Posts from the “Manhattan” Category

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite

Posted on October 21, 2021

*wame Brathwaite, Grandassa Models at the Merton Simpson Gallery, New York, ca. 1967.*

While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used nonviolence to push for Civil Rights and Malcolm X embraced the ethos of Black Nationalism to fight injustice in the United States, Brooklyn-born photographer Kwame Brathwaite turned to the teachings ofPan-Africanism and Marcus Garvey to introduce the “Black Is Beautiful” movement in the 1960s.

Rejecting the standards imposed by Western cultural hegemony, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe Brath embraced African aesthetics, creating Grandassa Models in Harlem and Naturally 62, a fashion show that set the groundwork for a global revolution in fashion and beauty. With the introduction of “Black Is Beautiful,” the brothers helped to popularize natural hair, a full range of skin tones, and African styles across the diaspora.

“I have been called ‘The Keeper of Images,’” Brathwaite writes in Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, selections from which are currently on view in a major museum tour across the United States. “My task has been to document creative powers throughout the diaspora—not only in our Black artists musicians, athletes, dancers, models, and designers, but in all of us….I have often been asked how I was granted so much access as a photographer. It was the fact that people trusted me to get it right, to tell the truth in my work.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Kwame Brathwaite, Marcus Garvey Day Parade, Harlem, ca. 1967*

*Man smoking in a ballroom, Harlem, ca. 1962.*

Categories: 1960s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Helen Levitt: In the Street

Posted on October 21, 2021

*Helen Levitt. New York, 1940 © Film Documents LLC Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne*

Hailing from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Helen Levitt (1913–2009) was a New York original. The daughter of Russian Jewish émigrés, Levitt rose to become one the greatest street photographers of the twentieth century.

“In a genre dominated by men at the time, Levitt created an outstanding body of work that spans more than six decades and encompasses images, films and books,” says Anna Dannemann, Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery, who collaborated with curator Walter Moser and the Albertina Museum in Vienna, on the new exhibition, Helen Levitt: In the Street.

The exhibition, along with the new book Helen Levitt, offer a look at street life in working class communities around New York, which she began photographing in 1936 after meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson. Drawn to the spectacle of everyday life, Levitt embraced the passion and pathos of the community — a time when kids transformed the streets into their playground.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Helen Levitt. New York, 1982 © Film Documents LLC Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne*

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

In the Gallery with The Center’s Archivist Caitlin McCarthy

Posted on October 20, 2021

*Christopher Street Liberation Day March, New York City, 1971. Photo by Leonard Fink. From the Leonard Fink Photographs, LGBT Community Center National History*

Until 1962, all 50 states in the US criminalized same-sex sexual activity. In 2003, less than two decades ago, all remaining laws against same-sex sexual activity were invalidated. But before that, LGBTQ people were forced to live in secret, lest they risk the possibility of losing their education, jobs, healthcare, homes, families, freedom, or lives. As a result much of LGBTQ history has been lost or destroyed by people fearing discovery. Understanding this, activist and historian Richard C. Wandel created the LGBT Community Center National History Archive at The Center in New York City in 1990 to, to collect, preserve, and make available to the public at large the material evidence of LGBTQ New Yorkers and their lives.

“As a community-based archive, we focus on unpublished records that people create… [connecting] with folks on the ground in big and small ways,” says Director of Archives Caitlin McCarthy. “The Center Archive was created as a space for those impacted by the devastating personal loss during the AIDS crisis. After people died, a family member or landlord might have tossed their belongings because they didn’t see any value in their artwork, journals, or photo albums — but we did.”

After working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Historical Society, McCarthy joined The Center when Wandel retired in 2017, after 27 years of service. “I’m the only staff in the department, which happens sometimes in archives,” says McCarthy, who handles donations, reference services, education, and exhibition aspects of the work. “Working with my community here has given me the ability to break the mold when necessary, with the recognition that the traditional ways of running an archive, collecting, serving researchers and even defining them may not serve The Center Archive.”

Read the Full Story at British Journal of Photography

*Travis Mark. The Center, New York City, 2014.*

Categories: Art, British Journal of Photography, Manhattan, Photography

Arlene Goffried: Clandestine – The Photo Collection of Pedro Slim

Posted on October 15, 2021

*Arlene Gottfried. Pituka at Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, 1977. Pedro Slim Collection. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York.*

“New York from the 1980s was crazy,” says photographer and photography collector Pedro Slim as he thinks back to his early days buying art. “I did terrible things economically.” Driven by passion and pleasure in equal part, Pedro has been blessed with a discerning eye that effortlessly distils the exquisite nuances of the human body, whether clothed or nude.

“I never thought of myself as having a collection,” he says. “I just bought pieces I liked, mainly nudes, by photographers like Peter Hujar and Allen Frame, who has been so important in my life.” Then one day, someone asked to borrow the collection, and everything became clear.

With images dating back to the turn of the 20th century, Pedro’s collection chronicles photography’s longstanding love affair with the human form. Whether embracing the classical glamour of George Platt Lynes’ homoerotic works made in the 40s, when depictions of male full-frontal nudity was illegal, or gazing upon Merry Alpern’s gritty images of sex workers in the backroom of a 90s Manhattan strip club, Pedro has amassed a breathtaking collection of black-and-white photographs that are sexy, cinematic and tender.

Over the past four decades, Pedro’s collection has grown to include works by luminaries likeLarry Clark, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus,Helmut Newton, Man Ray, Horst P. Horst andNan Goldin, to name just a few. A new exhibition, Clandestine: The Photo Collection of Pedro Slim, takes us on a whirlwind tour through some of Pedro’s most captivating works. From an Anthony Friedkin portrait of Divine sitting backstage at San Francisco’s Palace Theatre in 1972 to Mary Ellen Mark‘s 1994 photograph of a bearded lady reclining in the bathtub, each image offers a timeless take on the beauty, joy and wonder of the body.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Arlene Gottfried. Miguel Pinero and Friend, 1980. Pedro Slim Collection. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York.*

*Arlene Gottfried. Two Young Men With Afros, late 80 ́s. Pedro Slim Collection. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Ruth Orkin: The Centennial

Posted on October 1, 2021

*People lying on Tanglewood Lawn, Lenox, Massachusetts, 1948 © Ruth Orkin*

At the age of 17, Ruth Orkin (1921–1985) decided to ride a bicycle from Los Angeles to New York in order to attend the 1939 World’s Fair. She made the trip in a matter of three weeks, photographing her journey along the way — a singular feat that spoke to Orkin’s ability to realize her greatest ambitions.

“Ruth had a big personality. She was very charismatic,” says her daughter Mary Engel, Director of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive, who is honoring the centennial of her mother’s birth with the new book Ruth Orkin: A Photo Spirit and exhibition “Ruth Orkin: Expressions of Life”. Working across genres, Orkin created a singular archive of mid-twentieth century life, capturing a feeling of optimism that defined the modern. Orkin’s empathic eye found its home whether photographing celebrities or strangers she encountered on the street.

Although Orkin was an unconventional mother, telling her children Mary and Andy to call her “Ruth” so she could hear them in a crowd, she never put work above her family. Although she always carried a camera around her neck, Orkin brilliantly integrated her practice into every aspect of her life to avoid any sense of intruding upon those she loved.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Geraldine Dent, Cover of McCall’s, New York City, 1949 © Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021*

*Famous Malted Milk, New York City, 1950 © Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography, Women

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.

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

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

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

Bruce Davidson: In Color

Posted on September 14, 2021

*Central Park, 1991 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

As a teen coming of age, Bruce Davidson can remember his sense of color taking root in 1949. While working at a local camera store during his senior year of high school, Davidson was introduced to Al Cox Jr., a commercial photographer working in the town of Oak Park, Illinois. Cox invited Davidson to assist him with various tasks, including the painstaking process of making color prints in the darkroom. “It left an indelible impression on me at the age of seventeen,” Davidson wrote in Bruce Davidson: In Color, just re-released for the first time in five years.

After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Davidson enrolled in the Design Department at Yale University in the 1950s where he met artist and educator Josef Albers, one of the foremost color theorists of the twentieth century. “His demonstrations had an impact on me at the time but I was not yet committed to color as a way of life,” Davidson wrote.

After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, Davidson returned to New York in 1957 to resume his photography practice. Drawn to the Old World atmosphere of the Lower East Side, Davidson discovered among the pushcart vendors, tailors, and merchants a feeling of connection and community among people like his grandfather, a Polish émigré who arrived in the United States at the age of 14. Here he began making color photographs of the city as it was then — a world of immigrants who brought their culture to the streets of New York.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Chicago, 1989 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Joe Conzo: Remembering 9/11

Posted on September 10, 2021

Photographer Joe Conzo remembers getting an early start on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to vote in the mayoral primary, which saw billionaire media mogulMike Bloomberg throw his hat in the ring for the very first time. As the grandson of Dr. Evelina López Antonetty (1922-1984), the legendary Puerto Rican activist affectionately known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx,” Conzo was raised to fight for the rights of the community throughout his life.

Growing up amid the rubble of “benign neglect,” wherein the Nixon White House implemented a policy to deny government services to Black and Brown communities nationwide throughout the 1970s, Joe Conzo learned the only way to create change was to do it yourself. Whether accompanying his grandmother and mother Lorraine Montenegro to protests or photographing the early years of Hip Hop as it came up on the streets of the Bronx, Conzo understood “all power to all the people” was not simply a slogan — it was the truth.

While serving in the Army, Conzo trained as a combat medic and decided to continue in that line of work after being discharged. In 1992, he became a member of the Emergency Medical Services (EMS), which merged with the New York Fire Department (FDNY) in 1996. By 2001, Conzo was working as a union delegate, a position that would come to serve him and his colleagues in ways he could never have imagined.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Blind, Manhattan, Photography

Joe Conzo: The Elements

Posted on September 8, 2021

*Sal & Mickey Abbatiello, The Fever: 365 Nights of Hip Hop*

“Never in my wildest dreams as a kid from the South Bronx did I think that photography would bring me around the world,” says photographer, author, and activist Joe Conzo.

Coming of age in 1970s New York, Conzo’s worldview was shaped by his grandmother, Dr. Evelina Antonetty, who was fondly known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx” for the work she did on behalf of the Puerto Rican community; his mother, community Lorraine Montenegro; and his father, Joe Conzo Sr., legendary bandleader Tito Puente’s personal manager and confidante.

Conzo witnessed the city’s infrastructure collapse under the weight of “benign neglect”, which denied basic government services to Black and brown communities across the United States, while landlord-sponsored arson reduced city blocks to rubble. He quickly learned the best way to create change was through collective action.

Read the Full Story a Huck

*Biggie Rolling Dice by Manuel Acevedo, 1994*

*Japanese Print by Manuel Acevedo, 1986*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Huck, Manhattan, Music, 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.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*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

Sarah Schulman: Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

Posted on September 7, 2021

*The House of Color video collective. From left to right: Pamela Sneed, Robert Garcia, Julie Tolentino, Jocelyn Taylor, Wellington Love, Idris Mingott, Jeff Nunokawa © T. L. Litt*

*Kissing Doesn’t Kill © Courtesy of Gran Fury*

In 1987, the American government’s impassivity facing the AIDS pandemic led people to organize themselves in order to act. A broad coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds came together as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) — and in just six years, they changed the world.

“Five people cannot do a paradigm shift in America — you need coalitions to make change,” says Sarah Schulman, author of the new book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, which brings together more than 200 interviews with ACT UP members to create a masterpiece of activist history and tactics.

Together the members of ACT UP waged a multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They played offense, taking charge in a wide array of actions that included storming the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Washington, DC, and battling The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry to get results.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Mark Lowe Fisher’s funeral. From left to right: Tim Lunceford, Joy Episalla, BC Craig, Vincent Gagliostro, Scott Morgan, Eric Sawyer (partial) (Photographer unknown)*

*Tim Bailey’s political funeral, with Joy Episalla in the van, June 30, 1993 © Donna Binder*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Manhattan, Photography