Posts from the “Manhattan” Category

Allen Frame: NYC 1981

Posted on May 26, 2021

*John West and Charlie Boone, NYC, 1981 © Allen Frame, courtesy Gitterman Gallery and Matte Editions*

In the Deep South lies Greenville, Mississippi, a distinctly progressive town set amid a conservative landscape that gave birth to writers, musicians, and artists including photographer and filmmaker Allen Frame. Being LGBTQ was an unspoken fact of life; few like sculptor Leon Koury had the courage to come out. In the early 1970s, while on break from Harvard University and later Imageworks, Frame spent time at Koury’s studio, finding a source of connection that kept him from feeling like a complete outsider in hypermasculine world.

Dying to escape, Frame moved first to Boston before arriving in New York in 1977 just as the Gay Liberation Movement was in full swing. In 1981, he got a place on Perry Street just blocks from the Stonewall Inn, the site of the historic uprising in the fight for LGBTQ rights. At a time when one could easily afford to live, work, and party in New York, Frame took a job cleaning apartments, which left him with plenty of time to revel in the city’s burgeoning downtown art scene. Frame hung out in the East Village amid a new crop of artists and photographers including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Kenny Scharf, Dan Mahoney, Peter Hujar, and Alvin Baltrop.

At the same time, Frame was making his own body of work, which French critic Gilles Mora and photographer Claude Nori described as “photobiography.” Like Goldin and Armstrong, Frame created a journal of his personal life, one that evokes the warm intimacy of a family photo album. No longer an outsider, Frame was fully immersed among the avant garde but a penchant for mystery and suspense remained in his work, one that becomes all the more poignant in light of the catastrophe that would soon destroy the fragile world he loved.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Nan Goldin on her birthday, Allen Frame in the reflection, Nan’s loft on the Bowery. Courtesy of the artist and Gitterman Gallery © Allen Frame*

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

Janette Beckman: Downtown New York in the 1980s

Posted on May 20, 2021

*Janette Beckman. Andre Walker, Robin Newland, and Pierre Francillon for Paper’s premier issue, June 1984.*

After covering the first hip hop showcase in the UK for Melody Makermagazine in 1982, British photographer Janette Beckman became hooked to the newly emerging style and sound of New York street culture. That Christmas, she decided to see the scene for herself.

“I took the train from JFK airport and got off at West Fourth Street,” Beckman recalls of her first foray into the heart of downtown New York. “It was very exciting. Kids were carrying boomboxes on the train and people were breakdancing on the street. It was like everything I saw in the movies. I was a big Scorsese fan and here I was walking on those Mean Streets.”

Once she arrived, Beckman decided to call the city her home, settling down in the East Village and opening a photo studio on Lafayette Street. In 1984, Beckman got word that her good friend Kim Hastreiter and David Hershkovits were launching Paper, a black-and-white fold-out zine. “They asked if I wanted to take photos, and I did.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Janette Beckman. Jose Extravaganza wit Keith Haring designed trophy, Susanne Bartsch’s Love Ball, 1989.*

Categories: 1980s, Art, Fashion, Huck, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Lionel Derimais: New York 1980 Vol. I & II

Posted on May 12, 2021

*Lionel Derimais. African-American young couple, Manhattan, New York City, NY; USA. 1980*

Parisian native Lionel Derimais fell into photography by accident. He dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but his math grades made such aspirations impossible.

“In 1977, a school mate showed me his camera. I immediately thought: ‘I’ll do that too’ – even though I had no idea what ‘that’ meant,” he recalls. That summer, Derimais got a job at a photography shop, bought his first camera, built a darkroom, and never looked back.

In September 1979, he arrived in New York to study English at Columbia University. “But I just wanted to be ‘out there’ with film in my pocket, taking pictures,” he says.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Lionel Derimais. Kids posing for a photo while another one hides, Manhattan, New York City, NY, USA. 1980*

*Lionel Derimais. A reflection of the Twin Towers in downtown Manhattan, Manhattan, New York City, NY, USA, 1980*

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

Gary Green: Rebels & Dandys

Posted on May 6, 2021

American photographer Gary Green first picked up the camera as a youth coming of age in suburban Long Island during the late 1960s. “My parents thought it was another thing I’d give up like the saxophone and other hobbies that languished after a year or two,” he recalls. But, to his parent’s surprise, his interest in photography steadily grew into a career.

In the summer of 1976, Green moved to New York to work for a commercial photographer in midtown Manhattan. “New York was cheap, dirty, and dangerous in the best way. There was art to be seen, music to be heard, and artists making work everywhere,” he says.

Camera in hand, Green quickly hit the burgeoning punk scene at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, photographing bands like the New York Dolls, Blondie, and the Ramones, as well as the people on the scene like Andy Warhol. In the new exhibition, Rebels & Dandys, which features a selection of work from his recent book When Midnight Comes Around (Stanley/Barker), Green looks back at this pivotal era in music history.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Gary Green. Girls with fake guns, Peppermint Lounge, c.1980.*

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Meryl Meisler: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Posted on April 30, 2021

*Fast Dancing at the COYOTE Hookers Masquerade Ball NY, NY February 1977 © Meryl Meisler*

As a Baby Boomer coming of age in Massapequa, Long Island, in the 1950s and 1960s,Meryl Meisler enjoyed the picture perfect suburban American childhood. Her days were filled with Girl Scout meetings, piano lessons, twirling practice, and ballet class; on weekends, her family would take trips to New York City to catch a Broadway show. Glamour and theatricality filled her youth, setting the stage for things to come when she moved to Manhattan during the summer of 1975, after receiving her MA in Art from the University of Madison in Wisconsin.

Twenty-three of age, Meisler arrived in New York just as it was reaching the peak of decadence. The financial collapse of the city (as a result of the explosion in public spending), combined with the Sexual Revolution, the Gay Pride, and Women’s Liberation Movements to create the perfect storm: a playground for a new generation coming of age that could afford to work, live, and party in New York.

Meisler sublet a room from her cousin Elaine on the Upper West Side, in Manhattan. “I fell right in,” she remembers. “I was freelancing as an illustrator, making sporadic money, and photographing. I set up a darkroom in the laundry room and that was that. I loved meeting different kinds of people from different backgrounds. My cousins had a gallery in East Harlem that brought together poets, artists, and musicians of all ages. Elaine’s older sister, Barbara, was friends with journalist Betty Friedan and all the famous feminists of the day. I was going to parties with movers and groovers, then out dancing at a Latin club. I felt at home. Whoever I was, this was where I belonged.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*The DJ Booth at 4AM Studio 54, NY, NY, August 1977 © Meryl Meisler*

*Opening The Mirrored Door on Opening Night (With Judi Jupiter), La Farfalle, New York, New York, juin 1978 © Meryl Meisler*

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

Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color

Posted on March 18, 2021

*Street scene in East Harlem, NY 1947 © Ida Wyman / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography*

American photographer Ida Wyman (1926–2019) achieved her every dream except one — the opportunity to publish her illustrated memoir Girl Photographer: From the Bronx to Hollywood and Back before she died. Though Wyman was humble, she never lacked for confidence or nerve, becoming one of the few women photographers working for Look andLife magazines in the 1940s.

As with many things, Wyman was ahead of the times. “She never wanted to be the most famous,” says Heather Garrison, her granddaughter and executor of the Ida Wyman Estate. “I think in her later years she finally understood how important her journey was as a woman in a male dominated industry. She took meticulous notes and records, and had her archive well organized. She wanted to put it all into one piece.”

Despite the fact Wyman did not live to see her book published, her work is receiving its proper due in the new exhibition in Santa Fe, Ida Wyman: East Harlem, New York, 1947 in Color, which showcases a recently discovered collection of Ektachtomes Wyman made at the age of 21. The only color body of work from the period, Wyman’s photographs offer a poignant portrait of working class life in New York after the war. Neither activist nor ethnologist, Wyman was a humanist with a profound love for street portraiture. She eschewed the term “street photography,” seeing it as an anachronistic term to describe the documentation of urban life.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Women

Jamil GS: The ’90s

Posted on March 11, 2021

As the son of jazz saxophonist Sahib Shihab, who played with no less than John Coltrane, Quincy Jones, and Thelonious Monk, the connection between visual art and music was imprinted upon photographer Jamil GS as a child, while playing his father’s records and studying album covers in his hometown of Copenhagen.

“I believe input determines output,” he says. “I grew up in a very creative environment. My mother was talented at drawing and her mother was a famous illustrator working for fashion magazines and catalogues. There was a big American expat community in Copenhagen, and I was surrounded by musicians, artists, painters, poets, journalists, writers, directors, both American and Danish.”

Jamil GS got into hip hop in the 1980s at the age of 13 when he was a certified B-Boy, dancing in the clubs and bombing trains as a graffiti writer. “My dad started teaching me to play the saxophone,” he remembers. “He told me, ‘If you really want to do this and become good at it you have to practice six hours a day.’ As a teenager, I was out running the streets so I was like, I don’t know about that. I really wanted to be a professional graffiti artist, to be the next LEE or FUTURA.’”

After members of his crew got busted Jamil GS changed course, channeling his creative energy into photography, using the camera his father had given him at the age of 16. “For me, the connection with visuals and music is very close. When I hear the music, I see pictures,” he says. “I felt like photography hadn’t been explored that much by my generation. When something would come out in magazines or album art, there was a disconnect for me. I was like, this is not the experience I am having listening to this music. The music was so advanced and sophisticated: the production, compositions, poetry, slang. I wanted to make visuals that represented that.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1990s, Art, Bronx, Dazed, Manhattan, Music, 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

Linda Simpson: The Drag Explosion

Posted on March 2, 2021

*Kabuki Starshine on the town, 1993 © Linda Simpson*

Once relegated to the margins, drag queens came center stage in New York City in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, as a new generation of luminous beauties came of age in the downtown nightlife scene. Eschewing the female impersonator style of past performers, young artists took their cues from Warhol Superstars like Holly Woodlawn. Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis as well as cult sensation Divine to create personality driven entertainment. Visionaries like Lady Bunny, Lypsinka, and Kevin Aviance became celebrities in their own right, transforming the way we think about gender, beauty, fashion, and glamour today.

In 1992, RuPaul’s nightlife anthem “Supermodel (You Better Work)” a nightlife anthem became a global phenomenon, taking the leggy luminary to superstar heights. With his trademark blonde tresses. flawless physique, and exquisite wardrobe, RuPaul began his journey to take drag mainstream, a dream he fully realized with the smash reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which first began airing in 2009.

But back in the 1980s, drag was still underground, and slowly taking root at the Pyramid Club, a queer nightspot on Avenue A long before the East Village was gentrified. It was here that Linda Simpson — who The New York Times described as “a mother superior of the New York drag scene” — first got her start. Along the way, Simpson, an amateur photographer, amassed an archive of some 5,000 photographs, a selection of which are included in the new book, The Drag Explosion (Domain).

Read the Full Story at Blind

*RuPaul and Willi Ninja at Coffee Shop restaurant across from Union Square Park, where Wigstock was held that year. Both performed later that day, 1991 © Linda Simpson*

*Afrodite, London Broil and Ebony Jet in the Pyramid Club dressing room, 1992 © Linda Simpson*

Categories: 1990s, Blind, Books, Manhattan

Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop

Posted on February 14, 2021

*Shawn Walker (b. 1940), Easter Sunday, Harlem (125th Street), 1972. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © Shawn Walker*

In the fall of 1963 — the final year of Jim Crow America — two Harlem-based groups of Black photographers came together to create the Kamoinge Workshop, which has since become the world’s longest-running photography collective. Taken from the Gikuyu language of Kenya, meaning “a group of people acting together,” Kamoinge provided a space for both professional photographers including Roy DeCarava, Adger Cowans, and Louis H. Draper to nurture emerging talents drawn from the community at a time when Black artists were systemically excluded from the fine art world.

As an institution of authority, wealth, and prestige, the fine art world mirrored and maintained the exclusionary systems of power of the dominant culture it served. The work of Black artists and depictions of Black life rarely appeared within the hallowed halls of museums and galleries. It fell upon Black artists to create and sustain spaces to nurture their own styles and approaches to artmaking, without the structures of support afforded to countless white male artists.

Rather than adopt the American obsession with “rugged individualism,” the members of Kamoinge understood the power of the group. Every Sunday, DeCarava, Cowans, and Draper would gather alongside founding members James Ray Francis, Herman Howard, Earl James, Anthony Barboza, Calvin Mercer, Beuford Smith. Herb Randall, Albert Fennar, Shawn Walker, James Mannas, and later Ming Smith, for rousing conversations about art, photography, film, music, and literature as well as in-depth critiques of their work. “We all met at somebody’s home and became family,” Walker remembers.

Without institutional support, Kamoinge made a way for themselves — a path they forged for nearly 60 years to become the longest-running photography collective in history. Yet, because of the on-going practice of exclusion within the art world, their works are only now being given their proper due in the major touring museum exhibition, Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Beuford Smith, Two Bass Hit, Lower East Side, 1972. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts © Beuford Smith/Césaire*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Rose Hartman: Studio 54: Night Magic

Posted on February 10, 2021

*Bianca Jagger on a white horse that happened to be inside Studio 54 on her birthday in 1977. Rose Hartman / The Artists Company*

On April 26, 1977, hundreds of the world’s cultural elite had gathered outside 254 West 54th Street, desperate to get into the event of the year: opening night at Studio 54. Those in the know snuck in through the 55th Street side of the former CBS TV studio turned nightclub, while icons like Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty had no such luck. Failing to get the red carpet treatment, they left — missing out on all the fun.

In a scene out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, future TV host Robin Leach escorted preteen superstar Brooke Shields through a crowd that included grand dame Diana Vreeland, country music star Dolly Parton, fashion designer Halston, socialite Bianca Jagger, actress Margaux Hemingway, and pop star Cher.

The celebrated Alvin Ailey dancers, clad in costumes designed by Antonio Lopez, turned the party out with a live show. As Anthony Haden-Guest reported in his book, The Last Party, a doctor opened a massive bottle of Quaaludes, sharing the pills far and wide. After the hypnotic drugs kicked in, an orgy broke out. It was Sodom and Gomorrah in gold lame and peach chiffon, white suits and satin gowns.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Rose Hartman. Bethann Hardison, Daniela Morera & Stephen Burrows at Studio 54 party for Valentino, New York City – 1977*

Categories: 1970s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography