Posts from the “Huck” Category

Hazel Hankin: Coney Island, Summer of 77

Posted on March 14, 2021

*Hazel Hankin. Coney Island, Summer 1977.*

Brooklyn native Hazel Hankin can still remember the thrills and chills of going to Coney Island in the 1950s as a child, revelling in the vibrant atmosphere of “America’s Playground”. Drawn to what she describes as “a world that seemed to exist outside of normal life,” as a teenager, Hankin began hanging around Coney Island after dark with friends for late-night rides on the legendary Cyclone rollercoaster.

After graduating high school at 16, Hankin began studying art at Brooklyn College where she pursued her BA, then her MFA. Originally a painter, everything changed when Hankin, who married at 20, got divorced mid-degree.

“I didn’t have a place to paint but I had a place to put a darkroom,” Hankin remembers. “I didn’t know anything about photography. I was a blank slate. I learned photography on a 2 ¼ camera and didn’t even know about different photo formats.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Harvey Stein: Then and There – Mardi Gras 1979

Posted on March 12, 2021

In January 1979, American photographer Harvey Stein quit his job at a Madison Avenue advertising agency to pursue his dream of being a photographer. After publishing his first book, Parallels: A Look at Twins, the previous fall, Stein was ready to strike out on a path all his own. To celebrate leaving the business world behind Stein and fellow photo buddies Bruce Gilden, Charles Gatewood, and Jim Colman decided to travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras that February.

“As I recall, the shooting was non-stop, all day,” Stein says. “There was high energy everywhere. I wanted to document exuberant public behaviour, nudity, and high spirits. This was prevalent. I photographed mostly in the French Quarter – I thought that part of the city was charming, with narrow streets and small-scale buildings. Altogether it was a wonderful trip.”

Under the bright light of daytime, Stein used his Leica M-4 to create a series of black and white street photographs capturing the decadence of America’s most famous carnival. At dusk, Stein took out his Polaroid SX-70 camera to make intimate street portraits of people adorned with face paint and masks, published for the first time in the new book Then and There: Mardi Gras 1979 (Zatara Press).

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Leonard Fink Photographs

Posted on March 8, 2021

*Leonard Fink. Manon Motorcycle at the Pier.*

An amateur photographer with a passion for documenting gay life in New York, Leonard Fink (1930–1992) worked in complete obscurity for more than 25 years, amassing an extraordinary archive of work now being digitised by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York.

Fink’s photographs capture the early years of the gay liberation movement as a new generation came of age, taking to the streets to celebrate newly won freedoms to live and love openly. His vibrant scenes of parades, bars, and cruising at New York’s infamous West Side Piers offer an intimate slice of life as seen by an insider who was also extremely reclusive.

An attorney for the New York Transit Authority, Fink was a self-taught photographer who never exhibited or published his work while he as alive. He worked in his small apartment on West 92 Street, living frugally to afford the pricey cost of photographic supplies and develop his photographs in a homemade darkroom.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Leonard Fink. Pier 46 ’79 Boy with skateboard in pier 46 & shammey loin cloth.’79.*

Leonard Fink. Bar Patrons in Front of Badlands Bar and Gay World Series Banner.

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

Philip Wolmuth: Notting Hill

Posted on March 2, 2021

Socially concerned photography, which dates back to the work ofJacob Riis and Lewis Hine, has the power to change lives by shining a light on how the other half lives. In the 1970s, Philip Wolmuth, then in his 20s, began using photography to document the Horniman’s Adventure Playground in North Kensington where he worked, and got involved with community activism in North Paddington.

“Philip was interested in documenting the society we live in and the way people live and work, and felt very comfortable behind the camera,” says his partner Jane Matheson, and their children Anna and Eva Wolmuth.

“Philip has a strong sense of social justice and has always been strongly anti-establishment. He sought to document the reality of people’s lives in an unjust society, including community struggles, housing problems, low paid work, cuts to public services.”

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Philip Wolmuth. 1983: Young bikers on the first skateboard bowl in Meanwhile Gardens, a community-run park next to the Grand Union canal in North Paddington. The bowl was replaced by a new, state-of-the-art design in 2002.

*Philip Wolmuth. 1975: demolition of shops and houses in Kensal Road, North Kensington.*

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

Mariette Pathy Allen: Transformations

Posted on February 23, 2021

*Mariette Pathy Allen. “Christine Jorgensen at Home, Near LA,” 1984.*

“I seem to operate on flukes,” says American photographer Mariette Pathy Allen, who began documenting the transgender community after finding herself drawn to a group in the dining room of her New Orleans hotel during Mardi Gras in 1978.

“I always felt there was something wrong with society’s rules that said men are supposed to be one way and women are supposed to be another,” Allen says. “I was always thinking about big issues like, ‘How do we determine who we are?’ Then I met these wonderful people and I felt like they were living the questions that I was asking myself.”

From that serendipitous encounter in the lobby, a bond was formed, one that empowered Allen to document trans communities in the United States, Cuba, Burma, Thailand, and Mexico. In the new exhibition, Transformations, Allen revisits portraits made between 1978 and 1989 when the trans and gender-variant community was still very much underground.

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*Mariette Pathy Allen. “Vicky West Dancing the Cancan with My Daughters, Cori and Julia, Bridgehampton, NY,” 1982.*

*Mariette Pathy Allen. “Beth and Her Husband, Rita, Boston, MA,” 1983.*

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

Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole

Posted on February 17, 2021

Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1963. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was a singular figure in the 20th century, transcending every boundary erected against Black America to become one of the greatest artists of our times. The self-taught photographer, who barely escaped lynching as a child and ended up homeless as a young teen, used the injustice levelled against him as fuel to chart his own path through the mainstream in order to tell stories of Black America from the inside.

As the first Black photographer working for LIFE magazine, Parks’ photographs of segregation in the South, pictures made in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, scenes of crime in major cities in the 1950s, and documentation of the Civil Rights Movement have become some of the most indelible images of mid-century America.

The new exhibition, Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole, offers an intimate portrait of the complex realities for Black Americans between 1942 and the 1970s. The exhibition opens with an essay by New Yorker journalist Jelani Cobb, drawing parallels between the lives of George Floyd and Gordon Parks, both of whom moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in search of a better life.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Untitled, Mobile, Alabama, 1956. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.*

*Untitled (Malcolm X) Harlem, New York, 1963. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.*

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Donna Ferrato: Holy

Posted on February 12, 2021

American photographer Donna Ferrato is a force of nature, determined and unafraid to call out the injustice against women, break down taboos, and celebrate femininity in its many forms. In her new book Holy (powerHouse Books), Ferrato takes us on a journey in the fight for women’s liberation over the past half-century.

In the book, which is organised into sections honouring the Mother, the Daughter, and the Other, Ferrato reclaims the sacred while taking shots at the patriarchy – a position she adopted as a young girl. Ferrato remembers the confusion, frustration, and anger she felt taking catechism class in Catholic school. The Holy Trinity confounded her. “It didn’t make any sense that there was a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost,” she says.

Faced with erasure, Ferrato challenged authority, asking questions no one would or could explain. “It seems like mankind is too satisfied with getting some fairytale to explain the great mysteries in life. But I don’t want to accept any of that, and I want to give credit where credit is due. This is what Holy is about.”

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

Aperture #241: Utopia

Posted on February 5, 2021

*Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (In the Blue Bush), 2018*

*Biosphere 2, ca. 1991, from the film Spaceship Earth, 2020. Courtesy Matt Wolf*

Utopia is available to all who call upon their imagination to conjure the perfect world. And who better than the artist to visualise an escape from the infernal damnations of the earth and offer a visionary portrait of a future we might dare to dream into existence?

In ‘Utopia’, Aperture #241, artists, photographers, and writers come together to envision a world without prisons, sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, environmental collapse – and all the other dangers pushing our very existence over the precipice.

Featuring the work of Nicole R. Fleetwood, The Family Acid, Lina Iris Viktor, Mickalene Thomas, Lorna Simpson, among others, Utopia offers a panoply of possible futures at our fingertips: a world without prisons, where people from all walks of life are free and unhindered by the spectre of oppression on every level of existence, starting with the relationship between artist and subject.

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*Balarama Heller, Desire Tree, from the series Sacred Place, 2019.*

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Gary Krueger’s City of Angeles, 1971-1980

Posted on February 2, 2021

American photographer Gary Krueger attributes his success to luck, chalking it up to an undeniable knack for being at the right place at the right time. After graduating high school in 1963, Krueger hopped in his 1954 Ford and drove west from his native Cleveland, Ohio, to Los Angeles to study graphic design and photography at Chouinard Art Institute, which later became the fabled California Institute of the Arts.

“I was one of four people in the ‘60s who didn’t take drugs that went to art school. I was the casual observer of what was going on,” Krueger says. “I’ve always had a camera, Brownie Starflash, but it was never anything serious. After I got into Chouinard, I made one print in the darkroom and went, ‘This is fucking magic!’ It knocked me out.”

After graduating in 1967, Krueger got a job working at the ‘Imagineering’ division of Disney to photograph the park and its events. “After six months, I decided I’m going to be a photographer,” he remembers.

Krueger quickly struck gold when he landed a cover for West magazine. “I got $250. Well, it might as well have been a million dollars! This is 1967. To give you an idea, gasoline was 11 cents a gallon. My rent was $55 a month.”

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

Darnell Moore: Being Seen

Posted on January 27, 2021

Just two days after George Floyd was killed, Tony McDade, a 38-year-old Black trans man, was fatally shot by police in Tallahassee, Florida. While the Black Lives Matter movement surged to unprecedented heights, McDade’s death was underreported.

In the coming month, a new refrain would emerge: ‘All Black Lives Matter,’ signaling the need to ensure visibility for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Despite their vast contributions to culture and politics, the Black LGBTQ+ community has historically been misrepresented, marginalized and erased.

With Being Seen, a ten-episode weekly podcast, award-winning writer Darnell Moore honors the lived experiences and cultural contributions of Black gay, bi and trans masculine artists and activists. “Simply put, we wanted to create a platform that would make legible the fact that we, Black queer and trans men, exist and live lives worthy of consideration and celebration,” Moore says.

“We sought to involve Black people who come from a variety of places, people who contribute to culture in different ways, whether on screen, on the stage, or on the streets.”

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Categories: Art, Huck, Photography

Roy Mehta: Revival – London 1989-1993

Posted on January 26, 2021

In the 1960s, Roy Mehta’s family emigrated from India to the Kenton section of Brent, the most diverse district in London. Home to long-established Afro-Caribbean and Asian populations, the borough also includes significant Somali, Brazilian, Chinese, Irish, Italian, and Romanian communities.

As the only member of his family born in London, Mehta holds a unique perspective of the world, one honed by time spent in nearby Harlesden where his father worked as a GP, and at the Wembley Market, where he spent time with his mother and sister.

In 1989, while attending art school in Surrey, Mehta embarked on a project documenting life on the streets of Brent to make work that spoke to this family connection. Over the next five years, Mehta would create an intimate portrait of everyday life, photographing people on the streets, in their homes, and attending places of worship where they could freely express themselves.

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