Posts from the “Exhibitions” Category

Builder Levy: Humanity in the Streets

Posted on April 30, 2019

Malcolm X Speaking, Labor union/civil rights rally in support of the New York City school boycott, Upper East Side, Manhattan, 1964 © Builder Levy

Builder Levy enrolled in Brooklyn College in 1959 with the dream of becoming an Abstract Expressionist, but the work didn’t resonate the way he hoped it would. Photography, however, made perfect sense. “It allowed me to get more involved with life,” Levy says.

Growing up in Bath Beach, a predominantly Jewish and Italian neighbourhood, Levy lived in a housing development built by Donald Trump’s father, Fred. Living through the Jim Crow 1950s, fraught with the spectres of McCarthy and the Cold War, Levy was sensitive to the struggle of people of colour and the working class, becoming politically aware and engaged at a young age.

“I started taking the camera with me to street demonstrations,’ Levy remembers, recognising the importance of amplifying the fight against oppression and injustice.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Medallion Lords, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, 1965 © Builder Levy

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Dave Heath: Dialogues With Solitude

Posted on April 24, 2019

Dave Heath. Elevated in Brooklyn, New York City, 1963 © Dave Heath, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath. Washington Square, New York, 1960 © Dave Heath, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

At the age of 16, Dave Heath was paging through a 1947 issue of LIFE magazine when he came upon “Bad Boy’s Story: An Unhappy Child Learns to Live at Peace with the World,” a photo essay by Ralph Crane that explored the life of an orphaned by growing up in Seattle.

Heath, who had been abandoned at the age of 4, immediately felt seen. Living in foster homes and an orphanage, Heath saw himself in both the protagonist and the journalist at the same time. Heath had already been participating in a camera club and recognized that photography could become a lifeline between himself and the world.

It was a commitment to which he would give his life, using the camera to document the political, social, and cultural events of the time, while simultaneously creating an investigation of the photograph itself. Largely self-taught, Heath made it his business to learn the craft, theory, and history of his chosen medium in order to create for himself.

Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitude, on view at The Photographers’ Gallery in London through June 2, 2019, and the accompanying monograph from Steidl, provide a deep dive into Heath’s singular oeuvre that is a poignant and powerful look at the human animal.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Dave Heath. Washington Square, New York City, 1960 © Dave Heath, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Manhattan, Photography

Janette Beckman: Los Angeles in the Early 80s

Posted on April 11, 2019

Rivera Bad Girls, LA © Janette Beckman, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Back in the 1970s, while attending Central Saint Martins, Janette Beckman was living in a squat in Streatham, South London. After her upstairs neighbour moved to Los Angeles, Beckman too travelled to the city in search of some sun. There, she fell in love with the pop Americana she saw and took to photographing neon motel signs at night – an image Squeeze immortalised on their 1979 single, “Christmas Day”.

Hooked, Beckman returned to LA in 1981 on assignment for Melody Maker to photograph R&B icons like Stevie Wonder, the Brothers Johnson, and Patrick Rushen. But it wasn’t until summer 1983 that she went the distance. While staying in the Beverly Hills bungalow of the Go-Go’s manager Ginger Canzoneri, Beckman happened upon a story in the LA Weekly about the Hoyo Maravilla gang in East LA. “There weren’t any pictures,” Beckman says over a glass of wine in her Manhattan studio – and she was determined to get them.

Beckman spent the summer hanging out in El Hoyo Maravilla, a local park, and began hanging out with local gang members and their families. Then, at night, she’d hang out in Hollywood, catching punk shows at the Masque and the Whisky, fascinated by the dark style and sound of the scene.

In the wake of an exhibition of her work at Fahey/Klein Gallery during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, Beckman shares her memories of the legendary LA underground.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

The Brothers Johnson © Janette Beckman, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Lux Interior, The Cramps, LA © Janette Beckman, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Categories: 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Rick Castro: Fetish King

Posted on April 5, 2019

For Rick Castro, fetish is the ultimate manifestation of self; the very notion of perfection, if you will. The journey began one day in 1970, when the photographer – who has shot and interviewed Ron Athey, Alice Bag and Tony Ward for AnotherManmag.com – discovered a copy of A Clockwork Orange in his aunt’s secondhand bookstore when he was 12.

“It shocked me and made my young wheels turn,” Castro says from his Los Angeles home. “I was trying to put it all into context. The idea of glamourised violence and scary dystopia – it seemed to ring true. I started to see that is going to be the future – and it was. We’ve surpassed it.”

And in doing so, we have embraced fetish in a broader sense. Castro explains, “For me it’s all-encompassing. The 21st century is all about fetish. On the positive side, it is the appreciation on a larger scale of things that would not have gotten a lot of respect in the past, but on the negative side it’s that cult of personality that I think is a waste of time and lead to the banality of America if not the world.”

Words of wisdom from ‘The Fetish King,’ a title Castro has fully embraced, and given to the title to a three-decade survey of his black and white BDSM photographs, opening April 6 at the Tom of Finland Foundation in his native Los Angeles.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

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

Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies

Posted on April 4, 2019

Heal-a-zation, Swathe a la Blob Ba, Silver Gelatin Photograph, 1981. copyright The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

In 1974, American artist Steven F. Arnold traveled to Spain at the behest of Salvador Dalí, who was opening the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Catalonia that September and had embraced Arnold as his protégé.

The legendary surrealist, known to tire of people in a matter of minutes, was utterly enchanted with the 31-year-old artist and dubbed him the “prince” of his Court of Miracles – his eccentric, eclectic coterie that included Donyale Luna, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Ultra Violet, and Amanda Lear, as well as Arnold’s dear friends Pandora and Kaisik Wong.

“They made a scene,” says Vishnu Dass, Director of the Steven Arnold Museum and Archive. “In Spain, Dalí was occupied with getting press. He would have them dress and take them to public events as his entourage for the months leading up to the museum. There are newspaper clippings from Spanish newspapers that talk about riots with Dali’s transvestites.”

Their cosmic connection was just one of the extraordinary relationships Arnold had throughout his life. “I call Steven a Queer Mystic,” Dass says. “His ultimate goal was to create a space where he himself and all those he loved could exist in a place that wasn’t binary or judging.”

As an artist who never pursued fame, status, or wealth, Arnold was an integral figure in the American counterculture for 30 years, a true influencer whose legacy is being reexamined now, 25 years after his untimely death from complications due to Aids. In advance of an exhibition of his work at Fahey/Klein Gallery during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD – which opens today – Dass takes us on a magical journey through Arnold’s life and art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Dressed for Dali, Silver Gelatin Photograph, 1987. copyright The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

Lighting the Path, Silver Gelatin Photograph, 1985. copyright The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Photography

Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922

Posted on April 4, 2019

Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.

At the age of 20, Hugh Mangum set forth on a journey as an itinerant portraitist working in North Carolina and Virginia. The year was 1897, and the future was bleak as the peace of Reconstruction was undone by the perils of a new evil on the horizon. Jim Crow, as America has named its system of apartheid and oppression, began, bringing forth the horrors of lynching and the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan.

Over a period of 25 years, until his death in 1922, Mangum created photographs of the American South during a time when laws like 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, legalizing segregation and local Black Codes that severely limited black people’s right to vote, education, property ownership, and movement. In the 1970s, Mangum’s archive was discovered inside an old tobacco barn that had been set for demolition and saved at the last moment.

With an open-door policy at his studio, all the world who could afford it donned their Sunday best and sat before Mangum. Using a Penny Picture camera, which allowed for up to 30 exposures in a single glass plate negative, Mangum delivered the classic fine, flat-field image with a graceful fall-off on the edges. The photographer engaged his subjects to reveal slivers of themselves with each new frame, capturing moments of unassailable emotional truth that speak to the human condition on the cusp of modernity.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.

Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Olaf Otto Becker: Reading the Landscape

Posted on March 31, 2019

Photo: Supertree Grove, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore 10/2012 © Otto Olaf Becker

For more than 30 years, German photographer Otto Olaf Becker has been documenting the earth’s landscape. His work explores the impact of overpopulation on natural resources – including land, water, food, energy, and heavy metals – in remote corners of the earth, where few see what is happening in real time.

After completing his work in Greenland, Becker headed south to Malaysia and Indonesia to explore the devolution of forests under human stewardship. This led to his book Reading the Landscape (Hatje Cantz), selections from which will be on view at ClampArt during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD. Here, Becker shows us beauty, tragedy, and farce in a three-act narrative.

Reading the Landscape opens as the Bible does, with the sublime grandeur of nature, before introducing haunting scenes of destruction that suggest a war fought — and lost. Becker concludes with images made in Singapore, where nature is rendered impotent and reimagined as décor.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Suzanne Donaldson: Inside the Final Years of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Studio

Posted on March 29, 2019

Robert Mapplethorpe. Marcus Leatherdale, 1978 © Robert Mapplethorpe / Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Back in 1986, at the very beginning of her career, Suzanne Donaldson was working in the art department at Vanity Fair. Just 24 years old, her dream was to be a photo editor, and she was thrilled to learn of an opening in the photo department under Elisabeth Biondi.

“My boss didn’t want me to go,” Donaldson recalls. “She very snarkily said, ‘With your interest in photography, I don’t know why you don’t go work for Mapplethorpe, Horst, or Avedon?’”

The forces of fate must have heard the crack, for not long thereafter Donaldson learned that Robert Mapplethorpe was looking for someone to manage his Manhattan studio.

“I was lucky enough to have an interview with him,” she says. “It was an epic time in New York. It was the beginning of the AIDS crisis. He was diagnosed at that point. Everybody was wary of toilet seats, shaking somebody’s hand, kissing them — it wasn’t known how it was contracted.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Vincent Cianni: A Journey Through the Early Years of AIDS

Posted on March 27, 2019

Scott shaving, Ithaca, NY 1985. Photography Vincent Cianni. Courtesy of the artist

In the early 1980s, a mysterious disease began to infiltrate the LGBTQ community, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake. As it sped from one person to the next, a horde of horrific illnesses began to manifest as compromised immune systems made once-healthy bodies the site for devastating, often fatal conditions.

The government and the media turned a blind eye, ignoring the plight of HIV/Aids until it reached endemic levels. The speed at which the disease ravaged its victims and spread from one to the next was exacerbated by systemic, malevolent negligence. People were dying at an exponential rate because there was little to no information on the cause, treatment, and prevention of the disease.

It wasn’t until 1983 (after 1,450 cases, 558 of which ended in death) that The New York Times finally put Aids on the front page when the US government’s top health official declared an investigation of the disease was now “the number 1 priority” of the Public Health Service. Suddenly centered, it seemed Aids was everywhere – and the stigma, brought about by misinformation and malevolence, became something fierce.

“Early on it was a state of confusion, fear, and uncertainty,” remembers Italian-American photographer Vincent Cianni, whose photographs from the era are currently on view at Vincent Cianni: A Survey until April 6.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Cassell, 1989. Photography Vincent Cianni. Courtesy of the artist

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

Laurie Simmons: Big Camera, Little Camera

Posted on March 17, 2019

Have you ever wanted to step into a picture and live in that world? It’s a feeling American artist Laurie Simmons knows very well. “When I was a child, I had a strong desire to enter into the drawings in the storybook,” she says. “I can remember sitting on my mother’s lap and feeling this frustration. I wanted to get inside and walk around with the characters.”

As a member of The Pictures Generation (a group of American artists from the 70s who critically analysed the media), Simmons explores the subject of womanhood through enigmatic images that subvert stereotypes, forcing viewers to question their own assumptions.

40 years in the making, Laurie Simmons: Big Camera, Little Camera, is a major retrospective exhibition and book exploring the construction of gender, identity, reality, and illusion – as well as the photograph itself. Her work stages scenes that become poems, metaphors, and meditations on much larger ideas.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Vincent Cianni: We Skate Hardcore

Posted on March 4, 2019

In 1993, photographer Vincent Cianni moved to the south side of Williamsburg, as the next generation of Puerto Rican and Dominican teens were coming of age.

“Life was played out in so many different ways on the sidewalks, stoops, and playgrounds,” he remembers. “I started playing handball in McCarren Park and started to take my camera with me. It became part of my connection to the neighbourhood.”

After about a year and a half, Cianni came upon a scrappy group of local kids and teens who had built a skate ramp in a vacant lot by the river at North 7th Street. They were there to refine their skills, so they could get sponsored to skate professionally. “Like basketball, it was a way out of poverty and the experiences that they have growing up,” the photographer explains.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography