Posts from the “Books” Category

Peter van Agtmael: War in the 21st Century

Posted on March 30, 2021

*9/5/20. Protesters taunt militia members who had marched on the Breonna Taylor memorial. Louisville, Kentucky. © Peter Van Agtmael*

On January 17, 1991 a coalition of 35 nations led by the United States invaded Iraq launching the Gulf War, codenamed Operation Desert Shield — the largest military alliance since World War II. Over five weeks, the allied powers waged one of the most intense aerial bombing campaigns in military history, dropping some 85,000 tons on Iraq and broadcasting select strikes as seen from far above, creating the image of war as video game.

“As Operation Desert Storm erupted last week, there was only one unequivocal victor in the first days of war: the Cable News Network,” Variety reported on January 20, 1991. In just one month, the 10-year-old cable news service gained global prominence by live broadcasting from the frontlines into 10.8 million U.S. homes. Among those watching was future Magnum Photos member Peter van Agtmael, then a fifth grade student living with his family in Bethesda, Maryland.

“What I remember most vividly were videos showing air strikes and smart bombs filmed from the airplanes,” he says of the powerfully crafted propaganda produced by the U.S. government – a far cry from the horrific reportage witnessed during the Vietnam War. “It was about how accurate the weaponry was and avoiding civilian casualties, and to my mind, I believed it. I didn’t have any critical thinking skills at that point and I didn’t come from a politically radicalized family that was trying to puncture the myth by questioning what was going on.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*A gardener of a small health clinic in Garmsir, Helmand. Afghanistan, 2009. © Peter Van Agtmael*

*Marines swim in an irrigation canal at their outpost south of Garmsir in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2009. © Peter Van Agtmael*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes from a Disappeared City.

Posted on March 29, 2021

*Provisional Notes from a Disappeared City © Reynaldo Rivera*

“The only decade I feel nostalgic for is the ‘70s,” says photographer Reynaldo Rivera from his Los Angeles home. “There’s a dreamlike thing in my psyche about the ‘70s as this magical time even though I had this horrifying experience. My father kidnapped me and my sister, took us to a village in Mexico, and left there from ‘69 to ’75. It’s like an Oliver Twist story. This lady took us in and used to sing Toña la Negra songs. Music was my babysitter at a time when I would have had mother, my aunts and uncles.”

After singing a few lyrics to Toña la Negra’s bolero “Arráncame La Vida” Rivera shares the translation by text: “Rip the life from me / With your last love kiss / Tip it, take it, tale me heart / Rip me life and in case the pain hurts you / I must be from not seeing me / Because at the end, your eyes, I took with me.”

“This is what influenced me,” Rivera says. “Music opened the door that allowed me to create an environment where I’d want to take photos. Being into all this Mexican super tragic music created this baroque me, this person that’s over the top emotional. From Toña la Negra, and later Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, I sought answers that told me to take a beating and still love it!”

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

Iringó Demeter: She is Warm

Posted on March 26, 2021

Hailing from a tiny Transylvanian village of just 200 people, London-based photographerIringó Demeter remembers growing up surrounded by nature and animals. “It was very lonely but that pushed me to observe and question everything around me,” Demeter tells AnOther. “I relate to being an observer: looking at things as they happen, listening to them, and wondering why they are that way. A piece of grass blowing in the wind – there is so much beauty and so much quietness about it.”

Demeter’s fascination with nature serves her well in the creation of a series of female nudes brought together in the new book She Is Warm (Libraryman). Included as number 12 of the publisher’s quarterly Seasons Series, which draws inspiration from Kim Ki-duk’s seminal film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring, the book showcases Demeter’s original perspective on the nude, one rooted in the idea that our bodies are our first home.

Over the past four years, Demeter has amassed a collection of works crafted from what could be described as “slow” photography. “I would never carry a camera,” she says. “I look at all of these things, then maybe a day or a year later I photograph a body and think back on that experience. I work with single images. I always say that if I take away one good image, I am happy. I don’t have expectations that every it has to be good – no, that’s way too much pressure. I focus on single images and when I have it, I’m like this is great!”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Photography, Women

Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood

Posted on March 24, 2021

*Emine Dressed Up for Republic Day, Trabzon, Turkey, 1965 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

“I didn’t have the happiest home life or childhood, so I think that gave me a feeling of justice and passion for people that don’t have all the breaks,” Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015) said in 2010 on KOBRA SVT, Swedish National Television.

“I think it was important to me to be free and wander the world and not have a family,” Mary Ellen Marks added. “I think if you don’t come from a happy home, maybe you don’t want to tie yourself down. I always wanted to be completely free. Even from the time that I was like eight years, seven years old, I remember walking home from grade school thinking, When am I going to get out of here? I’ve got to be free. So the freedom was always a major thought for me, a major plan.”

That desire for freedom became the driving force in the artist’s life. Having no children of her own, Mark was able to dedicate herself wholly to the creation of an extraordinary archive of work, selections from which were recently published in the three-volume monograph, The Book of Everything (Steidl), published at the end of last year and edited by film director Martin Bell, Mark’s husband and collaborate for 30 years.

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*Amanda and her cousin Amy. Valdese, North Carolina, 1990 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

*Brooke and Billy at Gibbs Senior High School prom. St. Petersburg, Florida, 1986 © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation*

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

Harvey Stein: Then and There – Mardi Gras 1979

Posted on March 12, 2021

In January 1979, American photographer Harvey Stein quit his job at a Madison Avenue advertising agency to pursue his dream of being a photographer. After publishing his first book, Parallels: A Look at Twins, the previous fall, Stein was ready to strike out on a path all his own. To celebrate leaving the business world behind Stein and fellow photo buddies Bruce Gilden, Charles Gatewood, and Jim Colman decided to travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras that February.

“As I recall, the shooting was non-stop, all day,” Stein says. “There was high energy everywhere. I wanted to document exuberant public behaviour, nudity, and high spirits. This was prevalent. I photographed mostly in the French Quarter – I thought that part of the city was charming, with narrow streets and small-scale buildings. Altogether it was a wonderful trip.”

Under the bright light of daytime, Stein used his Leica M-4 to create a series of black and white street photographs capturing the decadence of America’s most famous carnival. At dusk, Stein took out his Polaroid SX-70 camera to make intimate street portraits of people adorned with face paint and masks, published for the first time in the new book Then and There: Mardi Gras 1979 (Zatara Press).

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Jim Goldberg: Fingerprint

Posted on March 11, 2021

*Jim Goldberg. Wea, Near Hollywood Boulevard. Los Angeles, California. USA. 1988-1994. © Jim Goldberg | Magnum Photos*

From 1985-1995, Jim Goldberg worked on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco getting to know a number of homeless teens, building the relationships that would come to form the basis of Raised by Wolves, the groundbreaking monograph that redefined commonly held notions of documentary work. Weaving together photographs, handwritten notes, drawings, snapshots, found objects, and ephemera into a majestic tapestry, Goldberg crafted a brutally compelling portrait of troubled youth struggling to survive.

Through the stories of protagonists Tweeky Dave and Echo, Goldberg provided visibility, and a voice, to at-risk teens at a time when they were alternatively vilified and marginalized, or erased from most peoples’ awareness, allowing the subjects to control the narrative.

The dazzling sunshine of Southern California and noirish shadows it cast made the perfect visual backdrop for a tale of adolescent antiheroes driven from their homes, fending for themselves on the streets. “The stories that they created about themselves were based on Hollywood, rock and roll, and love stories. Their family on the street was a movie in itself. They were in Hollywood and San Francisco, too. They would flow back and forth and be the new James Deans or Johnny Rottens.”

Read the Full Story at Magnum Photos

*Jim Goldberg. Schemer and Cupcake, Near Hollywood Boulevard. Los Angeles, California. USA. 1988-1994. © Jim Goldberg | Magnum Photos*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Magnum Photos, Photography

Mitch Epstein: Property Rights

Posted on March 11, 2021

*Ashton Clatterbuck, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania 2018, dye coupler print, © Mitch Epstein*

It wasn’t until photographer Mitch Epstein traveled to India in the 1980s that he began to understand what it means to be an American. By putting distance between himself and the United States, Epstein began to develop a deeper sense of his cultural identity. His travels to Vietnam in the early 1990s became a turning point, deepening the political dimension of his work. From that point forward, Epstein began to confront the political underbelly of American history in a series of projects made throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Although Epstein did not set out to create a trilogy, in retrospect he recognizes the thread that weaves through the cycle that began with Family Business, an intimate story about the cost of pursuing the illusory American Dream. Afterwards, Epstein expanded his perspective in a study of American Power and most recently with Property Rites, an exhibition and soon to be released book that ultimately reckons with the call to resistance on the home front.

Epstein does not consider himself an environmental photographer, but the stories he shares offer entrees into American histories that have largely been erased from view. “I don’t have a political agenda or a preconceived operandi in my head when I’m making the pictures,” Epstein says. “It’s not useful to me to be at service to the ideas I already have in my head. That’s an artistic handicap. But in the end I’m clear about the importance of taking responsibility of the work, to contextualize and position it without denying its own enigma. I’m not explaining it.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Tree of Life Synagogue Memorial, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 2018 © Mitch Epstein*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Mona Kuhn: Works

Posted on March 8, 2021

As a young girl coming of age in 1980s Brazil, Mona Kuhn discovered the power of photography when she received a Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera for her 12th birthday. “Photography is a modern, fast-paced medium and in a way that is what I like because I have a very restless side to me – but at the same time it scares me,” Kuhn tells AnOther in advance of the April 6 publication of Mona Kuhn: Works (Thames & Hudson), her first retrospective monograph chronicling a quarter century of work, selections from which are now on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York.

Since she was a teenager, Kuhn had been drawn to figurative work, particularly that of painters including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. After meeting Braziian artist Mário Cravo Neto, who used figurative photography to investigate the Afro Brazilian heritage and mysticism in Bahia, Kuhn embarked on her first study of the human form.

“I always wanted to go against how fast-paced the medium is, and work with nudes as a way of stopping time,” Kuhn reveals. “I was interested in the nude because it wasn’t limited by fashion; it was open-ended. It was not an easy thing because nudes have been done a lot, maybe in ways I do not think are best. At the time I was in college, in the early 90s, Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts were iconic, but it was not how I wanted it to be.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

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

Joe Conzo: Born in the Bronx

Posted on March 5, 2021

“Never give up! That’s my call to everything in life,” says Nuyorican artist, activist, and author Joe Conzo. The former FDNY EMT – who was buried under 9/11 rubble – is a survivor in every sense of the word. After recently battling and beating cancer of the pancreas and liver brought on by conditions at Ground Zero, Conzo made the front page of the January 26 Daily News after taking on Glacier Equities, a real estate firm that in November 2020 purchased the Bronx building where Conzo has lived since 1991.

Two days before Christmas, Conzo and dozens of residents across the Bronx and Inwood received a letter informing them they were being evicted during a pandemic, and given just 90 days to find a new place to live as of January 31. “Getting the letter was like being told again, ‘We found cancer in your body,’” Conzo says.

But Glacier Equities had met its match; Conzo is Bronx royalty. His grandmother, Dr. Evelina López Antonetty (1922-1984), was an activist affectionately known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx” who let politicians know: “I don’t work for you. You work for me. You do for us first and then we will do for you.” An educator unafraid to take on the establishment, Dr. Antonetty founded United Bronx Parents (UBP) in 1965 to fight for equal opportunities for the poor, the fruits of her labour resulting in bilingual education nationwide and school meal programs for impoverished children.

“My grandmother died fighting. Same thing with my mother,” Conzo says of Lorraine Montenegro who took the helm of UBP after her mother’s death and passed in 2017 as a result of the lack of government support in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Today, two adjacent Bronx street corners bear their respective names, honouring the work they did to help the people of the community.

“I’m still fighting – and it’s not by choice,” Conzo says with a laugh. “It’s like that line in The Godfather III, ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me backed in!’ It’s about education and standing up for your rights. If you do your due diligence, you’ll come out on top. I don’t care how big Goliath is.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Bronx, Dazed, Music, Photography

Ebony: Covering Black America

Posted on March 5, 2021

Throughout the twentieth century, most mainstream U.S. publications were reticent to bring more than one — if any — Black photographers on staff, resulting a biased depiction of the issues facing the Black America. Understanding the truth in journalist H. L. Mencken’s dictum, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one,” businessman John Harold Johnson founded the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago in 1942 to provide Black America with media made by, for, and about the community.

In 1945, the Johnson Publishing Company launched Ebony, which quickly became Black America’s answer to LIFE magazine. Rather than appropriate white culture, Ebonyoffered an inside view into a striving Black bourgeois through a series of photo essays and features on celebrities and current events. For 75 years, Ebony was the forerunner of Black American culture, chronicling the times, and offering a visual history of the nation from segregation through Civil Rights, and beyond.

“As one of the few individuals who know of a world before Ebony, let me tell you, John Johnson’s magazine was a game-changer, and remains one to this day,” retired educator Hazel S. Red says in Lavaille Lavette’s sumptuous new book Ebony: Covering Black America (Rizzoli New York). “It has been a vehicle by which we have maintained our dignity and sanity through our efforts to achieve true justice and equality for all.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

Michael Grecco: Punk, Post Punk, New Wave – Onstage, Backstage, In Your Face, 1978-1991,

Posted on March 5, 2021

Bow Wow Wow #2, Boston, Massachusetts, 1981 © Michael Grecco

“Punk, in a strange way, saved my life,” musician Lizzie Borden says in Punk, Post Punk, New Wave: Onstage, Backstage, In Your Face, 1978-1991, a breathtaking collection of 162 photographs by Michael Grecco accompanied by essays by Fred Schneider of The B-52sand music journalist Jim Sullivan.

By the age of 13, Borden — who shares her birth name a woman who allegedly killed her family with an axe — was rocking at CBGB, the epicenter of New York’s burgeoning punk scene. “It was filthy, it was raw. It was sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, and the bathrooms were disgusting,” she told Sullivan. “It was a group of people that not everyone wanted to join, but once you were in you were family….We would be up all night. Drugs, no sleep, more drugs. We lived in the streets. We squatted in Alphabet City. We lived punk rock.”

With “Do It Yourself” as the guiding ethos, punk encouraged all comers to make art without catering to careerist ambitions, commercial markets, or capitalist pretense. Stripped down to its bare essentials, punk was loud, angry, and raw — capturing the angst of adolescence and the disdain for the privileged politic of hippie ideology. With punk, anyone possessed with the audacity of youth could grab a guitar, jump on stage, thrash three chords, and howl at the moon.

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*Poison Ivy, The Cramps, Boston, Massachusetts, 1980 © Michael Grecco*

*Siouxsie and the Banshees, Boston, Massachusetts, 1980 © Michael Grecco*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Blind, Books, Music, Photography