Posts from the “Exhibitions” Category

Paolo Roversi: Intangible Presence

Posted on September 24, 2019

Guinevere in a Nina Ricci Haute Couture dress, Paris, 1996 © Paolo Roversi, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

When Paolo Roversi steps inside his Paris studio, he is on a quest in search of that which lies beneath the flesh. Whether capturing the glamour of haute couture or the intimacy of a nude, for Roversi, “a photograph is always a portrait, and always autobiographical in a way. Fashion photography is a double portrait: a girl dressed in a certain outfit and this outfit dressed by a certain girl. This is magic to me.”

In celebration of his extraordinary body of work, Roversi’s new exhibition Intangible Presence delves into an archive that includes portraits, nudes, and even still lifes that underscore the artist’s love for that which can be seen with the heart.

“Every show is another story. I try to put together a little new fairytale so I see my work in a different angle,” says the photographer and AnOther contributor. “This time it was about the idea of the intangible presence. For me, photography is always a presence and an absence at the same time. It is a little phantom, a little ghost in the photograph. Even if it is silent photography talks a lot.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Anna, Paris, 2015 © Paolo Roversi, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Categories: 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Jane Evelyn Atwood: Paris Red Light 1976-1979

Posted on September 18, 2019

Pigalle, Paris (Barbara sur la Voiture), 1978-1979 © Jane Evelyn Atwood, courtesy of L. Parker Stephenson Photographs

Hailing from New York City, Jane Evelyn Atwood travelled to Europe in the summer of 1971 after graduating from Bard College, where she had studied theatre. With no plans for her future and no reason to go back home, she decided to stay in France. While working as an au pair, Atwood realised she was deeply unhappy and found an English-speaking therapist who helped her unlock a wellspring of creativity inside of her, which had previously been blocked.

One evening, while attending Tuesday night gallery openings, Atwood met a woman who told her that she knew a prostitute. “I had seen these women prostitutes on the street whispering at the men who passed in these incredible costumes and fur coats, jewellery, and make-up,” she recalls. “In France, prostitution is not illegal; it is what they call ‘tolerated’. In 1975, they were allowed to stand in the street and solicit.”

That same evening, the woman took Atwood to 19 Rue des Lombards, a brothel located in the centre of Paris, and they ended up drinking champagne with a group of sex workers. “It was very chic to be there,” she says. “I was very excited because I was in this unknown and completely forbidden world – it was right where I wanted to be.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Rue des Lombards (Natasha chez le Tunisien), 1976-1977 © Jane Evelyn Atwood, courtesy of L. Parker Stephenson Photographs

Categories: 1970s, AnOther, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Arlene Gottfried: After Dark

Posted on September 15, 2019

Arlene Gottfried. Teatro Puerto Rico, c. 1980.

When Arlene Gottfried passed in 2017, the world took note as The New York Times ran one of her photographs on the front page of the Saturday edition and a full-page obituary inside. After a lifetime of picture making, it was a fitting tribute to the artist who had gone largely unheralded in her own lifetime.

But Gottfired did not travail in obscurity. The author of five monographs, Gottfried’s spent her sunset years basking in the critical glow of two well-received exhibitions, Sometimes Overwhelming (2014) and Bacalaitos and Fireworks (2016), thanks to the work of New York gallerist Daniel Cooney.

On September 13, Cooney will present Arlene Gottfried: After Dark, a selection of black and white photographs made on the streets, in the nightclubs, dive bars, back alleys, and drug dens of New York in the 1980s. Gottfried’s portraits reveal a profound sense of beauty made with exquisite sensitivity and care to the impact of poverty, addiction, and crime on people plagued by the effects of systemic oppression, generation after generation.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Arlene Gottfried. Studio 54, 1979.

Arlene Gottfried. Empire Rollerdrome, c. 1980.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Brooklyn, Dazed, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Godlis: On the Inspiration of Brassaï

Posted on September 10, 2019

Lydia Lunch, Delancey Street Loft, 1977 © Godlis

In the summer of 1976, two events occurred, forever transforming the course of American photographer Godlis’ life and the history of punk. It began when he purchased a copy of The Secret Paris of the 30s, Brassaï’s evocative memoir from his youth featuring his adventures through the brothels and opium dens of the bas monde.

“During my first years in Paris, beginning in 1924, I lived at night, going to bed at sunrise, getting up at sunset, wandering about the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre,” Brassaï, then in his seventies, wrote. “I was inspired to become a photographer by my desire to translate all the things that enchanted me in the nocturnal Paris I was experiencing.”

On one of these nightly jaunts, Brassaï happened upon the Bals-Musette, a shady dance hall where Paris’s high society mingled with its underground. Here, he made pictures too scandalous to include in Paris by Night, the groundbreaking 1933 monograph that brought the Hungarian photographer to the world stage. But by the 1970s, in the wake of Free Love and the Gay Liberation movement, a new hunger for the lives of sexual libertines was in the air, and Brassaï published these images of the darker side of the French capital in The Secret Paris of the 30s in 1976.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Stiv Bators and Divine, Blitz Benefit, CBGB, 1978 © Godlis

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Alex Prager: Play The Wind

Posted on September 10, 2019

Big West, 2019. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Alex Prager’s lifelong love affair with Los Angeles has informed the creation of her art since the beginning of her career, when she went around the city with a camera and a friend making photographs guerilla-style – no permits and all heart.

The city as muse is an archetype that runs throughout art history, from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris to Keith Haring’s New York City, providing a setting just as alive as its inhabitants. It is a sensation evident in every breath of Play The Wind, Prager’s new exhibition of film, photography, and sculpture.

“This is the most autobiographical work I have ever done,” Prager says, a statement that reveals itself figuratively and literally throughout the show. Upon entering the gallery, you are greeted by the figure of ‘Big West’, a towering sculpture of a woman decked out in her freshest Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, whose message is simply: ‘Welcome Home’.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Play the Wind Film Still #2, 2019. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Categories: AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Shikeith: Rude / Emergencies

Posted on September 3, 2019

Shikeith, Rude/Emergencies Image courtesy of Shikeith and ltd Los Angeles

Like Gordon Parks before him, African-American artist Shikeith has chosen the camera as his weapon of choice, taking aim at the historic depictions that have altered minds and souls for generations through a campaign that has simultaneously denied, exploited, criminalised, fetishised, and appropriated black manhood and desire.

Hailing from North Philadelphia, Shikeith understands the remedy lies in the power of imagination to queer the image of black masculinity, reclaiming ownership of the narrative and its representation while making it illegible so that it cannot be easily read and consumed by the insatiable appetite of western hegemony. Using photography, video, and sculpture, Shikeith is creating a new visual lexicon that at once reveals as much as it hides, provoking a profound emotional response that is almost ineffable while it sits right on the tip of the tongue.

In the new exhibition Rude / Emergencies, opening 14 September at ltdlosangeles, Shikeith takes us to the very edge by transgressing boundaries in search of a deeper truth that lies beyond the false images imposed on black boys from the very day they are born. His is a desire that transcends the body in which it lives, yet fully embodies the vessel as a portal between realms. Here, Shikeith shares his journey, embracing his own tongue to reconcile being a black man in America to move forward in the world.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Shikeith, Where Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops. Image courtesy of Shikeith and ltd Los Angeles

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Photography

Rick McCloskey: Van Nuys Blvd. 1972

Posted on August 26, 2019

After World War II came to a close, a new phenomenon crept across the United States. As many adolescents no longer had to drop out of school and get a job to support their family, the era of the teenager began. Born of a potent combination of combination of leisure time, disposable cash, angst, boredom and rebellion, teens soon discovered true freedom came from owning or borrowing a set of wheels.

The car — perhaps the most potent symbol of American self-determination at the expense of the environment — became the vehicle to freedom of a sort: the ability to go cruising at night. From the late 1940s through well into the 1990s, cruising down the main streets, avenues, boulevards, and specially designated strips became the coolest thing a teen could do.

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California during the 1950s and ‘60s, American photographer Rick McCloskey spent his youth cruising Van Nuys Boulevard every Wednesday night. His family home, just one city block from “The Boulevard” was located a few blocks from the famed Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant, home of the All-American meal: burgers and milkshakes.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1970s, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Vivian Maier: The Color Photographs

Posted on August 22, 2019

Chicago, April 1977 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

Self-Portrait, Chicagoland, October 1975 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

When legendary American photographer Vivian Maier died in 2009 at the age of 83, she left behind some 40,000 Ektachrome colour slides that had gone unseen and unpublished. Thankfully, a new exhibition and monograph – titled Vivian Maier: Colour Photographs – showcase the stunning works made by the artist, who worked in total seclusion throughout her life.

For more than 40 years, Maier work as a nanny on Chicago’s wealthy North Side. Her job gave her the ability to hit the streets with her camera and take portraits of modern life during the second half of the 20th century.

“Look closely art the many self-portraits Vivian Maier made, and you will see her disguises, her cloak of invisibility,” photographer Joel Meyerowitz writes in the book’s foreword. “She’s as plain as an old-fashioned school marm. She’s the wallflower, the spinster aunt, the ungainly tourist in the big city… except… she isn’t!”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Untitled, c. 1977 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

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

Greg Ellis: Sex Crimes

Posted on August 21, 2019

Beau Rouge, Los Angeles, 1954, Gelatin silver print from original large-format negative© The Estate of Bob Mizer (1922-1992). Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

It wasn’t until 2003 that the US Supreme Court finally gave LGBTQ people basic civil rights protection under the Constitution, ruling that sex between consenting adults of the same gender in private was not a crime. Under the current administration, though, these rights are slowly being chipped away in an effort to take the nation back to a time when citizens could be targeted for what have been interchangeably known as Crimes Against Nature, Unnatural Acts, and Sex Crimes.

For generations, these draconian laws lead to incarceration, institutionalisation, familial rejection, public shaming, loss of employment, denial of healthcare, and even death for members of the LGBTQ community. “This is our history,” says Greg Ellis of Ward 5B, who has co-curated Sex Crimes, a new group exhibition with Brian Clamp. “Times have changed, there have been gains made, and I think it’s good to put this context out there to say, ‘hey, not too long ago this is where we were, and we don’t want to head back there.’”

Rooted in the decades before Stonewall, Sex Crimes features work by artists including George Platt Lynes, John S. Barrington, Bruce of Los Angeles, James Bidgood, Mel Roberts, Jim French, and Jack Smith, all of whom created homosexual art and literature under the threat of arrest.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Untitled (Cowboy) / P00103, c. 1967-9, Vintage Polaroid print (Unique)© The Estate of Jim French (1932-2017). Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

Categories: 1960s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

The Second Latin American Foto Festival

Posted on August 16, 2019

Fred Ramos. A Honduran child plays near train tracks in Arriaga, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, October 2018.

Johis Alarcón. Nicole Carcelén, 19, plays with a cotton plant in her hair. The black slaves who first came to Ecuador were forced to work in cotton fields, cane fields and coal mines. For Nicole, cotton plants represent the strength of her ancestors and the strength of their blood. La Loma, 2018

With the second edition of the Bronx Documentary Center’s Latin American Foto Festival, curators Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera provide a space for photographers living and working in Latin America to tell their stories on their terms. The Festival, held in nine venues throughout the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx, gave some 50,000 residents — many of whom are Latinx immigrants — the opportunity to engage with stories from their homelands through exhibitions, workshops, tours, and panel discussions.

The history of colonized lands is rarely told by those who have suffered the fate of centuries of imperialism that have systemically decimated the people and the lands of every continent outside Europe. Over the past 200 years, the people of Latin America have fought for independence and sovereignty, and against puppet regimes installed by the United States that first began in 1823 under the Monroe Doctrine.

As ICE raids systemically target Black and Latinx communities, the Foto Festival provides a pertinent moment to pause and reflect on the impact of white supremacy in its many forms, and the ways in which those it aims to exploit, oppress, and erase fight back in a struggle for life or death.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Chris Gregory. Ruta del Progreso

Yael Martinez. Family heart .photos on the wall of Perla Granda’s (my sister-in-law) bedroom of her missing brothers. She is 14 years old, she is in high school. She lives with her mother and Her sister Sandra at Taxco Guerrero Mexico On September 10,2013.

Categories: Art, Bronx, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Latin America, Photography

Wynn Miller: A Portrait of East LA in the 1970s

Posted on August 16, 2019

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Wynn Miller first visited the city’s Eastside in the 1970s, after an invitation from his brother-in-law to meet members of the Arizona Maravilla gang. “It was a foreign world to me; I was a surfer,” Miller remembers. “I didn’t know anything about the gangs.”

“I took a few pictures and when I got home I made a few prints in my own darkroom. I thought they were really cool so I decided to take a chance. I took pictures of their kids and that was my way into the gang life.”

Over the next year, Miller would spend his weekends in the area, creating a series of black and white environmental portraits. Recently on view in the exhibition On the Edge of Society, his photographs are an intimate look at the brotherhood in a disenfranchised community living on the margins of society.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1970s, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography