Posts from the “Feature Shoot” Category

Tanya Marcuse: Fruitless|Fallen|Woven

Posted on August 29, 2019

© Tanya Marcuse, courtesy of Radius Books. Conceptual catalogue of fruit trees photographed over a 4 year period in the Hudson Valley, NY by artist, Tanya Marcuse. Many of the trees grow on land that is for sale and in danger of development.

Nature is our greatest teacher, providing ample evidence of the wisdom of the earth, the cycles of life and death ever flowing from one into the next. It is here in nature that we learn the truth: the beauty and power of the sublime, the ineffable, unspeakable grandeur that existence inspires.

But with the words written in Genesis 1:26, the world has lost its way, for the very idea that we have dominion over what does not belong to us is a sin of the worst kind. We are stewards and our role is to preserve and conserve so that nature continues to provide abundance, rather than wipe us off the earth as payback for the abuses of greed, gluttony, wrath, sloth and pride that have wrought the horrors of climate change to our doorstep.

The further we remove ourselves from nature, stashed indoors and stuck behind screens, in a state of constant consumption, always needing more and never satisfied, the more perilous the payback will be, according to Newton’s Third Law: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Yet it is entirely too easy to forget, to lose ourselves in the conveniences and conventions of the postmodern world, to presume that there are no consequences for our choices just because we cannot see them yet. We can rationalize the irrational until such a day the center can no longer hold, and the weight of our delusions shall break the dam, a deluge of glacial proportions.

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Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, 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.

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Categories: 1970s, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Mike Osborne: Federal Triangle

Posted on August 22, 2019

Many Americans profess surprise at the inhumane social practices coming from the present White House. Perhaps they are comforted that they once had the luxury to have never been concerned about the forces of the military and prison industrial complexes weighted against foreign lands and U.S. citizens alike.

Perhaps the carnage of AIDS never touched their families. Perhaps they were never the victim of land grabs, medical experimentation, or any number of the genocidal acts waged by this nation that are documented in the annals of history and the on-going subject of current events.

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them,” poet Charles Bukowski opined, summing up the new wave of “Not my country!” that greets those who have chosen denial over truth up until it finally affected them.

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Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Elspeth H. Brown: Work! A Queer History of Modeling

Posted on August 19, 2019

Ruth Ford, c. 1930s. Portrait by George Platt Lynes

Lily Yuen with fellow performers, in Lily Yuen Collection, Schomburg, Folder 6: scrapbook 1926-1930. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Fashion models, first described as “mannequins” arrived in New York via London in 1909. Their purpose, as their name denotes, was to sell merchandise to a burgeoning consumer class — while simultaneously advertising archetypes that simulated insatiable desire.

This desire was cultivated within something the product could never supply — a psychological state of want and aspiration designed to heighten insecurity and anxiety through the creation of a state of constant craving. Tapping into the psychological underpinnings that can only exist when survival is no longer the mainstay of one’s being, merchandisers understood the link between consumption and identity necessary to maintain the capitalist enterprise.

Glamour, romance, sex, and pleasure became the foundation upon which the mannequin was based — making the very spectacle of the human body and visage an object available for purchase. In the creation of the model, the individual was reduced to a thing that could be commodified and exploited for the express purpose of profits.

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George Platt Lynes with Paul Cadmus, on the set, c. 1941 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Categories: Books, Fashion, Feature Shoot, 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.

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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

April Dawn Alison

Posted on August 8, 2019

“Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life,” the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez knowingly remarked, reminding us that what we see and what we believe is often just an illusion of sorts. Beneath it all, lays the true self, an identity we often keep hidden from the world — including ourselves.

But there are those who dare to delve into the person they are we no one else is there to witness it. These moments are a manifestation of something beyond the person others see: it is the self that exists within our deepest being. To record this, to document it, to create evidence of that which exists for no one else — this takes nerve. It is here our story of April Dawn Alison begins.

In 2017, a painter named Andrew Masulio donated an archive of over 8,000 Polaroids to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) — previously unseen self-portraits of April Dawn Alison, the female persona of Alan Schaefer (1941-2008), an Oakland-based photographer who lived in the world as a man. The archive reveals to us a fully-realized secret life beautifully revealed in the exquisite monograph, April Dawn Alison (MACK), selections from which are currently on view at SFMOMA through December 1, 2019.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Patrick Waterhouse: Restricted Images – Made with the Warlpiri of Central Australia

Posted on August 6, 2019

In 1899, British/Australian biologist and anthropologist Sir Baldwin Spencer and telegraph-station master Francis J. Gillen published The Native Tribes of Central Australia, an in-depth study of the customs and traditions of the Aboriginal groups living near Alice Springs. Initiated as members of the Arunta tribe, the authors were the first Europeans to witness the customs and social structures of a people that the state of Australia did not recognize.

The book featured 119 photographs, many of sacred rituals and ceremonies never seen by the Western world before. While the book caused a sensation in Europe, it failed to take into account the impact it had on those it documented — quite literally as such encounters with the disease-carrying Europeans often resulted in death:

“The very kindness of the white man who supplies him, in outlying parts, with stray bits of clothing is by no means conducive to the longevity of the native. If you give a black fellow, say a woollen shirt, he will perhaps wear it for a day or two, after that his wife will be adorned with it, and then, in return for perhaps a little food, it will be passed on to a friend. The natural result is that, no sooner do the natives come into contact with white men, than phthisis and other diseases soon make their appearance, and, after a comparatively short time, all that can be done is to gather the few remnants of the tribe into some mission station where the path to final extinction may be made as pleasant as possible.”

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Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Shunk-Kender: Art Through the Eye of the Camera 1957–1983

Posted on July 30, 2019

Harry Alexander Shunk (1924-2006) and János Kender (1938-2009), Self-Portrait, Italy, 1956.

Between 1958 and 1973, German Harry Alexander Shunk (1924-2006) and his Hungarian partner János Kender (1938-2009) collaborated with nearly 300 European and American artists to document some of the most iconic moments in modern art.

Together, they produced some 190,000 images in collaboration with artists including Man Ray, Roy Lichtenstein, Lou Reed, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, William Klein, and Yayoi Kusama — many of which have become an integral part of the history of art, and works worthy of veneration themselves.

“In the history of photography, ‘documents for artists’ exist in the shade, with a few rare exceptions,” writes Florian Ebner in an essay that appears in the new book, Shunk-Kender: Art Through the Eye of the Camera 1957–1983 (Éditions Xavier Barral), which accompanies the first exhibition of their work, now on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through August 5, 2019.

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

Werner Bischof: USA

Posted on July 23, 2019

Magnum photographer Werner Bischof (1916-1954) arrived in the United States a year before his death and spent 1953 traveling across the continent. His series USA, currently on view at David Hill Gallery in London through July 26, 2019, is a vivid portrait of the nation as it rose to become a global superpower.

While most of his contemporaries were firmly entrenched in the tradition of black and white, Bischof broke free, using color to capture both the mood of a place and the quality of life, creating lyrical poems of extraordinary nuance and depth. The exhibition features a selection of 25 photographs that reveal his experiments in color and motion to capture the sensations of being in a rapidly modernizing country possessed with entirely too much faith in itself.

Writing in his diary in 1953, Bischof’s recorded his immediate impression of New York City as a “mechanized” and “numb” existence. “Now I realize what Chaplin’s Modern Times was really about,” the Swiss photographer revealed, recognizing the inherent dehumanization of the capitalist enterprise.

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Categories: Art, Feature Shoot, Photography

Sara Cwynar: Gilded Age

Posted on July 7, 2019

Photo: Sara Cwynar. Red Rose, 2017. Pigment print mounted on Dibond 30 x 24 in. Artist’s proof ½ Collection of David Madee. © Sara Cwynar. Courtesy of Cooper Cole, Toronto and Foxy Production, New York .

Like any language, photography has given birth to a series of clichés that are reductive at best. At their worst, they become a vehicle for disinformation and stereotype, fueling pathologies by reinforcing the most dangerous aspects of confirmation bias. As Jenny Holzer noted, “Clichés endure” — and may very well exist until we root them out and expose them for the perilous, short-sighted, and sloppy thinking that they are.

Canadian artist Sara Cwynar takes aim at popular photographic clichés in her new exhibition, Gilded Age, on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, through November 10, 2019. Whatever medium Cwynar selects, she uses the form to explore and expose the ways in which images are constructed and recycled in an endless digital loop. Cwynar sets her sights on the preponderance of visual clichés that crowd our space, recognizing the ways in which they can be used as dog whistles to signify ulterior agendas.

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Categories: Art, Feature Shoot

Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich

Posted on July 1, 2019

Peggy Moffitt modeling the topless swimsuit designed by Rudi Gernreich, 1964. Photograph © William Claxton, LLC, courtesy of Demont Photo Management & Fahey/Klein Gallery Los Angeles, with permission of the Rudi Gernreich trademark.

On June 16, 1964, Rudi Gernreich’s infamous monokini went on sale in New York’s most prestigious department stores. Buyers at B. Altman & Co., Lord & Taylor, Henri Bendel, Abraham & Strauss, Splendiferous and Parisette placed orders after William Claxton’s photograph of Peggy Moffit rocked the pop culture landscape.

Moffit was Gernreich’s muse and Claxton’s wife, and together this ménage a trios was pure fire. The idea for the monokini first came to Gernreich in December 1962 and first appeared in futuristic fashion feature in a late 1963 issue of Look magazine — after LIFE refused to publish them. In The Rudy Gernreich Book, Moffit recalls the editor at LIFE shamelessly told Claxton, “This is a family magazine, and naked breasts are allowed only if the woman is an aborigine.”

LIFE’s racist policy about women’s bodies cost them one of the biggest news stories of the year. They “goofed” Moffitt politely says. The magazine ordered a reshoot, demanding Moffitt cover her breasts with her arms. Moffitt described their art direction as “dirty.”

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Peggy Moffitt modeling dress designed by Rudi Gernreich, Fall 1971 collection. Photograph © William Claxton, LLC, courtesy of Demont Photo Management & Fahey/Klein Gallery Los Angeles, with permission of the Rudi Gernreich trademark.

Categories: 1960s, Fashion, Feature Shoot, Photography