Posts from the “Feature Shoot” Category

Bruno Stettler: Als War’s Das Letze Mal

Posted on March 14, 2019

Siouxsie & the Banshees. Baden. 9. 7. 1979 © Bruno Stettler

Musical Youth. Zürich. 1983 © Bruno Stettler

On October 1, 1977, the Clash played Switzerland for the very first time. Their 15-track set at Kaufleuten in Zürich began with “London’s Burning” and “Complete Control” — and somewhere in the audience, 16-year-old Bruno Stettler was taking his very first concert photographs.

Over the next decade, Stettler would go on to take 20,000 photographs at nearly 100 rock concerts around town, capturing the raw intimacy of live shows long before they became overproduced spectacles.

In his new book, Als War’s Das Letze Mal (Sturm & Drang), Stettler takes us on a magical trip through the looking glass, back in the late 1970s and ’80s, when legends like Bob Marley, David Bowie. Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Nina Hagen, and Kraftwerk called the shots.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Judas Priest. Zürich 17. 4. 1980 © Bruno Stettler

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Music

Gloria Oyarzabal: Woman go no’gree

Posted on March 14, 2019

The search for knowledge, wisdom, and understanding lies in the process of distilling fact from fiction, truth from lie, meaning from myth. It is the sifting through appearances where deception flourishes, in search of the source of authenticity and integrity upon which existence takes root.

“One consequence of Eurocentrism is the racialization of knowledge: Europe is represented as the source of knowledge and Europeans, therefore, as thinkers,” photographer Gloria Oyarzabal observes, recognizing the systems of power profiting off this misinformed belief.

These systems of power feed off a form of colonization that extends beyond the centuries-long rape, pillage, and enslavement of the people and the land — it is the colonization of the mind, a far more insidious programming that is more difficult to detect and eradicate, for its forms are multifarious, moving like a virus from one person to the next.

The programming runs so deep that many will fight to defend its dastardly deeds before do something so honorable as change their mind. Often times, the programming only ends when one finds it is too foolish and disgraceful to hold irrational thoughts. Then it becomes a process of decolonizing the mind of the bankrupt ideologies and logical fallacies one has been fed throughout their lives, and do the work of self-education, recognizing that blind spots will be revealed.

In her series, Woman go no’gree, Oyarzabal has done just this in a photographic exploration of gender, history, knowledge-making, stereotypes, and clichés of Africa. Using a mixture of archive colonial images mostly found in magazines, street photos taken with a digital camera, and studio photography found or made during her artist residence in Lagos in 2017, Oyarzabal employs a visual language that subverts and spellbinds in equal part, leading us into a silent realm of symbol and iconography. Here, Oyarzabal shares her journey with us.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Africa, Art, Feature Shoot, Photography

Rosalind Fox Solomon: Liberty Theater

Posted on February 27, 2019

Rosalind Fox Solomon, ‘Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1976’ in Liberty Theater (2018). © Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, ‘New Orleans, Louisiana, 1992’ in Liberty Theater (2018). © Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, American artist Rosalind Fox Solomon traveled across the South creating a powerful series of photographs that reveal the state of the nation during the first decade following the Civil Rights Movement. It is here in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina that we are privy to the complex interconnection of life rooted in the triumphs, tragedies, and traumas of the past.

At the time Fox Solomon started making these images, she had begun taking trips to New York to study photography with Lisette Model, a master of the human psyche laid bare in silver gelatin. Fox Solomon’s work bears witness to the power of photography to cut to the quick, to go beyond the luxuries and limitations of language by focusing solely on action, gesture, and expression to tell us more than word could ever say in a single, fleeting moment.

Fox Solomon’s photographs resonate with quiet grandeur, visceral eccentricity, and profound depth of ineffable emotion. Over the next two decades, she traversed the deepest reaches of the South to create Liberty Theater (MACK), an exquisitely nuanced portrait of the profound interplay of race, class, and segregation.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Rosalind Fox Solomon, ‘New Orleans, Louisiana, 1993’ in Liberty Theater (2018). © Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

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

Brenda Ann Kenneally: Upstate Girls

Posted on February 14, 2019

Kayla and James © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

In the dystopian mythos that fuels the American Dream, poverty is a mark of character upon which outrageous projections are made. Many, clinging to the illusions of living in a meritocracy, where everyone starts on a level playing field, prefer the ignorance of ideology above all, villainizing the victims of a system designed to create a permanent underclass upon which America’s Next Top Billionaire will assuredly feast.

Poverty, as it is presented to us, is a choice — the wrong one, the experts suggest. “If only these people would X, Y, or Z,” the armchair analyst adds without the slightest shame, from the comforts of their breakfast nook while scrolling the latest headlines on their news feed.

“X, Y, or Z” could be any number of conservative talking points that focus the minutiae of personal accountability while turning a blind eye to the crushing weight of living hand to mouth in country that has designed systems to profit off your demise.

Artist Brenda Ann Kenneally knows how the game is played better than most, and uses her knowledge and wisdom expose the truth — rather than perpetuate the lies told and sold. In 2002, she and author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc began collaborating on a magazine assignment in Troy, New York, a once-thriving city whose fortunes have gone dark.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Tony in the dark bedroom, looking out the window © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

Dana nursing KyLanne the day before she took her baby home © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

New York in Photo Books

Posted on February 6, 2019

Life is Good & Good For You in New York by William Klein (1956)

There are eight million stories in the naked city — at any given time. As the years slip away, one fact remains: the only constant is change. “New” is the truth. Nothing ever stays the same, except the photographs. This, my friend, is the only time you can and will ever go home again.

At a certain point, even if you weren’t there, you know the photograph. It’s become a memory of another time and place that has now become a part of a history that ceaselessly fascinates. The city has a curious ability to romanticize the dog-eat-dog Darwinian principles that made Frank Sinatra proudly proclaim, “If I can make it there I can make it anywhere.”

It’s vast, self-aggrandizing sensibilities spring up from the bedrock upon which the city is laid, it’s towering testaments to capitalism lining the island of Manhattan like so many rows of jagged teeth, while the outer lying boroughs nestle around like kin, creating a sprawling mass of magnificent encounters that can only happen in a place like this.

New York is not just photogenic, it’s the very landscape where genres flourish and styles abound — advancing the medium as only a true muse can. In New York in Photo Books (RM/Cento José Guerrero), editor Horacio Fernández takes us on a spellbinding tour of the city that never sleeps in ink on paper.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

New York by Keizo Kitajama (1982)

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

The Black Image Corporation

Posted on February 4, 2019

“Buy Black” is a powerful sentiment, one that underscores the radical racial disparity in business ownership throughout American history. Political capital has long been gained by catering to the economic interests of various groups, except Black communities — which have been historically met with violence.

“I do not expect the white media to create positive Black male images,” Huey Newton sagely observed, witnessing the impact of centuries of image making on the minds of the populace, whether wholly erasing histories, or revising them resale so that nothing in the new version resembled the truth.

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” journalist A.J. Liebling wrote in The New Yorker in 1960, acknowledging a lifetime’s wisdom in a dozen words. Representation and visibility or only half the story being told: it’s not just the who, what, and where that matter but the how and the why that tell you everything you need to know.

Defamed by fake news long before the term became popular, Black America always finds a way to transcend the limitations constantly imposed. In 1942, businessman John J. Johnson founded the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago, premiering its flagship publication, Ebony, three years later. In 1951, Jet, a weekly digest, debuted. Together, Ebony and Jet, creating the defining image of Black America during the tumultuous years of the twentieth-century, creating a space wholly for itself that drew a loyal audience excited to catch the latest in the glossies. In 2016, Johnson sold both magazine, marking the end of an era.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

Dawoud Bey: Night Coming Tenderly, Black

Posted on January 31, 2019

Untitled #14 (Site of John Brown’s Tannery), 2017. ©Dawoud Bey

In 1926, poet Langston Hughes (1901-1967) published “Dream Variations,” a poem that imagines a time and place where African-Americans could finally be free. For Hughes, this could come when the sun had finally set, when “the white day is done,” when the cover of darkness illuminated by the twinkling of distant stars, gave him a feeling of ecstatic peace made possible by “Night coming tenderly / Black like me.”

These words spoke to African-American photographer Dawoud Bey, the recent recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. As Bey approached his 60th birthday, he decided to make a fundamental change in his work. Moving away from the urban scenes of and people that had documented for over four decades, as magnificently catalogued in the new monograph, Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press), Bey began a new series of work that offered the artist a new way of exploring Black history through the photograph.

In Night Coming Tenderly, Black, now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through April 14, 2019, Bey imagines what American landscape looked like under the cover of night to those who followed the Underground Railroad to freedom in a series of 25 prints. His photographs, a lush symphony of blacks on blacks, pay homage to the work of Roy DeCarava (1919–2009), whose mastery of dark tones illustrates the exquisite sensitivity to his subjects, who have largely gone unseen or overlooked.

In reimagining how the American landscape looked to those fleeing slavery, Bey invites us to consider the story of this nation from the perspective of those who built it. Here, Bey shares his journey.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Untitled #4 (Leaves and Porch), 2017. ©Dawoud Bey

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Rory Doyle: Delta Hill Riders

Posted on January 25, 2019

You wouldn’t know it from the films or the television shows, but the Lone Ranger was a Black man by the name of Bass Reeves. Born into slavery in Crawford County, Arkansas in 1838, Bass won his freedom during the Civil War by beating up Colonel George R. Reeves, a member of the slaveholding family.

Bass fled north, living among the Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek Indians until 1865. His knowledge of Native languages made him highly desirable to the U.S. Marshals who were expanding west, and in 1875, Reeves became the first Black deputy U.S Marshal west of the Mississippi. Over a period of 32 years, Reeves nabbed 3,000 felons, and is said to have killed 14 outlaws in self-defense. By the time he died at 71 in 1910, Reeves was a legend — though his legacy was whitewashed and stolen.

Reeves is one of countless great Americans whose contributions have been rewritten, revised, or erased to fed the voracious appetite of those who craft self-aggrandizing tales to cover up their darkest sins. Yet, the beauty of history is that the truth will always out, and those who have inherited the great traditions of the past continue to practice and elevate the culture to this very day.

Hailing from Maine, photographer Rory Doyle headed South and set up shop, working as a freelance editorial and commercial photographer in Cleveland, Mississippi, the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Here he began a series of work titled Delta Hill Riders, a portrait of Black cowboys today. Here, Doyle shares his experiences creating these photographs, portraits of a way of life whose history is still being told.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Feature Shoot, Photography

Evenlyn Hofer: New York

Posted on January 15, 2019

There are moments when you find yourself gazing upon a photograph feeling as though you were there. In the silence of the still image, you can feel the breeze caress your hair as the steady of flow of traffic hums along. The sun warms your back as you take it all in. It’s like you are there; of course, you are not, but the image gets transferred into your memory anyway. You now have a memory of witnessing something someone else saw, and all of the attendant emotions it caused. Can you be nostalgic about someone else’s life? It’s the question that comes up time and again in Evelyn Hofer: New York (Steidl).

The monograph itself, begins with a reference to an older time, drawing inspiration from the classic 1965 book New York Proclaimed, which features an in-depth essay by V. S. Pritchett and photos by Hofer before moving on to include a selection of previously unpublished photos made during early ‘70s throughout. Evelyn Hofer’s New York is the city of one who knows it well, who traverses its streets, parks, and bridges. It is the landscape of a True Yorker who loves it all: the glass and steel, the flesh and bone, the lives to be found everywhere you look.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me

Posted on January 2, 2019

Mickalene Thomas. Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher, 2009. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel. 82 x 72 in. Private collection

Mickalene Thomas. Afro Goddess Looking Forward , 2015. Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel. 60 x 96 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Look, but don’t touch, just imagine how it feels as your eyes caress the surface of a work of art by Mickalene Thomas. Painting, photograph, and collage commingle effortlessly as sequins, rhinestones, and glitter every hue imaginable make their way across the picture plane. Spellbound, you stand there and breathe it all in, taking refuge in the infinite glory of the sublime.

At the heart of Thomas’s work is an intoxicating sense of intimacy, a sensual embrace that that seems to embody the very air we breathe. One is immediately seduced and disarmed, overwhelmed by the feeling of being welcomed into this milieu, a space that suggests a boudoir filled with velvet and lace, with veils that cover and reveal, of secrets to be shared.

At its very center, it is about relationship, about the dynamic that exists between artist, model, and viewer that dances into the timeless sunsets of an infinite land. It is rooted in the connections Thomas holds with the women who inspire her to create a wonderland.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Mickalene Thomas. Racquel: Come to Me, 2017. Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, oil stick, and glitter on wood panel. 108 x 84 in. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Women

Sheila Pree Bright: #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests

Posted on December 26, 2018

Sheila Pree Bright. 2015, Justice League NYC’s “March 2 Justice” from New York to Washington, DC, in protest of police brutality.

On November 27, Ferguson activist Bassem Masri was found unconscious on a bus in suburban St. Louis. Just 31 at the time of his death, Masri is the latest untimely death of local activists who have passed in sudden and mysterious ways.

Many will remember the murder of Deandre Joshua, just 20 years old, when his body was found with a gunshot to the head inside his car, which had been set on fire during the height of the protests against the extrajudicial assassination of Mike Brown at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson.

Then in 2016, the body of Darren Seals, 26, was found — the same manner of killing exacted upon one of the most prominent activists in the movement. But the deaths did not end there. In 2017, Edward Crawford, 27, was found shot to death in the backseat of his car, and just as recently as October 17, Ferguson activist Melissa McKinnies discovered her son, Danye Jones, 24, lynched in her backyard.

On December 3, HBO premiered Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland, a documentary film that asks, “What really happened to Black Lives Matter activist Sandra Bland?” In her death, Bland became a symbol of all that the government has done — and the ways in which the true story is hidden from view.

During the height of the protest movement, there were often photographs of men, women, and children holding signs asking, “Am I Next?” It is difficult to ignore this question paging through the book, #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests (Chronicle) by Sheila Pree Bright, a selection of which are currently on view in Radical Lens at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum through May 31, 2019.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Sheila Pree Bright. 2015, Students of Historically Black Colleges and Universities stand in solidarity with
students of University of Missouri, demanding the resignation of President Tim Wolfe.

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography