Posts from the “Manhattan” Category

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.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*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

Douglas Corrance: New York 1970-1980s

Posted on August 17, 2021

By 1975, New York City teetered along the edge of bankruptcy, some $11 billion in debt. By October the situation had reached dire straits when President Gerald R. Ford refused a federal bailout, prompting the infamous Daily News front page: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”.

The headline cost Ford re-election the following year, and haunted him for the rest of his life – a fitting turn of events for the man who dared to turn his back on the city that never sleeps. New Yorkers, on the other hand, had no choice but to soldier on.

Despite the crumbling infrastructure and economic decline further exacerbated by the Nixon White House of “benign neglect,” which systematically denied government services to Black and brown communities nationwide, and landlord-sponsored arson that reduced city blocks to rubble at record speed, New Yorkers proved to be resilient.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Stephan Erfurt: On the Road

Posted on August 6, 2021

*Stephan Erfurt. New York Bridges, 1988.*

German photographer Stephan Erfurt fell in love with photography in 1978 while exploring the streets of Paris with his father’s camera. Alone in the city and still learning French, the camera gave him courage and confidence, inspiring him to become what he describes as a “visual explorer”.

Erfurt stayed true to this approach when he moved to New York City’s infamous Alphabet City in 1984. “Our back window faced a burned down house and our front window looked toward Tompkins Square Park where a lot of drug dealing was going on,” says Erfurt, who grew up in a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Although it was quite a change of scenery, the photographer found an oasis nestled away in the building’s roof garden. “We spent many evenings there with friends, having barbecues, drinking gin and tonics, and with our heads in the clouds above New York,” Erfurt remembers.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Stephan Erfurt. Wall Street New York, 1985.*

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

Stanley Stellar: Artifacts at the End of a Decade

Posted on July 26, 2021

*Stanley Stellar. “Brian Michaels in a cowboy hat with a friend, West Side Highway NYC” (1981).*

On May 18 1981, the New York Native, the only gay newspaper in the city, published the first story on a new disease later identified as AIDS. After hearing rumours of a “gay cancer,” the paper’s medical writer Lawrence D. Mass contacted the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC claimed that word of a deadly threat descending upon the gay community largely unfounded – a pernicious start to what would become a longstanding pattern of malignant neglect by the federal government.

The advent of AIDS marked the end of a brief but shining chapter of LGBTQ+ history that began with the Stonewall uprising in 1969. As a new generation came of age during the Gay Liberation Movement, they transformed the street of New York into a garden of earthly delights, reveling in the bountiful pleasures of existence itself. No longer driven into the shadows, forced to deny their true selves, the community could openly partake in sex, love, friendship, and camaraderie.

Although the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) would not extend Constitutional rights to the LGBTQ+ community until 2003, change was in the air. After 20 years of pathologising homosexuality as a form of mental illness, the American Psychiatry Association removed it from the DSM-II in 1973 – the very same year that SCOTUS modified its definition of “obscenity” to finally legalise the depiction of male frontal nudity.

While established artists like Andy Warhol began experimenting with homoerotic photography in his series Sex Parts and Torsos, he struggled to call a spade a space, writing in The Andy Warhol Diaries: “I shouldn’t call them nudes. It should be something more artistic. Like ‘Landscapes’.” But a new crop of emerging artists including Antonio Lopez (1943-1987), Peter Hujar (1934-1987), Alvin Baltrop (1947-2004), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), and Peter Berlin were more inclined to embrace the spirit of the times, centring LGBTQ+ life in their work.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

*Stanley Stellar. “Grand Torino, Hudson River Waterfront, NYC” (1979).*

*Stanley Stellar. “Gay Pride Day on Christopher Street, NYC” (1983).*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Manhattan, 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.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*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

T. Eric Monroe: Rare & Unseen Moments of 90s Hip Hop

Posted on July 13, 2021

*T. Eric Monroe. Erykah Badu, Power, 1997, NJ.*

Throughout the 1980s, corporate media called Hip Hop a “fad,” trying to dismiss a culture that made its way up from the streets and required no formal musical education — just beats, rhymes, and life. It wasn’t until 1989 that the Grammys introduced a rap category, but after a decade of snubs, artists had had enough. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, who had won the first-ever Best Rap Performance for “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” boycotted the show along with Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J, Slick Rick, and Public Enemy.

By the time the 1990s rolled around, Hip Hop was a distinctly underground phenomenon that made headlines as the subject of FBI attention and Senate hearings organized by Second Lady Tipper Gore. Although it would be years before white audiences transformed Black and Brown street culture into a billion-dollar global industry, Hip Hop was in its Golden Age.

Throughout the ‘90s, skater turned photographer T. Eric Monroe was on the scene, creating a massive archive of Hip Hop icons including Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, Lil’ Kim, the Fugees, and The Roots. Featured in the 90’s HipHop Art Tour on New York’s Lower East Side and the three-volume set Rare & Unseen Moments of 90s Hip Hop, Monroe retraces his journey documenting the scene for record labels and magazines including The Source, XXL, Thrasher, and Transworld Skateboarding.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*T. Eric Monroe. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Barbershop Chair Stare, 1995, Harlem, NY.*

*T. Eric Monroe. Biggie Smalls, Hoodshock, 1996, Harlem, NY*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Music, Photography

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.”

Read the Full Story at i-D

*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

Ming Smith: Evidence

Posted on June 9, 2021

*Ming Smith. Grace Jones, Studio 54 (New York), 1970s.*

Throughout her five-decade career, Ming Smith has broken through boundaries she has faced as a Black American artist coming of age during the Civil Rights Movement. Born in Detroit, raised in Columbus, Ohio, and educated at Howard University in Washington D.C., Smith moved to New York in the 1970s to work as a model alongside pioneers including Grace Jones, Toukie Smith, and Bethann Hardison.

“I didn’t call myself a photographer, but I was constantly shooting,” the artist said in Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. “I was just a young person in New York trying to find my way, and I had to support myself, so I took a job as a model.”

While on a go-see, Smith heard Kamoinge members Louis Draper and Anthony Barboza discussing photography. She showed Draper her work and he invited Smith to become the first woman to join the legendary photography collective. “That was a major awakening,” Smith said.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Ming Smith. Self-Portrait as Josephine (New York), 1986.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

In the Gallery with: Brian Clamp

Posted on June 4, 2021

*© Peter Berlin, “Self Portrait as Urban Cowboy, “ c. 1970s, Hand-painted vintage gelatin silver print.*

The year 2000 marked a turning point for New York-based gallerist Brian Clamp. After turning 30 and receiving his MA in Critical Studies in Modern Art from Columbia University, he had reached a crossroads. “I had been working as director of Owen Gallery on the Upper East Side, and wanted to get more involved with contemporary art, photography, and working with living artists,” says Clamp. “I decided to take the plunge and start my own gallery, not fully realising what I was getting into.”

That fall, he opened ClampArt, and worked as a private dealer from his West 27th Street loft. An avid practitioner of photography, Clamp also spent time at The Camera Club of New York (now known as Baxter St), getting to know a number of photographers whose work he admired. Through these relationships, Clamp developed the foundations for the gallery program.

In early 2003, Clamp signed a lease for a commercial space on West 25th Street, just as Chelsea was becoming the center of the downtown art world. “I was able to get a ground floor space in Chelsea for my first gallery without any backing,” he says.

Read the Full Story at British Journal of Photography

*© The Estate of Peter Hujar, “Scrumbly Koldewyn and Tom Nieze, The Cockettes,” 1971, Vintage gelatin silver print, Courtesy Peter Hujar Archive.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, British Journal of Photography, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Meryl Meisler: New York PARADISE LOST: Bushwick Era Disco

Posted on June 3, 2021

*Meryl Meisler. Potassa de la Fayette Poised at COYOTE Hookers Ball The Copacabana, NY, NY 1977.*

In 1975, at the tender age of 23, Meryl Meisler arrived in New York City to study with legendary photographer Lisette Model. The Long Island native quickly found herself at home living amid the dazzling display of a city that evoked the refrains of Paradise Lost, John Milton’s 1667 epic poem chronicling the fall of man. Everywhere she turned, scenes of ecstasy, pandemonium and redemption unfolded with cinematic flair, beckoning her to photograph its rapturous days and nights.

In a new book and exhibition, New York PARADISE LOST: Bushwick Era Disco, Meryl chronicles the hedonistic nightlife scene of the late 1970s and pairs it with images of Bushwick in the 1980s as it struggled to recover from the plague of “benign neglect“, wherein the Federal government systemically denied financial support to Black and Brown communities nationwide.

andlords hired arsonists to torch their buildings to collect insurance payouts, prompting Howard Cosell to allegedly proclaim, “There it is ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” during Game 2 of the 1977 World Series. Entire city blocks were reduced to rubble while abandoned buildings were boarded up. The city was cheap, run-down and dangerous — attracting the kind of fearless devotee that defines the heroic spirit of New York. Teetering along the edge of bankruptcy, $453 million in debt, the city became a cauldron of creativity, unleashing hip hop, punk, and disco before the decade ended.

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” Satan proclaims in Paradise Lost, a sentiment befitting the city’s gritty glory. In the wake of the sexual revolution and the civil rights, women’s and gay liberation movements, a new generation came of age revelling in the libertine pleasures. Clubs like Studio 54, Copacabana, GG’s Barnum Room, and Les Mouches offered the ultimate escape: a night of freedom, fantasy, and decadence.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Meryl Meisler. Magnolia Tree, Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY 1983.*

*Meryl Meisler. Meryl’s Hand Prints on JudiJupiter on Man Wearing White, Studio 54, 1977.*

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

Thomas Holton: The Lams of Ludlow Street

Posted on June 3, 2021

As the son of travel photographer George Holton, who studied under Ansel Adams, Thomas Holton grew up surrounded by images of distant lands capturing people from New Guinea to Guatemala.

“I began to realise the magic photography has to transport the viewer elsewhere and tell new stories and share experiences,” Holton says. George Holton passed away in 1979 during his time working in the town of Lushan on the Yangtze River, while making a book about China, his wife’s native land.

Two decades later, Thomas Holton embarked on a journey of his own: an 18-year odyssey into the life of a Chinese-American family, the Lams. He first encountered the family in 2003 while pursuing his MFA at The School of Visual Arts in his hometown of New York.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography