Posts from the “Huck” Category

Mark Murrmann: The Midwest Basement Band Scene

Posted on April 16, 2018

Teengenerate at the Fireside Bowl, Chicago, IL © Mark Murrmann

The Tyrades at the Ice Factory, Chicago, IL © Mark Murrmann

American photographer Mark Murrmann caught his first gig as a teen in 1987. It was a GWAR show, with a local band called the Slammies as the opening act. “I had no idea what to expect or what it was about, but I got hooked,” he remembers. “From that point on, I’d go to every show I could.”

There were only a handful of venues in his hometown of Indianapolis catering to the under-21 crowd back then. The only larger venue, the Arlington, didn’t book small touring bands, who made due by playing at high school cafeterias, hotel conference rooms, park recreational halls – anywhere someone was willing to host a show.

“This wasn’t new, but was new to me,” Murrmann explains. “Going to see a band play in a crowded basement or small hall with everyone packed together – the energy was combustible.”

“A guy named Steve Duginsky was booking a lot of the hardcore and emo shows featuring early Bay Area Lookout Records bands, Dischord bands, Chicago bands, bands via Maximum Rock’nroll’s Book Your Own Fucking Life guides. He rented a shitty storefront as a space for shows and called it the Sitcom. In the early ’90s, a lot of spots like this were popping up around the Midwest.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Short Eyes, Monkey Mania Warehouse, Denver, CO. © Mark Murrmann

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

John Myers: The Portraits

Posted on April 15, 2018

Mr. Jackson, 1974. © John Myers

British artist John Myers first took up photography in 1972 when he began creating portraits of local residents in the town of Stourbridge in the West Midlands. Using a 5 x 4 Gandolfi plate camera, Myers made a series of photographs that combine the classic archetypical studies of August Sander and the quirky psychological profiles of Diane Arbus.

Although a selection of the works were exhibited in London at the time and published in British Image 1 (1974) – the first landmark publication from the Arts Council – most of the photographs had never been printed until now. With the release of The Portraits (RRB Photo Books), Myers returned to his archive to unearth a selection of work made throughout the 1970s.

“In the early ’70s in England, there were very few photography books available,” Myers recalls. “My main interest and influence was August Sander and Diane Arbus. What’s striking about Arbus’ photographs is that you can’t get away from the figure. They are not composed in any composition sense; they are in a box and they intrude on your space. There’s nowhere to hide. Arbus developed this notion of the figure in space from August Sander.”

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Nicola and Donny Osmond, 1973. © John Myers

Categories: 1970s, Books, Huck, Photography

Lukas Birk: Burmese Photographers

Posted on April 5, 2018

Actor Kyaw Thu. Taken by U Sann Aung, USA Photo Studio, Yangon 1989/1990

Calendar photographs taken by Har Si Yone, Bellay Photo Studio, Yangon 1970s

The Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar has long been shrouded in mystery and intrigue. Formerly known as Burma, the country sits on the Bay of Bengal where it lies nestled between India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, and China, and has been subject to invasions for the better part of the past millennia.

For the past six decades, it has been ruled by a military dictatorship that has worked to keep its borders closed. “We have this idea that the country was closed off from the world and to some extent it was – but certain things always come through,” Austrian photographer and archivist Lukas Birk reveals.

In 2013, Birk launched the Myanmar Photo Archive (MPA) to create a comprehensive archive of Burmese photographers working between 1890 and 1995. Featuring some 10,000 photographs, it provides an inside look at the nation through the eyes of its citizens. A selection of the work is showcased in the new book, Burmese Photographers (Goethe Institut Yangon), which includes fascinating chapters on youth culture between 1970 and 1990.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Calendar photographs taken by Har Si Yone, Bellay Photo Studio, Yangon 1970s

Actors Kyaw Thu & Moh Moh Myint Aung. Taken by U Sann Aung, USA Photo Studio, Yangon 1989/1990

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

The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand

Posted on March 27, 2018

Untitled, 1970s. © Garry Winogrand

“I photograph something to find out what it will look like photographed,” American street photographer Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) famously said, revealing the fundamental principle of his philosophy. Through his lens, life was rendered anew, giving us a fresh perspective and vantage point for seeing the world.

“The more interested you get in Winogrand the more eager you are to see stuff you have not seen,” British writer Geoff Dyer reveals about the hunger that drove him to create The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (University of Texas Press), a luxurious meditation on the many ways in which the photographer’s remarkable images work.

The book, which is modelled on John Szarkowski’s classic book Atget, presents a brilliantly curated selection of 100 photographs, including 18 previously unpublished colour works, from the Winogrand archive at the Centre for Creative Photography. Each image is accompanied by an essay, in which Dyer explores the relationship between the artist, his subject, and the photograph in a wholly original manner that is as insightful as it is engaging.

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Central Park, New York, 1970. © Garry Winogrand

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Huck, Photography

Steven Edson: Vintage New York City Street Scenes

Posted on March 25, 2018

Wedding couple NYC, 1973. © Steven Edson

Big car white shoes, 1973. © Steven Edson

Steven Edson was just eight years old when he was blinded in one eye by a pebble thrown by another child. While recovering, his neighbour, who was also an eye doctor, gave him a camera and he began to shoot. He quickly fell in love with photography – a passion he shared with his father, who always took pictures at various family occasions.

At home, he would page through picture magazines like LIFE and National Geographic, and came to admire the work of street photographers like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus.

Growing up in New York City during the ’50s and ’60s, Edson got to know the streets of his native town, which soon became the backdrop for a series of black and white street photographs and portraits. “New York was rough and unpolished,” Edson recalls. “It was filled with buses, taxis, and trucks all honking their horns, while the fumes of exhaust spilt out into the street, choking your breath. The subway was also extremely loud but offered the thrill of sending you barreling down the tracks through the darkened tunnels.”

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NYC street scene. © Steven Edson

Man hugging woman, 1974. © Steven Edson

Categories: 1970s, Art, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Morgan Ashcom: What the Living Carry

Posted on March 19, 2018

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” American writer William Faulkner wrote in the 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, recognising the long shadows that hang over us. A Mississippi native and Nobel Prize laureate, Faulkner’s words speak a profound truth about the American South, a land shrouded in myth and mystery, where illusion and reality are forever intertwined in the tales people tell.

Photographer Morgan Ashcom, a native of Free Union, Virginia, understands this underlying truth: our stories have just as much (if not more) influence on our identity than the facts themselves. Like Faulkner, Ashcom understands that the South is not so much a “geographical place” as it is an “emotional idea,” one which he deftly explores in What the Living Carry, a new exhibition currently on view at Candela Books + Gallery to time with the publication of a monograph by the same name from MACK Books.

What the Living Carry tells the story of life in a fictional Southern town named Hoys Fork, where memories of the past perfume the air like bouquets of magnolias blossoming on the trees. The town is nestled in the landscape, a timeless space that evokes the myths of how the country was formed, driven by a belief in Manifest Destiny: that people are entitled to take what is not rightfully theirs.

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Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Huck Magazine Cover Story: The Journeys Issue

Posted on March 14, 2018

I could not be more thrilled to discover my feature on Ryan Weideman’s vintage taxi cab photos made in the 80s and 90s has been selected for the cover of the new issue of Huck Magazine.

Ryan took me back to the nights when the “Speed Deman” cruised the streets of New York. His stories had me holding on to the edge of my seat, and when it was all said and done he imparted a classic bit of taxi cab wisdom that concludes our wild ride.

Read the Announcement at Huck

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Huck, Photography

Nicola Brandt: The Earth Inside

Posted on March 14, 2018

Guardian I, Namib Desert (2017). © Nicola Brandt

The Shape of Memory, Wlotzkasbaken, Namibia (2012). © Nicola Brandt

The Herero Wars of 1904–1908 are considered by many to be the first genocide of the 20th century. During the “Scramble of Africa,” imperialist powers in Germany descended upon present-day Namibia in southwest Africa in 1884. Two decades later, when the Herero people rose in revolt, General Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order to kill every man and drive women and children into the desert.

At the end of 1904, the Germans divided up survivors, sending some to concentration camps and others to work slave labour for German businesses. Within four years, up to 110,000 Herero had been killed – yet it would be nearly a century before the government of Germany publicly acknowledged and apologized for the acts of genocide, as reported in The Guardian in 2004.

As a woman of German descent born in Namibia, photographer Nicola Brandt feels a profound connection to its legacy, creating The Earth Inside, a body of photographs and Indifference, a video, that examine the landscape where these European atrocities took place. “As an artist sensitive to the histories and memories contained in the landscapes and structures that relate to our past, it is difficult not to engage with our colonial inheritance and its effects,” she explains.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Huck, Photography

Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself

Posted on March 9, 2018

At 80 years old, American photographer Joel Meyerowitz is still going strong, forging a singular path that has taken him around the globe several times over. Hailing from East Bronx, Meyerowitz began his career as a street photographer, capturing the curious, quirky moments that reveal themselves as quickly as they disappear.

Today, Meyerowitz now finds himself living on a farm in Tuscany, amassing an archive of 50,000 photographs in just about every genre imaginable. “How come I found myself here, living in Italy and making still lifes when I am a street photographer Jew form New York City? What am I doing here?” Meyerowitz laughs.

He set out to answer this question in Where I Find Myself (Laurence King), a career retrospective presented in reverse chronological order. Here, Meyerowitz takes us on a magical journey from the present into the past, guiding us through the many chapters of his well-lived life.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Landon Nordeman: Prom in Flint

Posted on March 6, 2018

FLINT, MI – MAY 21: Antonio Nelson, 18, looks inside his friend’s car on the way to his high school prom on Saturday, May 21, 2016 in Flint, Michigan. (Photo by Landon Nordeman)

FLINT, MI – MAY 21: A student’s shoes and socks match his ride on the way to the Northwestern High School Prom on Saturday, May 21, 2016 in Flint, Michigan. (Photo by Landon Nordeman)

Flint, Michigan, first made headlines in 2014 when state officials changed water sources and failed to apply corrosion inhibitors, creating a public health crisis that continues to this very day. With 10 people dead, and some 12,000 children exposed to lead-infested drinking water, the predominantly African-American city has been forced to drink, cook, clean, and bathe with bottled or filtered water for the past four years.

Despite these horrific circumstances, the people of Flint endure – and even thrive. In 2016, Zack Canepari invited New York-based photographer Landon Nordeman to spend 24 hours in Flint, documenting the annual Northwestern High School prom as part of Canepari’s larger project Flint is a Place.

“Zack had been to one the previous year and reached out to me,” Nordeman explains. Nordeman, who shoots for The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine, was invited to photograph the scene for a body of work titled Prom in Flint that captures the senior class celebrating in their flyest finery and enjoying a classic American rite of passage.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

FLINT, MI – MAY 21: Unidentified students dance during their high school prom on Saturday, May 21, 2016 in Flint, Michigan. (Photo by Landon Nordeman)

Categories: Art, Fashion, Huck, Photography

Nathan Farb: The Russians

Posted on February 28, 2018

In June 1977, during the height of the Cold War, American photographer Nathan Farb travelled to the city of Novosibirisk, Siberia, the third-largest city in Russia nestled deep in the South. Farb was travelling as part of Photography USA, part of the United States Information Agency, established as a cultural exchange program under President Carter’s administration.

Farb brought a four x five Polaroid camera and loads of film to create black and white portraits of visitors throughout the six-week exhibition. “There were as many as five or ten thousand people a day who came to the show,” he remembers. “Everybody wanted to be photographed because they were going to be able to take home a portrait. I could only do 30 or 40 a day as I wanted it to be very precise, like a gold wire that connects one point to another with the least resistance.”

While his subjects left with a print, Farb kept the negatives for himself, sending them back to the United States in a diplomatic pouch. Upon his return, Farb began publishing the photographs in The New York Times Magazine and in publications around Western Europe, before eventually being compiled in a monograph. The works, which were first exhibited in 1979 at the Midtown Y Gallery, New York, are once again on view in The Russians at The Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City, California, now through April 29, 2018.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1970s, Art, Huck, Photography