Posts from the “i-D” Category

Tseng Kwong Chi: East Meets West (a.k.a. Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series)

Posted on November 3, 2021

*Tseng Kwong Chi, Monument Valley, Arizona, 1987. Gelatin silver print. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Courtesy of the Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi and Yancey Richardson, New York.*

In 1978, Chinese photographer Tseng Kwong Chi (1950–1990) donned a Zhongshan suit purchased at a Montreal thrift store and showed up to a dinner party his parents were hosting at Windows on the World, a posh restaurant located at the very top of the World Trade Center. His parents, Chinese Nationals who fled Hong Kong in the 1960s to escape the reign of Chairman Mao, were aghast — but as his sister Muna Tseng remembers, the maître d’ treated Kwong Chi like a foreign dignitary.

Recognising the potent impact of costume, class and the ‘exotic’ on the American psyche, Kwong Chi created the Ambiguous Ambassador, a persona he would adopt for East Meets West (a.k.a. Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series) — selections from which will be on view at Yancey Richardson during The Art Show 2021 in New York.

Beginning in 1979, and continuing until just months before his untimely death from AIDS in 1990, Kwong Chi donned the suit, dark glasses and an ID badge that read “visitor” or “slut for art” to construct a distinctive look that readily exposed reductive notions of the ‘other’. Like his contemporary Cindy Sherman, Kwong Chi combined elements of photography and performance to examine issues of identity, myth and representation with a decidedly camp sensibility.

Although China’s first president Sun Yat-sen introduced the suit in the early 20th century, Mao made a global fashion statement when he wore it to the historic 1972 meeting with President Richard Nixon. While Western sensibilities endowed it with prestige, Mao knew it was common-wear — adopting it to present himself as a “man of the people”. The irony was firmly lost on Americans, who often minimised this complex culture to a monolithic identity (whilst simultaneously claiming to embrace “diversity” and “inclusion”).

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*Tseng Kwong Chi, Hollywood Hills, California, 1979. Gelatin silver print. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Courtesy of the Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi and Yancey Richardson, New York.*

*Tseng Kwong Chi, New York, New York, 1979. Gelatin silver print. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Courtesy of the Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi and Yancey Richardson, New York.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, i-D, Photography

Helmut Newton: Legacy

Posted on October 25, 2021

*Helmut Newton. Thierry Mugler Fashion, US Vogue, Monte Carlo, 1995*.

“One’s period is when one is very young,” wrote fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland in her 1984 memoir D.V., a pertinent observation about the ways in which our aesthetic sensibilities are imprinted during our earliest years. For Helmut Newton, whose childhood was spent in Weimar, Germany, the luminous drama of noir and glamour cast a powerful imprint upon his style, one that he brought to bear throughout his revolutionary fashion photography career.

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1920, Helmut Neustädter fell in love with photography at a young age. At 12, he started photographing the Funkturm (Radio Tower), a sleek, chic symbol of the emerging modern age and a motif to which he would return. Surrounded by artists, intellectuals and innovators who made Berlin one of the most avant-garde cities of the time, young Helmut came of age in a culture ripe with pleasure, provocation, and decadence.

“It sounds quite promising as one thinks of the liberalism of the Weimar Republic and the Roaring Twenties, of alcoholic and erotic debauchery,” says Dr Matthias Harder, Director and Curator, in advance of the opening of Helmut Newton: Legacy at the Helmut Newton Foundation on 31 October. “Helmut’s mother, an elegant woman with a strong sense of fashion, influenced him early on. In 1936, aged 16, Helmut began a two-year apprenticeship with then-famous photographer Yva, who published her sophisticated and, for the time, sometimes erotically-charged fashion photographs and portraits in many magazines.”

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*Helmut Newton. Prada, Monte Carlo, 1984.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, i-D, Photography

Sean Maung x DFLii on LA’s Exotic Male Dance Scene

Posted on October 14, 2021

In May 1990, National Geographic magazine published a 26-page cover story on Spanish Harlem by Puerto Rican photographer Joseph Rodriguez, chronicling daily life in El Barrio at the height of the crack epidemic. From the streets to the social clubs, the churches to trap houses, Joseph crafted a powerful portrait of a neighbourhood struggling to survive. At a time when the mainstream American media rarely offered honest, compassionate stories of Latino life, publishing these images was a powerful political act — one that added to a growing rift inside the magazine, which resulted in the firing of photography director William Garrett.

A couple of years later, Los Angeles native Sean Maung found a copy of the magazine in his Los Angeles elementary school. “One of the first photos that ever hit me was Joseph Rodriguez’s photo of a girl with a blue and white ice cream pop,” Sean says. “I was in fourth grade like, ‘Damn, that’s a dope photo!’”

A seed was planted, taking root and eventually came to fruition in 2004 when Sean picked up a camera for himself. “My first passion has always been people — I am fascinated by them,” he says. Rather than confining himself to a neighbourhood or scene, Sean moves between different worlds without disrupting the flow. Whether hanging out at swap meets, barbershops, vaquero bars in East Hollywood, the Flower District in Downtown LA, Venice Beach or South Central, Sean uses photography to celebrate the working class who give the city its style and edge.

While hanging out at King Henry VIII, an old school strip club in Hawthorne, Sean met Cash, a dancer whose style he admired. He photographed her for a shoot, and they stayed in touch. “One night in 2018, she texted me and said, ‘I’m dancing at this event in Inglewood. You should come through and take pictures’. She didn’t explain what it was,” Sean says. “So I showed up at a comedy club, and the bouncer said, ‘You know what you’re about to get yourself into, right?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ I went inside and it was nothing but women in the crowd. Next thing I knew, there were dudes coming out and putting on shows.”

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Categories: Art, i-D, Photography

Gillian Laub: Family Matters

Posted on September 29, 2021

*Gillian Laub, Grandpa helping Grandma out, 1999, from Family Matters (Aperture, 2021). © Gillian Laub*

On a brisk winter afternoon in 1999, Jewish-American photographer Gillian Laub stepped onto the streets of New York’s Upper East Side to enjoy a cigarette in between classes at the International Center of Photography. As she stood there, a Norwegian classmate spotted a gaggle of older women adorned in lavish furs and brightly colored lipstick walking down the block. He found them vulgar and called them as much. Gillian nodded along — until recognition struck.

“Gillian, oh my gawd, what are you doing up here?” her grandmother Bea screamed, the thick Bronx Yiddish accent filling the air like the full-bodied parfum of a potato knish served up piping hot from a sidewalk cart. Bea, accompanied by Gillian’s mother and her Aunt Phyllis, enveloped her with an effusive display of hugs and kisses, before rejoining a larger group of ladies making their weekly Upper East Side art crawl.

Gillian felt embarrassed, then defensive, wanting the Scandinavian student to understand and perhaps empathize with her family’s rags to riches story; their exuberant show of wealth — like their extravagant displays of affection — was evidence of their fierce determination to overcome prejudice and discrimination. Gillian fought back the urge to explain how a series of anti-Semitic pogroms during the Russian Revolution of 1905 split both sides of her family apart. Her great-grandparents fled Ukraine and headed to distant shores, arriving in the US in the early 20th century to make a better life for themselves.

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*Gillian Laub, Chappaqua backyard, 2000, from Family Matters (Aperture, 2021). © Gillian Laub*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, i-D, Photography

DASHCAM – Dash Snow: Photographs of Life

Posted on September 24, 2021

*Dash Snow. Untitled (Jade and Secret Nest), 2007.*

A mythic figure in every sense of the word, Dash Snow evoked the romantic archetype of the rebel who sacrificed everything, including, ultimately, his own life. A member of the 27 Club, Dash died from a drug overdose in 2009, just as his star was on the rise.

Born Dashiell Snow on the 27th of July 1981, Dash was the great-grandson of French aristocrats and art collectors Dominique and John de Menil, founders of the Menil Collection museum and the Rothko Chapel, a chapel and work of modern art home to 14 paintings by Mark Rothko, both in Houston. An anti-authoritarian to the core, Dash rebelled against his parents and was sent away to a boarding school for troubled youth. After getting out, he fled to New York during the 1990s and 00s — the last gasp of the city’s once-legendary libertine age — and quickly fell in with the city’s demi-monde.

As a member of the legendary graffiti crew IRAK, Dash was an integral figure on the downtown scene. His exploits became the stuff of legend alongside a wild cast of characters. The quintessential renegade, Dash embodied the ethos of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll as he charted his way from the upper echelons of society to the streets, refusing to play by the rules. But the very world he disdained loved him for his insouciance, catapulting him to art star for his antics — like sperm and glitter-encrusted collages of Saddam Hussein or the “hamster nests” whereby rooms would be entirely destroyed, made ritualistically with friend Dan Colen in hotels and later galleries.

In what would have been his 40th year, Morán Morán and the Dash Snow Estate have organized DASHCAM – Dash Snow: Photographs of Life, the artist’s first posthumous gallery exhibition in the United States. Guest curated by Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator of White Columns, New York, the exhibition focuses on Dash’s lesser-known black-and-white 35mm photography.

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*Dash Snow. Untitled (Self-portrait in Bedroom), 2008.*

*Dash Snow. Untitled (Gang Gang Dance), 2006.*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, i-D, Manhattan, Photography

Jill Freedman: Street Cops 1978-1981

Posted on September 8, 2021

*NYPD Police officers stop and search a car in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, 1979. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)*

By 1975, New York City was $11 billion dollars in debt. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the city could no longer afford to maintain basic municipal services. Enraged about proposed budget cuts, unions representing the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the New York Fire Department (FDNY) created a pamphlet titled “Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” which they passed out at local airports and hotels. On the cover, a black hooded skull smiled menacingly; inside were a list of nine “safety” tips for tourists such as “Stay off the streets after 6 P.M.” and “Remain in Manhattan.”

Unsuspecting recipients had no idea they were caught in a propaganda war waged against Mayor Abe Beame, who took the battle to court and secured a temporary restraining order to protect the “economic well-being of the city”. But the image of New York had already taken a nosedive as Hollywood and the media capitalized on the gritty glamour of a city struggling to survive.

Taking a page from the new wave of neo-realist Hollywood films, including The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the Fear City pamphlet cast New York as a den of sin, doomed but for the heroism of the boys in blue. Copaganda, as it is popularly known, is a long-standing American trope, one which found increasing popularity with the arrival of television in the 1950s with shows like Dragnet, Naked City and Peter Gunn.

By the 1970s, copaganda was everywhere, slickly produced to package violence to the masses. American photographer Jill Freedman (1939–2019) was not impressed. “I hate the violence you see on TV and in the movies. I wanted to show it straight, violence without commercial interruption, sleazy and not so pretty without its make-up,” she wrote in the introduction to her 1982 monograph Street Cops, which is being republished and exhibited this month.

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*A group of boys sit on a police patrol car in Alphabet City, New York City, 1980. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)*

*Two drug dealers are arrested on 42nd Street, New York City, 1979. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, i-D, Manhattan, Photography

Marvel Harris: MARVEL

Posted on August 24, 2021

*Marvel Harris. Image from MARVEL (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.*

As a teen, Dutch photographer Marvel Harris struggled with disordered eating and profound feelings of insecurity and aversion towards his body. Not understanding the root of his conflict, therapists trotted out textbook analysis, telling him: “Not wanting to gain weight, when struggling with an eating disorder, is associated with not wanting to grow up and take responsibilities.”

Recognizing this was not the source of his distress, Marvel dug deeper in search of understanding. When he gained weight, people offered compliments like, “Real women have curves,” which inadvertently got at the crux of the matter: Marvel was not a woman.

While reading about gender dysphoria in 2016, Marvel began to recognize himself and embarked on a journey to live his truth. A year later, he picked up the camera and began making a series of self-portraits documenting his experiences as a non-binary transgender artist transitioning to manhood. But something happened as he created a space for silent reflection of himself — Marvel found the path to his lifelong search for self-love and self-acceptance.

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Categories: Books, i-D, Photography

Patrick D. Pagnano: The Streets of New York

Posted on August 18, 2021

*Patrick D. Pagnano. Twin young women leaning on car; taken in NYC in the 1970s*

*Patrick D. Pagnano. Two men relaxing on park bench; New York city; Early 1970s*

“I was going to begin my tales of this city with a statement about how long I’ve been here, but the phone rang,” the Italian-American photographer Patrick D. Pagnano (1947-2018) wrote in a notebook on April 16, 1974 — just six weeks after he and his new wife, Kari, arrived in New York City for their honeymoon.

After spending their first week at the Times Square Motor Lodge, Pat and Kari found a cosy apartment on Thompson Street in the heart of Greenwich Village, which was then home to the bustling Italian-American community. “He loved the neighbourhood,” Kari says. “The Italian ladies in our building brought chairs down to sit on the stoop. There were a number of mafia-related characters that we always talked about. There was a guy on the next block, Sullivan Street, always walking up and down the sidewalk in his bathrobe.”

Pat was in his element. “The building we live in is practically all Italians,” he wrote in his notebook. “On Sunday you can smell the garlic and tomato floating from floor 1 to 6.” Undoubtedly the scent of Italian food evoked memories of home. A second-generation Italian-American, Pat was raised in a multi-generational home in Chicago’s South Side during the 1950s and 60s.

His family faced the horrors of ‘urban renewal’ twice in Pat’s youth: first when the government seized his father’s store to build the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects where the movie Candyman was based, and then a second time when the family home was razed to build the University of Illinois in Chicago. These experiences shaped Pat’s outlook, building a firm sense of solidarity with the working class.

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*Patrick D. Pagnano. Young man at Lunch Counter; taken in NYC in the 1970s*

*Patrick D. Pagnano. Four Guys Setting Up; taken in New York City in early 1970s*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, i-D, Manhattan, Photography

Rick Castro: Reformation

Posted on August 6, 2021

*Rick Castro. Portrait of De’ Ephrim Manuel 2015.*

Vincent van Gogh observed, “Art is to console those who are broken by life” — a sentiment befitting the struggles of the current moment, as people attempt to establish an approximation of normalcy while the pandemic continues to rage. For photographer Rick Castro — better known as “The Fetish King” — art has provided sustenance and stability during this devastating time that hit him hard when Los Angeles went into lockdown in March 2020.

As businesses shuttered, people panic-shopped and store shelves were left bare; searching for some semblance of understanding, Rick began perusing the web from the safety of his East Hollywood home. “I would go on the newly formed COVID map, and there were cases surrounding me,” Rick says. “I felt like I was living in that Vincent Price movie, The Last Man on Earth, which became I Am Legend. I felt like that was going to be our destination — the final result.”

For many, 2020 was a period of collapse, of endings both literal and figurative. “I had no work,” recalls Rick, who had been organising a career retrospective at a Chinatown gallery that soon closed permanently. “In a week, everything I was working on that year came to an end. I applied for assistance and got turned down for most things; the few I got kept me going, but there was a time where I felt like I was going to lose my home.”

Feeling trapped, Rick knew he needed to escape. He headed to a little cabin that his father built in the late 1960s on a 2.5-acre property in the high desert of San Bernardino County. “It was in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “It was very bare-bones: no air conditioning and no central heat. There was no wifi. I had to use my cell phone as a modem, but that ran out way too quickly. I was really in seclusion, but I loved it. It gave me respite to relax and repair. I immersed myself in writing a daily journal on my blog that I called The Plague Diary: This Is How the World Will End.”

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*Rick Castro. Apocalyptic Culture 2020.*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, i-D, Photography

Hazel Hankin: Never Before Seen Photos of NYC in the 1970s &’80s

Posted on July 19, 2021

*Hazel Hankin. Skate dancers at Park Circle Roller Disco, Brooklyn, NY, 1978.*

*Hazel Hankin. Busy street scene, Lower East Side, 1976.*

Growing up in Midwood, Brooklyn, in the 1960s, Hazel Hankin led a sheltered life until she started going into Manhattan as a teenager. “The wider world of New York City opened up to me. It was gritty and a little scary, but also a place of energy, excitement and possibilities. It was a time of great social and political ferment,” Hazel says, rattling off an impressive list of liberation movements, anti-imperialist activism and radical feminist consciousness-raising groups that transformed her worldview.

As the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords fought for human rights, Hazel was keenly aware that the importance of justice extended to something as basic as housing. “New York was affordable,” she remembers. “You could live on a modest income, and there were jobs to be had if and when you needed one. If you were an artist, an activist, or just a young person trying things out, you could get an apartment, make a little money, and do just that.”

After graduating high school at age 16, Hazel enrolled at university the Pratt Institute in NYC but had to drop out after problems at home caused undue stress. “I rented an apartment with my friend Michele — who tells people now that we ran away from home together at 18,” Hazel says with a laugh, looking back fondly on her years living near the Flatbush entrance to Prospect Park.

Determined to continue her studies, Hazel got an office job working days and enrolled in Brooklyn College, where she studied painting and photography, taking courses at night. At that time, the contemporary art world excluded photography from its ranks, a practice that would continue for the next two decades. Largely unprofessionalised, photography drew artists like Hazel, who gravitated to the fluidity of form and could move seamlessly between portrait, documentary, photojournalism, and street photography over the course of a single afternoon.

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*Hazel Hankin. Two boys, Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1977.*

*Hazel Hankin. Neighborhood salsa band performance, Lower East Side, 1976.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Brooklyn, i-D, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Janette Beckman: New York, New Music 1980-1986

Posted on June 24, 2021

By 1980, New York City was a shell of its former self, reduced to miles of rubble in Black and Latino communities across the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Landlords laid their properties to waste, sometimes hiring arsonists to torch their buildings to collect insurance payouts. With the government support systemically denied under the Nixon White House policy of “benign neglect“, infrastructure crumbled, and crime rose. Yet within this bleak and barren landscape, a new generation came of age embodying the dictum, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

While white flight drove a mass exodus of the middle class to the hermetic safety of suburbia, rents plummeted, making it possible for anyone to afford to work, live and play in New York. Without the threat of over-policing or the stultification of gentrification, kids ran the streets, the clubs and the bars, creating their own styles of art and music — hip-hop, punk, disco, salsa, jazz, and No Wave — that would set the blueprint for decades to come. It was a golden era, the likes of which are being celebrated in the new exhibition New York, New Music: 1980-1986 at the Museum of the City of New York, which brings together art, fashion, music videos, vinyl records and photography for a kaleidoscopic look at the city’s highly innovative music scene.

“Everything was authentic — it came from the streets and people’s hearts,” says British photographer Janette Beckman, who came to visit New York during Christmas 1982 and never left. “Hip-hop was the boiling point. The economy was bad, and people just decided they were going to do things their way. Kids would steal out of their parents’ house at midnight, go to a train yard to paint, then come home again before going to school. Other kids wrote poetry in their bedrooms, practiced on the streets, and got tapped to rap on stage, getting props from their community. The creativity was coming from the artists, rather than someone telling them what to do.”

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*CHARLIE AHEARN, DEBBIE HARRY, FAB 5 FREDDY, GRANDMASTER FLASH, TRACY WORMWORTH, AND CHRIS STEIN, 1981*

Categories: 1980s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, i-D, Manhattan, Music, Photography