Posts from the “Books” Category

Mike Abrahams: Toxteth 1979-1982

Posted on January 22, 2021

*Mike Abrahams. Young men on Granby Street, Toxteth. Liverpool 8. 1982*

The Toxteth section of Liverpool is the oldest Black community in England, dating back to the American Revolution of 1776. Over the centuries, it has been home to a bustling mix of West Indian, African, Chinese, Irish, and Welsh immigrants.

But that didn’t stop racism from infiltrating the area: after World War I, white Britons blamed Black people for unemployment and housing insecurity. Their rage erupted into riots in 1919, when thousands ran amok for days. Their rampage resulted in the destruction of Black-owned properties and the death of 24-year-old Bermudan Charles Wootton, who was chased into the River Mersey by a mob, as police looked on. Police officers listed drowning as the cause of the Bermudian’s death; no one was held accountable.

The underlying bigotry continued to fester, creating tensions that resulted in a Black-led rebellion on July 3, 1981. A large crowd had gathered after word got out that an unidentified young Black man had been arrested and placed in the back of a police van.

Among those in attendance was Leroy Cooper, a 21-year-old photography student, who was violently arrested in front of the crowd, sparking nine days of civil unrest that resulted in the death of a disabled man, David Moore, 500 arrests, and the destruction of 70 buildings. The subsequent Scarman Report, which focused largely on the Brixton uprising of the same year, acknowledged that systemic issues facing Black communities in the UK were the root cause of the protests.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Mike Abrahams. Protesting against the police racist and oppressive tactics in Toxteth during the riots of 1981*

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

Godlis Streets

Posted on January 21, 2021

In 1975, New York had reached its breaking point. After years of being denied funding for essential services under the federal policy of “benign neglect,” the city was falling apart. Robberies, burglaries, and aggravated assault had spiked dramatically while the city was $34 million in debt, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford had just announced he would veto any bill calling for a federal bail out, effectively telling New York to drop dead.

Though the city had been abandoned, those who remained were shaped and molded by the struggle for survival. They were the poor, the working class, the artists and eccentrics who understood nature abhors a vacuum and remade New York into a landscape of art, culture, and music unseen before or since. Though many had fled, some like city native Godlis returned with dreams of becoming a street photographer.

Godlis got his start in photography in 1972 after seeing the Diane Arbus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art during his sophomore year at Boston University. After graduating, he studied at ImageWorks alongside famous photographers Nan Goldin and Stanley Greene, and began walking the streets of Boston — but he quickly realized the photographs he was making did not have the grit and glamour of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, or Arbus. After getting robbed, Godlis realized, of the two cities New York was clearly the safer option.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Manhattan, Photography

New Queer Photography: Focus on the Margins

Posted on January 21, 2021

As the first generation raised on the Internet, schooled by social media, and fluent in digital technology comes of age, they possess an innate understanding of how images can be used to explore and express the intricate construction of identity and selfhood. With the democratization of photography, people from around the globe are now able to author and distribute their own visual language to tell stories on their own terms, helping to usher in a new age of liberation movements.

For LGBTQ photographers working at a time when laws against homosexuality and trans rights are finally being repealed in many countries around the globe, we are entering a renaissance comparable to the Stonewall era half a century ago. By smashing the binary precepts that have plagued Western thinking for thousands of years, a new generation of queer image-makers are introducing new ways to consider the complex expression of sexuality and gender in their works.

With the recent publication of New Queer Photography: Focus on the Margins (Gingko Press), editor Benjamin Wolbergs brings together 52 international contemporary artists who use photography as a tool of activism and self-actualization. Featuring works by Dustin Thierry, Pauliana Valente Pimentel, Laurence Rasti, and Lissa Rivera, among others, the book offers a panoply of perspectives at the edges of a new frontier, pushing the boundaries of the word “queer.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Jim Goldberg: Fingerprints

Posted on January 18, 2021

*Untitled Polaroid from Raised By Wolves © Jim Goldberg*

A century after photographer Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, a harrowing portrait of urban poverty, Jim Goldberg took to the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco where he met a cadre of homeless children fending for themselves. From 1985–1995, Goldberg bore witness to chaotic reality of street life to create Raised by Wolves, a collection of photographs, snippets of conversation, handwritten notes, drawings, snapshots, and the detritus of daily life, which the Washington Post called, “A heartbreaking novel with pictures.”

The protagonists, Tweaky Dave and Echo, were charismatic but troubled youth, whose personalities, histories, and dreams leap from the page and grab you by the throat. With Raised by Wolves, Goldberg found a way inside a band of outsiders whose existence has been alternately vilified, marginalized, or erased, and restored to them a humanity that had been stripped by addiction, violence, and abuse.

The book transformed the role that photography could play as it collapsed the space between documentary and narrative fiction, revealing the endless interplay between myth, history, and identity. The people were real, their circumstances harrowing, but their stories contained half-truths and falsehoods constructed to reflect what they want or need to believe. Tweeky Dave described his devout Christian parents as a junkie slut and a biker from Hell; while untrue the slanderous depictions seemed befitting for a couple who later turned their back on their dying son.

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

Gilles Peterson: Cuba: Music and Revolution – Original Album Cover Art of Cuban Music: The Record Sleeve Designs of Revolutionary Cuba 1960–85

Posted on January 15, 2021

From rhumba to salsa, mambo to jazz, the music of Cuba has set the world aflame. Seamlessly fusing the melodies of Spanish guitar with complex African drum patterns to create an endless variety of intoxicating styles, it has become one of the most influential sounds of our times.

After the Cuban Revolution, the state launched its official record company, Egrem, which stands for ‘Empresa de Grabaciones y Ediciones Musicales’ (‘Enterprise of Recordings and Musical Editions’) in 1964. At that time, record sleeves were one of the only means for an artist to convey their image to the public en masse. The government understood the power of art, photography, and graphic design to spread its message around the globe.

“We must bear in mind that a new society is being established in Cuba and graphic art plays an important role in communicating the message to this society,” Cuban graphic designer Félix Beltrán is quoted as having said in 1969 in the new book, Cuba: Music and Revolution – Original Album Cover Art of Cuban Music: The Record Sleeve Designs of Revolutionary Cuba 1960–85 (Soul Jazz Records) edited by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Michael Brennan: They Must Fall – Muhammad Ali and the Men He Fought

Posted on January 8, 2021

*The Deafening Silence. Muhammad Ali in retirement, Los Angeles, Wednesday February 23, 1983 © Michael Brennan*

To be a world champion boxer, you must be a warrior in and out of the ring, a master of both the sport and the psychology that allows one man to dominate another. Muhammad Ali, the G.O.A.T. (“Greatest of All Time”), learned this lesson at the start of his career, when he converted to Islam and faced the rage of the mainstream press during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

But it didn’t stop there. On April 28, 1967, Ali refused to be inducted into the Armed Services to fight into the Vietnam War on religious grounds. The following day, the U.S. government stripped him of the World Heavyweight title and had his boxing license suspended. Sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, so he did what any fighter would do — he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was overturned in an unanimous decision in 1970. Ali immediately set forth to restore his reputation and his career, training harder than ever before and taking on all contenders in the ring.

As it so happened, Ali unknowingly crossed paths with Michael Brennan that same year while the British photographer sat in an airport outside Glasglow, Scotland on a quiet Saturday afternoon. “Suddenly the departure lounge doors opened and five or six big Black guys lead by Ali came running through the airport, chanting,” Brennan says. “They went out [on to the tarmac] and up the stairs of the airplane. The door closed and the airplane took off.”

A member of Ali’s camp was seated near Brennan and they began to chat. He gave the photographer his card and invited him to call whenever he was in the states. Three years later Brennan did just that when he moved to New York City. “In the early days, I wasn’t getting much work and I knew that if I took the bus to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, walked to Ali’s camp, and knocked on the door, he would come out. I would take a picture and that was the rent paid for the next month,” he remembers.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Sonny Liston. Fought Ali twice: February 25, 1964, title fight, Miami Beach; RTD after 6thround, and 25 May 1965, Lewiston, Maine; KO’d in the 1st round © Michael Brennan*

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

Erik Madigan Heck: The Garden

Posted on January 6, 2021

Umbrella, The Garden © Erik Madigan Heck

At a time where many have fled cities in search of seclusion amid the verdant reassures of the natural world and become family photographers out of cheer necessity, their options limited by the strictures of social isolation, American artist and fashion photographer Erik Madigan Heck has been years ahead of the curve.

The Garden, Heck’s four-gallery exhibition and forthcoming book, is an ongoing body of work depicting the artist’s wife and two sons set amid a landscape that evokes the myth and majesty of childhood fairytales. Describing himself as “a painter who uses a camera,” Heck transforms the original photographs into storybook scenes through the meticulous process of adding luminous layers of color and exquisite patterns while simultaneously flattening the images by removing shadows and depth of field.

Like Edouard Vuillard, the French Impressionist painter he admired as a child, Heck transforms the picture plane into a dreamscape where reality and fantasy become one. Where he once altered the photograph in the darkroom, Heck now does it digitally to produce the same effect: a photograph that transcends notions of the documentary nature of the medium.

“The original photographs I take don’t really resemble the end results,” Heck reveals. “When everything is so immediate, there’s a real luxury in being able to put something aside, come back to it. There are photographs taken years ago and I’ll go through the archive and pull something out and then start reworking it. Sometimes I will spend weeks where I will do a little color, put it aside, and come back to it, which is basically the same way you would approach painting on a canvas. Time with the piece erases the moment when you took the picture first in because it’s no longer about that day you took the photograph.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Eniko in Flowers, 2020 © Erik Madigan Heck*

*Untitled, The Garden, 2019 © Erik Madigan Heck*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

The Best Photo Stories of 2020: Portrayals of Sex and Identity

Posted on December 23, 2020

*Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Ladies and Gentlemen (Easha McCleary), 1974. Unique polaroid print*

“I am large. I contain multitudes,” American poet Walt Whitman famously wrote in “Song of Myself,” a profound work of humanism written more than a century before the nation would ride up demanding civil rights for all. Identity is not a singular thing but a kaleidoscopic expression of self. Like DNA, identity connects us across time and space to bridge the past, present, and the future of humanity.

Yet in a world where many have been marginalised or erased, we are charged to set the record straight, righting the wrongs of the past by telling stories that honour the legacy of our ancestors. Here, we showcase ten artists who explore ideas of sexuality, race and ethnicity in their work, revealing a shared love for that which unites us across generations.

*Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Sex Parts and Torsos, 1977. Unique polaroid print*

Andy Wathol: Sex Parts and Torsos and Ladies & Gentlemen

As the Gay Liberation Movement took off during the 1970s, Andy Warhol embraced the LGBTQ community, creating two seminal bodies of work, “Sex Parts and Torsos” and “Ladies & Gentlemen.” He began making tightly framed Polaroids of the torsos, buttocks, and penises of men recruited from hay bathhouses, though he largely kept these works hidden for years, describing them as “landscapes” in an effort to distinguish them from the recent influx of pornographic works.

At the same time, Warhol photographed trans icons including Marsha P. Johnson, Vicki Peters and Wilhelmina Ross for a portrait series titled Ladies & Gentlemen. Amanda Hajjar, Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska New York, observes: “What makes Warhol’s series special is that he captured Black trans women in a way that celebrated their identities and provided them with space to express themselves freely and fully.”

Luke Gilford: National Anthem – America’s Queer Rodeo

American photographer Luke Gilford inherited his love of rodeo from his father, a champion and judge who filled their home with memorabilia of the sport. In 2016, Gilford discovered the International Gay Rodeo Association and began to make portraits of LGBTQ riders collected in the book “National Anthem: America’s Queer Rodeo” (Damiani).

“One of my close friends in the rodeo community is a Black, gender-nonconforming bull rider. They said to me simply, ‘If I show up, I’m a cowboy.’ And they’re accepted as such, with no questions asked,” Gildford says. “This series is my way of holding up each person with dignity and respect, and showing a beauty, strength, glamour, or tenderness that they may not have seen before.”

*Sunil Gupta, Untitled #22, 1976. From the series Christopher Street*

From Here to Eternity: Sunil Gupta. A Retrospective

With “From Here to Eternity: Sunil Gupta. A Retrospective,” a major solo exhibition currently on view at The Photographers’ Gallery and accompanying book, Sunil Gupta looks back at works from 16 series made over the past 45 years that explore how the Delhi-born, Montreal-raised, London-based artist has used photography as a form of activism to address his experiences as a gay Indian man living with HIV.

“I photograph what’s around me, what’s happening to me, and this central question of, ‘What does it mean to be a gay man of Indian origin?’ That’s what stuck with me most of my life and it’s never really gone away,” Gupta tells Indian-American photographer Nick Sethi in a cross-generational conversation about art.

*Patch, Amsterdam, April 22, 1992 © The Remsen Wolff Collection, Courtesy of Jochem Brouwer 2020*

Remsen Wolff: Amsterdam Girls

In 1990, American photographer Remsen Wolff (1940–1998) embarked on the creation of “Special Girls – A Celebration”, creating more than 100,000 portraits of over 125 trans and genderfluid models from New York and Amsterdam. Wolff, who described himself as a “faux transsexual” made annual month-long pilgrimages to Amsterdam between 1990–1992 to photograph nightlife luminaries as well as anonymous trans women struggling with their gender identity – an issue the artist understood all too well. Like his subjects, Wolff was determined to shine – even if it took him a lifetime of wandering to find his way home.

Paul Smith: The Human Curve

An integral part of the downtown New York art scene in the 1980s, American artist Paul Smith began making using a homemade pinhole camera to create “Bodily Fluids” a series of black and white landscapes and sensuous scenes of sexual self-discovery made during the height of the Aids crisis.

“It wasn’t so common then for people to exhibit sexually intimate and frank work then,” Smith says. “I wanted to depict sex from a participant’s point of view, rather than from a voyeur’s. I would set up a shot but it was pretty improvisatory; I suppose I was just operating out of my libido.”

Read the Full List at AnOther

*Sunil Gupta, Untitled #9, 2010. From the series Sun City*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Books, Exhibitions

Huck: Top Ten Photo Stories of 2020

Posted on December 23, 2020

In a challenging year, visual storytellers are still finding exciting ways to document – be it through innovative new projects, or old archive series now seeing the light of day. Here are the best ones we covered this year.

Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha

Growing up in Germany, Russian Ghanaian artist Liz Johnson Artur spent her summers in the former Soviet Union. But in 1986, she received an invitation to stay with a family friend in Brooklyn. Deep in Williamsburg, long before it was gentrified, Artur found herself in a Black community for the very first time.

“Up until then I hadn’t really travelled in any countries that had a Black population,” she says. “Coming to Brooklyn was something I didn’t expect, but I realiszd I could take pictures of people.”

Karen O’Sullivan: Somewhere Below 14th & East

By the ’80s, New York’s Lower East Side (LES) had been decimated by the ravages of drugs, “benign neglect” and landlord-sponsored arson. As squatters took over abandoned buildings, living side by side with black and Latinx residents, they immersed themselves in the sound of hardcore, punk, and hip hop exemplified by bands like The Clash, Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, Black Flag, the Misfits and Minor Threat.

The LES became the Mecca of all things anti-glamour and glitz, raging against the Reagan-fueled yuppification of Manhattan. As the centre of resistance from the coming onslaught of gentrification, the neighborhood welcomed outcasts into the mix, giving them an outlet for creativity and self-expression in an increasingly neoliberal city.

Sergio Purtell: Love’s Labour

In 1973, at the tender age of 18, Sergio Purtell fled his hometown of Santiago, Chile, for the United States. The decision came after General Augusto Pinochet and Admiral José Merino lead a coup d’état, killing the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. Once situated in his new home, Purtell began studying photography, going on to receive a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MFA from Yale.

“Photography had the ability to sustain time itself – it was to be discovered not constructed,” Purtell says. “One could use one’s intuition to drive one’s motivation. Suddenly the world started to make sense to me.”

Read the Full List at Huck

*Liz Johnson Artur, Josephine, Peckham, 1995.*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Amani Willett: A Parallel Road

Posted on December 21, 2020

atural extension of Manifest Destiny, the mythic American road trip supposes freedom can be found on stolen land. Crafted by colonisers, the belief that one could simply jump in a car to escape the oppressive confines of society was a privilege granted to and moulded for the self-actualisation of, by and large, white men.

But those without their protected status have long warned of America’s vast network of highways and roads. In 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a Black travel writer hailing from Harlem, began publishing The Negro Motorist Green Book – a handbook showcasing stores, motels, and gas stations that welcomed Black travellers in New York City. An immediate success upon release, Green expanded coverage to include other US destinations in annual editions over the next 30 years.

“The Green Book is a testament to the courage, perseverance and unwillingness of Black Americans to be cast aside. But, it also told of the legitimate fears and threats that awaited them,” says Amani Willett, author of the new book A Parallel Road (Overlapse), a five-year project that examines the American road trip from a Black perspective.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography

The Ten Most Visually Arresting Photo Books of 2020

Posted on December 16, 2020

Thrilled my features on Sunil Gupta: Lovers – Ten Years On (Stanley/Barker) and Tyler Mitchell: I Can Make You Feel Good (Prestel) were chosen among the ten best photo books of 2020 by AnOther.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Tyler Mitchell. Untitled (Park Frivolity), 2019.*

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Fashion, Photography