Posts from the “Huck” Category

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

Robert Mapplethorpe. Phillip Prioleau, 1982 © Robert Mapplethorpe / Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

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

Laurie Simmons: Big Camera, Little Camera

Posted on March 17, 2019

Long House (Orange and Green Lounge), 2004. © Laurie Simmons

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

Welcome To Crooklyn, Walking Across the Williamsburg Bridge 1996. © Vincent Cianni

Under The Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Williamsburg Brooklyn 1996. © Vincent Cianni

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

Sugeiry Touching Scarface with Knife, Bedford Avenue Williamsburg Brooklyn 1998. © Vincent Cianni

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

Jamie Diamond & Elena Dorfman: Surrogate – A Love Ideal

Posted on February 20, 2019

Elena Dorfman. Ginger Brook 4, 2001. From the series, Still Lovers

In a culture where overexposure has become the new norm, intimacy and bonding is becoming increasingly complex. People adapt in any number of ways, adopting attitudes, behaviours, and even objects that allow them to channel the desire for love in a tangible way.

In the new exhibition Surrogate. A Love Ideal, opening February 21, American photographers Jamie Diamond and Elena Dorfman explore the expression of familial and romantic love between human and doll — an expression that elicits feelings of surprise, confusion, disgust, and even empathy from those who see it from the outside looking in.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Jamie Diamond. Mother Kyla, 2012. From Forever mothers

Categories: Art, Huck, Photography

How Art Changed the Prison: The Work of CPA’s Prison Arts Program

Posted on February 5, 2019

Lee Jupina. Game Day, 2015. 7 x 8 1⁄2 inches. Pen on Bristol board. Collection of Jeffrey Greene

The United States prison industrial complex is firmly rooted in the legalisation of slavery. For over 150 years, those rightfully and wrongfully imprisoned have been forced to endure conditions that violate human rights, their fates given over to the government and private corporations.

In the past week, stories of egregious violations at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn and Cook County Jail in Chicago have gone viral, revealing just a fraction of the brutality that largely goes unreported in the news. In much the same way, there are also successful rehabilitation stories that rarely get told.

Jeffrey Green, manager of the Prison Arts Program for the Community Partners in Action (CPA), is aiming to rectify this problem – creating a non-profit organisation that works with current and former inmates in Connecticut’s prison system.

The CPA was originally founded in 1875 as the Prisoners’ Friends Society by a group of notable citizens invested in social reform. This included Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), who called out the school-to-prison pipeline by astutely observing: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Joseph Castellano. When I Was Young, 2007. 8 1⁄2 x 11 inches. Pen, colored pencil on paper. Collection of Jeffrey Greene.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck

Patti Smith: Wing

Posted on January 15, 2019

Patti Smith (1946) Patti at William Burroughs Grave, Lawrence, Kansas, May 2013 Silver gelatin print Photo by Lenny Kaye. Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York.

In the early 1970s, Patti Smith travelled to Mexico with a Polaroid camera in hand, making photographs as components for collages, most of which have been lost to history. In the decades since, Smith returned time and again, creating a series of images and poems inspired by a feeling of kinship with the nation and its flourishing artistic community.

Now, a selection of 30 photographs is on view in Patti Smith: Wing, a celebration of creation and communion. Wing is also the title of a poem about freedom, both physical and spiritual, as well as the act of travelling independently to distant lands.

“I am not a photographer, yet taking pictures has given me a sense of unity and personal satisfaction,” Smith writes in Land 250. “They are relics of my life. Souvenirs of my wandering. All that I have learned concerning light and composition is contained within them.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Patti Smith (1946) Frida Kahlo’s corset 2, Casa Azul, Coyoacan, 2012 Gelatin silver print. Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

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

1947, Simone de Beauvoir in America

Posted on January 10, 2019

Louis Faurer, New York, NY, 1947 (profile head in El window), Courtesy Deborah Bell Gallery/ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery

Esher Bubley, Coast to Coast, SONJ, 1947, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery/ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery.

In January of 1947, Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986) arrived in New York from her native France to begin a four-month speaking tour at colleges across the United States. Over a period of 116 days, she crossed 19 states and 56 cities by trains, cars, and Greyhound buses, immersing herself in the nation’s landscape and keeping a detailed diary of all that she witnessed.

First published in France in 1948, America Day by Day shows us America through de Beauvoir’s eyes, giving us a taste of life for the young writer and intellectual just two years before she published her landmark work, The Second Sex.

“This is a very photographic book,” says Corinne Tapia, director of Sous Les Etoiles Gallery in New York. “The writing is so precise. She is determined to tell her truth and what she sees. You can easily point out the fact by the descriptions of the cities: where she is, where she goes, and what she hears.”

Tapia first read the book 15 years ago, returning to it periodically and therein discovering a desire all her own: to curate an exhibition of photographs illustrating the world de Beauvoir’s encountered.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Wayne Miller, From ” The Way of Life of the Northern Negro,” Chicago (Afternoon Game at Table 2), 1946-1948 courtesy Stephen Daiter Gallery/ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery.

Fred Lyon, Post & Powell, Union Square, San Francisco, 1947, courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery/ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Karlheinz Weinberger: Sports

Posted on January 3, 2019

For Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006), the camera was an all-access pass into a world where men openly expressed their true selves. Best known for his photos of rebels and rockers, Weinberger pursued the masculine ideal in its many forms, including the peak athletic physiques of the sporting world. In Karlheinz Weinberger, Volume # 2, Sports (Sturm & Drang), we’re whisked away and taken into a testosterone-fueled world filled with bodybuilders, wrestlers, weightlifters, motorcyclists, and football players drenched in pools of tension and sweat.

Curator Patrik Schedler, who cared for Weinberger artistically from 2000 until his death and manages the photographic estate, explains: “Weinberger was so interested in the relationships between men, their self-expression and their beauty. With his camera, he was able to observe and work out all this very well. Weinberger said that he was able to photograph almost all the men he liked. In fact, they liked to be photographed, to show themselves, to pose.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Picks of the Bunch: Huck’s Top 10 Photo Stories of 2018

Posted on December 29, 2018

What a way to end the year! I am thrilled to have two of the top ten photo stories chosen by the readers of Huck — including my very first cover for the magazine!

Read the Full List at Huck Online

Then check out…

PICTURES OF REALLY, REALLY RICH PEOPLE GETTING DRUNK

Throughout the ’80s, photographer Dafydd Jones captured the well-heeled hedonists of England’s upper classes. ‘It was another world going on behind closed doors,’ he remembers. Read more…

A CAB DRIVER CAPTURES 30 YEARS OF NEW YORK AFTER DARK

Street photographer Ryan Weideman drove a New York City cab for decades. With one eye on the road and a camera in his hand, every passenger became a story, every trip a wild ride. Read more….

Dachshunds fighting over canapes, ris Love and Brooke Astor with Just Desserts and Dolly Astor at a Dachund party. Barbetta. Manhattan. 12 February 1990

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

Jamie Reid: XXXXX – Fifty Years of Subversion and the Spirit.

Posted on December 12, 2018

For half a century, Jamie Reid has done it his way, on his own terms, refusing to kowtow to the establishment and its pompous self-regard. Under his careful eye, art becomes a vehicle for anarchy, subversion, and resistance against the powers that be.

Now, for the first time in his career, Reid is the subject of a major retrospective: XXXXX: Fifty Years of Subversion and the Spirit. The show brings together collage, drawings, paintings, prints, posters, photographs, film, and installation work made over half a century. So why now? “I haven’t been asked before,” Reid says, before casually adding that he did not begin selling his work until a decade ago.

Most famous for sticking a safety pin through the Queen’s nose, desecrating the Union Jack, and crafting the ransom note letter styling of the Sex Pistols’ graphics, Reid has been a pivotal figure in the establishment of punk. His work helped shape the movement into not only a form of music, fashion and art, but into a philosophy predicated on the notion that capitalism is the biggest scam going today.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck