t unsee the invisible traces of history.

I keep these things to myself. Most people are not trying to hear messages without “evidence,” and even then… Shadowboxing with lies is a losing proposition and I quit that game. I simply see who said what now, flag, and keep it moving.

But when I came across Jeanine Michna-Bales’ photographs, Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad, the vision came tumbling back. The photographs, published in a book from Princeton Architectural Press, are currently on view at the Wyandotte County Historical Museum in Bonner Springs, Kansas, and will be traveling around the nation through 2020.

Resting Place. Church Hill, Mississippi, 2015

On the Way to the Hicklin House Station. San Jacinto, Indiana, 2013

Fifteen years ago, Michna-Bales received the message and began to see, imagining in her mind’s eye what the journey along the Underground Railroad looked like to those who made the trip. She began to do the work, researching the details of the routes, scouting locations by day, and then, finally photographing them at night.

For the project, she traced a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana through the cypress swamps of Mississippi, across the plains of Indiana, and north to Canada, traveling nearly 1,400 miles to freedom. Michna-Bales shows us the American countryside as was then, as it is now, and in doing so, she reveals that time itself is an illusion. As William Faulkner understood, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”

Michna-Bales’ photographs are haunting elegies to the horrors that hide in plain sight, histories of trauma and exploitation that only the spiritually corrupt can ignore and the intellectually dishonest can diminish or deny. Her work operates on several levels at the same time. In the darkness there is cover, but there is also constant threat, where innocence and serenity lies alongside four centuries of brutality and genocide. There is heroism and bravery, courage and nobility—as well as the very real awareness that the greatest threat to this nation is homegrown, that the real terrorists pledge allegiance to the flag and will do its bidding without conscience or soul.

Moonlight Over the Mississippi. Tensas Parish, Louisiana, 2014

Look for the Gray Barn Out Back. Joshua Eliason Jr. barnyards and farmhouse, with a tunnel leading underneath the road to another station, Centerville, Indiana, 2013

Michna-Bales’ photographs are the embodiment of W.E.B. DuBois’ double consciousness: of you can only see a lyrical landscape, you do not know the truth about America. If you cannot feel the curious combination of fear and valor, you might be out of touch with the history of the nation and the debt it has yet to pay.

Through Darkness to Light is one of the most searing bodies of work made in recent years, eloquent in its ability to capture all that no longer has body or voice but blows through the air far and wide, always present even if you refuse to look.

I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now I was free.
There was such a glory over everything,
the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields,
and I felt like I was in heaven.
—Harriet Tubman

Within Reach. Crossing the St. Clair River to Canada just south of Port Huron, Michigan, 2014

All photos © Jeanine Michna-Bales.

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Marvin E. Newman: The XXL Collector’s Edition

Posted on September 4, 2017

Photo: Coney Island, 1953. © Marvin. E Newman 2017 Howard Greenberg Gallery / Courtesy of TASCHEN.

Photo: Wall Street, 1958. © Marvin. E Newman 2017 Howard Greenberg Gallery / Courtesy of TASCHEN.

Now in his 89th year, American photographer Marvin E. Newman is receiving his due as one of the finest street photographers of the twentieth century. His self-titled monograph, just released as a XXL Collector’s Edition from Taschen showcases his vibrant collection of cityscapes made in New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles—as well as in the Heartland of the nation and the outskirts of Alaska between the years 1950 and 1983.

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Newman studied photography and sculpture at Brooklyn College with Walter Rosenblum. He joined the Photo League in 1948 before moving to Chicago the following year to study with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design. “They taught you to keep your mind open and go further, and always respond to what you are making,” Newman remembered.

It was here in Chicago that Newman began to shoot in color film, doing so at a time long before the medium was recognized. His comfort with color is evident throughout his work, as it becomes a harmonizing force and a whirlwind of energy and emotion as much as light itself.

After obtaining his degree in 1952, Newman returned to New York, which was undergoing a major change in the years immediately following the war. At the same time, the artist’s eye as developing and transforming his experience of life. He observed, “I was beginning to see the world in photographic terms. You start to see everything as a rectangle of some sort and see things that you feel are just made to be photographed.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Photo: Broadway, 1954. © Marvin. E Newman 2017 Howard Greenberg Gallery / Courtesy of TASCHEN.

Photo: Broadway, 1954. © Marvin. E Newman 2017 Howard Greenberg Gallery / Courtesy of TASCHEN.

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

Claudia Andujar: Tomorrow Must Not Be Like Yesterday

Posted on September 1, 2017

Claudia Andujar, Urihi-a, 1974 [2016], Inkjet print, 90 x 134 cm
Claudia Andujar / Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil

The Yanomami of Brazil live deep inside the rainforests of the Amazon. They have lived for thousands of years on their own, free from the imperialist forces that have punished the globe. But invariably, it was only a matter of time before they were invaded too.

They survived the slave-hunting expeditions of the Spanish and Portuguese made between 1630 and 1720 that decimated other complex tribes living along the river, continuing to inhabit some 9.6 million hectares, in what has become the largest forested indigenous lands in the world.

In 1955, Swiss photographer Claudia Andujar arrived in Brazil, unable to speak Portuguese but able to communicate with her pictures. She quickly began traveling into the interior, making contact with native groups. In 1971, she reached the Yanomami, and experience that changed her life.

She became an advocate and an activist, using her photography to communicate with the outside world, to tell the story of the Yanomami and their challenges in the face of imperialist policies threatens to destroy their way of life. Her photographs have been collected in Tomorrow Must Not Be Like Today, just released from Kerber.

In the book there is a curious sequence of portraits, called Maracados, where subjects were placards bearing numbers. Andujar explains, “The Yanomami do not use names. They have large families, and so everyone is referred to by their family relationship: father, mother, brother, and so on. We created health cards, and I took their pictures. We hung signs around their necks to be able to identify each of them on the health cards.”

But there was something more, something deeper and more haunting that speaks to the photographer’s personal investment in this truth. Andujar, who was born in 1931, recounts her childhood in Transylvania, when the Nazis invaded in 1944, “No one survived from my fathers side,” she reveals. “In the camps, numbers were tattooed on their arms. These were the marcados para morrer [marked to died]. What I was trying to do with the Yanomami was to mark them to live, to survive.”

For her efforts, the Brazilian government had her removed from the land in 1978, in order to prevent her advocating for Yanomami rights to the free world. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Yanomami’s right to their ancestral territories was recognized by the government.

Through it all, Andujar has continued along her path, working to bring the plight of the Yanomami to the public eye. She explains her mission as one that not only protects the people, but the planet as well, a poignant issue raised during a time where climate change is proving to be a global level extinction event.

“For at least the last 50 years, the Brazilian government, especially during the military dictatorship, has wanted to occupy the Amazonas region, cutting down trees to exploit the soil, the wood, and it is the same today. The government also discusses liberalizing mining, which would be a disaster,” she reveals.

“My work, my photography, addresses the problem. And I certainly strongly believe that you have to maintain a balance. You cannot develop a country at all costs. The biggest problem in the Yanomami territory is currently the invasion of their land, the extraction of minerals and gold, and I am opposed to felling trees to use the land for agriculture,” Andujar adds. “I am very concerned about all of this, and I pay a lot of attention to what the Yanomami say. They say we are approaching the end of the world. My work is all about how to prevent the end of the world.”

Godspeed.

Claudia Andujar, Metrópole, 1974 [2016], Inkjet print, 100 x 150 cm
Claudia Andujar / Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Olivia Locher: I Fought the Law

Posted on August 31, 2017

Photo: In Texas it is illegal for children to have unusual haircuts. Photography Olivia Locher, published by Chronicle Books 2017

“Hey, do you know it’s illegal to have an ice cream cone in your back pocket in Alabama?” The question, posed by a friend during a photoshoot, kept echoing in Olivia Locher’s mind for months. Eventually, she hit up the Internet to check it out for herself, only to discover that this law, made during the nineteenth century, extended to the states of Kentucky and Georgia as well. Word on the street had it that thieves pulled this stunt in order to lure horses away, then plead innocent by claiming, “I didn’t steal him. He followed me!”

Ahh, those crafty Southerners – what will they think of next? Locher launched an investigation, delving into the criminal codes across the United States, digging up the dirt for I Fought the Law: Photographs by Olivia Locher of the Strangest Laws from Each of the 50 States, a new book releasing from Chronicle on September 5, which will also be exhibited at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, from September 14 through October 21, 2017.

Although many people would like to believe that laws are written to uphold moral, ethical principles, this is patently untrue. In many cases, they are written to reflect the biases of those who once wielded the power to write the rules. The USA, being a nation dedicated to states’ rights, has any number of bizarre, quirky, obscure laws on the books that few know about – as well as a host of urban legends that have captivated the public’s imagination.

For I Fought the Law, Locher compiled her favourite flagrant criminal codes and staged a series of charming photo shoots that embrace peculiar peccadillos from Arizona’s law against having more than two dildos in the house to Ohio, where it was once illegal to disrobe in front of a portrait of a man. Locher speaks with us about creating a tongue-in-chic portrait of the American outlaw.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Categories: Art, Books, Dazed, Photography

Tabloid Art History x Mythomania

Posted on August 21, 2017

Artwork: Rihanna at Crop Over 2017, Barbados // Plate from Ernst Haeckel’s ‘Kunstformen der Natur’ (‘Artforms of nature’), 1904. Courtesy of TabloidArtHistory.

“Everything has already been done,” Stanley Kubrick opined “Every story has been told. Every scene has been shot. It’s our job to do it one better.”

Perhaps this is true—perhaps it is not. It’s impossible to know that which has never existed until it takes form. But one thing is for sure, and that’s the power of myth, which speaks of human nature’s relentless desire to find a narrative that makes sense out of the chaos and complexities of existence.

We do not need to look all the way back to mythologies of yore, to the heroic, monstrous, and villainous archetypes that have inspired great art, music, and literature in all cultures across time. The classical ideals of god, mortal, and beast have so completely subsumed our conscious (and even unconscious) minds that we simply follow the script.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Prince Harry at a pool in Miami, Florida, 2014// ‘Portrait of Nick Wilder’ (detail), by David Hockney, 1966. Acrylic on Canvas, 183 x 183 cm. Courtesy of TabloidArtHistory.

Artwork: A pregnant Beyoncé amongst flowers, Mother’s Day 2017 // ‘Mary Little, later Lady Carr’ by Kehinde Wiley, oil on canvas, 30” x 24”, 2012.Courtesy of TabloidArtHistory.

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Painting, Photography

Juergen Teller: Enjoy Your Life!

Posted on August 16, 2017

If Juergen Teller had a theme song, it would be “My Way,” but not the Frank Sinatra version. No, he would make sure to subvert your expectations at every turn, and cue up the Sid Vicious cover. Like Sid, Juergen is so anti-glamour that he’s chic, always finding a peculiar beauty and joy in the uncomfortable.

His new book, Enjoy Your Life! (Steidl), published in conjunction with the recent exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, embraces the ethos the unexpected. Because what gives life a greater kick than catching you off guard with the curious and the absurd. Teller loves to hone in on things we usually ignore, or look at them from a new vantage point, demystifying their aura and allure. On the reverse, he finds a queer loveliness in things we might otherwise think a bit grotesque, savoring all of the pleasures of our strange and quixotic existence.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Photography

~~ A Tribute to Arlene Gottfried ~~

Posted on August 9, 2017

“Only in New York, kids, only in New York.”

American columnist Cindy Adams’ famed bon mot could easily caption any number of photographs in the archive of Arlene Gottfried. Whether partying in legendary 1970s sex club Plato’s Retreat, hanging out at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café with Miguel Piñero, or singing gospel with the Eternal Light Community Singers on the Lower East Side, Arlene was there and has the pictures to prove it.

“Arlene was a real New Yorker who thrived on the energy of the city, roaming the streets and recording everything she felt through a deeply empathetic and loving lens,” Paul Moakley, Deputy Director of Photography at TIME observes.

It was in her beloved city that Arlene Gottfried drew her final breath. She died the morning of August 8, after a long illness that may have taken from her body but never from her heart. In the final years of her life, she experienced a renaissance with the publication of her fifth final book Mommie (powerHouse, 2015), sell-out exhibitions at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, and the 2016 Alice Austen Award for the Advancement of Photography – all of which she attended to with a style all her own.

I put together a tribute to the legendary lady who has always felt like family to me for today’s Dazed.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Teju Cole: Blind Spot

Posted on August 8, 2017

Photo: Teju Cole, Brienzersee, June 2014. Archival pigment print, printed 2017. Description: I opened my eyes. What lay before me looked like the sound of the alphorn at the beginning of the final movement of Brahms’s First Symphony. This was the sound, this was the sound I saw.

The relationship between image and text is one of the most challenging pairings to exist. They demand complete attention and so one must choose: to look or to read—and in what order?

Perhaps it seems deceptively simple: one simply does as they are inclined. Yet regardless of preference, they inform each other, infinitely. When we read, we see the picture in our mind. When we look, we write the words ourselves. Now we are asked to forgo our imagination and focus on the given context.

Yet few can bridge the gap that exists between the linguistic and visual realms, the distinctive forms of intelligence that operate independently and interdependently at the same time. Most often, we simply opt out somewhere along the line, wanting to return to the freedom to imagine for ourselves rather than listen to what we are told.

Writer Teju Cole understands this well. As photography critic for the New York Times Magazine, Cole has mastered the painting pictures with words that illuminate and elucidate in equal part so that his words both add and peel back layers from that which appears before our eyes. As an author of Open City (2011) and Every Day is for the Thief (2014), Cole crafts entire worlds inside the written world, evoking the very experience of life itself.

Now, in his first solo show, Teju Cole: Blind Spot and Black Paper at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, on view through August 11, 2017, the writer brings us along for a journey around the world, looking at life in Capri, Zurich, Lagos, Saint Moritz, Chicago, Nairobi, Brooklyn, Seoul, and more, where we see life not only through his eyes but experience it through his prose.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Photo: Teju Cole, Zurich, November 2014. Archival pigment print, printed 2017. Description: A length, a loop, a line. Faraway wave seen from the deck of the ship. I think the Annunciation must have happened on a day like this one. Stillness. In the interior, she reads with lowered eyes, unaware of what comes next. A presence made of absence, the crossbar, the cloth, the wound in his side.

Categories: Art, Books