Posts from the “Manhattan” Category

Remembering the Life and Legacy of Patrick D. Pagnano, Street Photographer

Posted on March 20, 2019

On October 7, 2018, the photographer Patrick D. Pagnano died, leaving behind a treasury of classic American street photography and documentary work made over more than 50 years.

While attending Columbia College Chicago, Pagnano developed his “stream of consciousness” approach to street photography, a narrative technique inspired by Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Walker Evans. Pagnano strove to capture the essence of the moment while simultaneously indicating a larger story beyond the photograph, creating a dynamic exchange between the subject and the environment in each photograph.

In 2002, Pagnano published Shot on the Street, a collection of his color work made during the 1970s and ‘80s that evokes the visual poetry of Helen Leviitt and the intimacy of Joel Meyerowitz.

In the preface, Pagnano writes, “’Shot on the Street’ refers not only to the images having been taken on the street, but more importantly, to the psychological effect of the street. It is a place where races of people and social classes converge and vie for space and mobility with ever increasing urbanism. It can excite, anger, defeat, and inspire. The street’s influence and energy never ceases.”

That electric energy comes alive in Pagnano’s work, whether capturing candid scenes of daily life on the pavement or taking in the pleasures of Empire Roller Disco, his series documenting the legendary Brooklyn skating rink. Here, Kari Pagnano, his wife of 44 years, gives us a deep, heartfelt look at Pagnano’s life and legacy.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

The Last Dance Before the Lights Come On

Posted on February 14, 2019

A young Michael Jackson takes to the dance floor. Credit: Courtesy Hasse Persson

In a city filled with history and legend, 1977 might just be New York’s most notorious year, as decadence reached dazzling new heights typified by the flight of the Concorde soaring at the speed of sound overhead. While 100 of the world’s most glamorous jet setters shuttled back and forth above the pond, New York was collapsing into anarchy.

After years of white flight and “benign neglect,” the city was broke. The federal government refused a bailout. Criminal became bold. Arsonists torched the Bronx while landlords collected insurance checks. A serial killer dubbed “Son of Sam” was terrorizing the city and writing letters to the press. Pornography was legalized and prostitution flourished openly on the streets. Then, on one hot night in July, a blackout struck and the city descended into pure chaos.

Amid the madness, a spark had emerged, soaring through the sky like a comet until it burned to dust — Studio 54, the most legendary nightclub ever known. College buddies Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager transformed a former midtown TV studio into a pleasure palace for the senses that took the Warholian ideal of celebrity to new heights, where everyone was a star in their own right.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Hasse Persson / Courtesy Embassy of Sweden

Categories: 1970s, Art, Fashion, Jacques Marie Mage, Manhattan, Music

Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen: Catcher in the Eye

Posted on January 14, 2019

Inside the upstairs bathrooms at The Tunnel nightclub. © Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen

Calvin Klein model of the time in orange with Billy Name. Silkscreen prints designed by Lynne Packwood. © Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen

New York City in the 1990s was a heady time. Murder surged to a record high as the crack epidemic reached its peak. Abandoned buildings became crack dens and prostitution flourished on the streets, ushering in the controversial rule of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1994.

Under Giuliani’s “Quality of Life” campaign, the New York Police Department began a crackdown on people committing minor offenses. Then the mayor took aim at nightclubs, ordering raids that would transform the underground scene from a DIY space for outsiders to a corporate endeavor replete with mega clubs, bottle service, and couches on the dancefloor.

The 90s was the last hurrah of bohemian New York, an epitaph to the “anything goes” insouciance that came with being able to live, work, and party in Manhattan without breaking the bank. It was into this bohemia that Danish artist Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen arrived and set up shop at the Gershwin Hotel on East 27th Street, the epicenter of the downtown avant-garde scene.

The Gershwin drew a delicious mix of artists, writers, and luminaries—including Quentin Crisp, Danny Fields, and Marcia Resnick; Warhol legends like Ultra Violet, Billy Name, and Paul Morrissey; and nightlife icons like Susanne Bartsch, Amanda Lepore, Sophia Lamar, and Junior Vasquez. Casting himself as Holden Caulfield armed with a camera, rather than a hunting rifle, Mikkelsen created a performance piece in which he “shot” the people on the scene, capturing them for a series he titled Catcher in the Eye.

Mikkelsen’s photographs preserve the city as it was: a surreal phantasmagoria of freedom, independence, and self-expression. VICE recently caught up with the photographer, who spent some time reminiscing about life in New York during the dial-up era.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Morning on 14th Street outside Junior Vasquez’s Arena Party at Palladium. From left: Actor Tim Cummings and Raymie Moynagh with friends. © Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen

Categories: 1990s, Art, Manhattan, Photography, Vice

Art Kane: Harlem 1958

Posted on November 27, 2018

Photography Art Kane; Taken from Art Kane: Harlem 1958, Wall of Sound Editions

American photographer Art Kane was introduced to the idea of the “Big Picture” while serving as a member of the Ghost Army – a 1,100-man unit tasked with creating 20 battlefield deceptions, complete with dummy tanks and fake radio transmission to mislead the German Army during the 1944 invasion of Normandy. “The experience of creating something larger than life really stuck with him,” Jonathan Kane, his son, tells me.

By 1958, Kane was restless. At 27, he was the hot young art director for Seventeen magazine but he yearned to be a photographer. He got word Esquire was planning a special issue dedicated to jazz and decided to pitch his very first photography story: “A Great Day in Harlem,” which they accepted and published as the issue’s centerfold.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of this legendary group portrait, one of the most celebrated images in American history, Jonathan Kane has put together the phenomenal book, Art Kane: Harlem 1958 (out this month via Wall of Sound Editions), featuring texts by Quincy Jones, Benny Golson, and Art Kane, as well as dozens of never-before-seen photographs of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie, and Gene Krupa, among others.

“It’s exciting to see the outtakes, and also rare,” Kane reveals. “My father did not believe in outtakes. He was about his one vision. I’m normally very protective but become bigger than even his original intention. The book is a journey through that day, and a revelation of the intimacy and connections between the musicians, and what is in the mind of a young photographer doing his first major professional assignment, and how it all crystallised in the ‘Big Picture.’”

Here, in an excerpt from the book, Art Kane looks back on this moment in time, as history was being made on the streets of Harlem.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Photography Art Kane; Taken from Art Kane: Harlem 1958, Wall of Sound Editions

Categories: AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography

Posted on November 2, 2018

John M. Valadez, Brooklyn and Soto, from the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio, ca. 1978

In the years following World War II, America’s Latinx communities were becoming increasingly marginalised and misrepresented. The Latinx immigrants joined African Americans who fled the South during the Great Migration, one of the largest, most rapid movements in history. Cities became the point of arrival for millions of migrants, who entered into established communities where their cultures took root, such as Spanish Harlem, the South Bronx, and East Los Angeles.

Many of their stories have largely gone untold, and E. Carmen Ramos, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s deputy chief curator and curator of Latino art, aims to correct this. In Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography, Ramos has organised the work of 10 Latinx photographers – Manuel Acevedo, Oscar Castillo, Frank Espada, Anthony Hernandez, Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Ruben Ochoa, John Valadez, Winston Vargas, and Camilo José Vergara – who documented their communities as insiders.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

John M. Valadez, Couple Balam, from the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio, ca. 1978

Camilo José Vergara, 65 East 125th Street, Harlem, 1977

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

Contact Warhol: Photography Without End

Posted on October 9, 2018

Andy Warhol (U.S.A., 1928–1987), Detail from Contact Sheet [Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Halston, Diane de Beauvau, Bethann Hardison in the back of a limousine], 1976. Gelatin silver print. Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2014.43.3622. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Andy Warhol (U.S.A., 1928–1987), Detail from Contact Sheet [Photo shoot with Andy Warhol with shadow], 1986. Gelatin silver print. Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2014.43.2893. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

In 1976, Andy Warhol began using a Minox 35EL camera to document his world – much in the same way he would call Pat Hackett every morning to report and record the previous day’s activities. Taking his camera wherever he went, Warhol shot over 3,600 rolls of film for an impressive total of 130,000 exposures over the following years, creating a meticulous record of New York City during its most decadent era. Through these images, we encounter the luminaries of the day including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Halston, Elizabeth Taylor, and Diane Von Furstenberg, with whom he seamlessly blended work and play.

In 2014, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University was chosen as the permanent home for the Andy Warhol Photography Archive, selections from which are currently on view in the new exhibition Contact Warhol: Photography Without End and its accompanying catalogue from The MIT Press. Here, project archivist Amy DiPasquale takes us on a deep dive inside the days and nights of Andy Warhol during the last 11 years of his life.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Andy Warhol (U.S.A., 1928–1987), Detail from Contact Sheet [Jean-Michel Basquiat photo shoot for Polaroid portrait; Andy Warhol, Bruno Bischofberger], 1982. Gelatin silver print. Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2014.43.1547. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Fred W. McDarrah: New York Scenes

Posted on September 26, 2018

Eighth Street, looking east from Sixth Avenue, January 1, 1950. © Fred W. McDarrah, courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery.

Reading copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” on the couch at Fred W. McDarrah’s apartment, 304 West 14th Street, New York City, February 14, 1959© Fred W. McDarrah, courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery

For half a century, Fred W. McDarrah (1926-2007) was Greenwich Village’s poet-photographer laureate, penning subversive verse in black and white silver gelatin prints. As the sole staff photographer for The Village Voice for decades, and its first photo editor McDarrah centred himself at the heart of the New York’s downtown scene when it was a bohemian paradise filled with artists, activists, musicians, writers, and performers.

McDarrah’s chronicle of life recalls when the Village was just that: a community of iconoclasts ready to take on the world. In light of the closing of The Village Voice earlier this month, the comprehensive new survey exhibition Fred McDarrah: New York Scenes at Steven Kasher and catalogue from Abrams provides a timely, well-considered compendium of McDarrah’s impressive oeuvre.

McDarrah’s New York is a comet casting through space, a fiery mass of humanity in the final decades of the second millennia. Whether documenting Carolee Scheneemann’s first performance of Interior Scroll or shooting firefighters rushing into a townhouse after the Weathermen accidentally set off a bomb, McDarrah was on the scene with camera in hand, ready to capture it all. Here, his son Tim McDarrah takes us on a magical trip back in time.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Artist Faith Ringgold poses with her work, August 30, 1978. © Fred W. McDarrah, courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Alanna Airitam: The Golden Age

Posted on September 25, 2018

Saint Strivers. © Alanna Airitam, courtesy of Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.

Saint Nicholas © Alanna Airitam, courtesy of Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.

Native New Yorker Alanna Airitam understands the impact of place as it informs our sense of what is possible. Within the history of Western Art is a vast sense of absence and exclusion. Visibility and representation occurs for a select few the powerful and wealthy wished to venerate, often propagating distorted, dissembling narratives they pawn off as history.

After considering the limited spaces offered to Black folk in Western art, both on the walls and in offices, Airitam recognized a path for herself, one she began to pursue without knowing where it would take her. Her understanding of the human spirit found a natural home in portraiture, and as she continued to photograph, a story revealed itself.

In The Golden Age, Airitam weaves a tale of two cities exchanging ideas over the centuries, reuniting Old and New Amsterdam – Haarlem and Harlem, to be exact. It’s not small coincidence that City of New York was founded by the Dutch during their seventeenth-century Renaissance – in a real estate swindle, no less.

Fast forward three centuries, and the Harlem Renaissance is in full bloom as the nation’s greatest mass migration takes place over a period of 70 years, with Black folks fleeing the South following the hell of Reconstruction. For decades, Harlem sparkled uptown, the crown jewel in the city that never slept.

But the government-sponsored plague of benign neglect helped destabilize the city, making it ripe for the plagues of crack, AIDS, and gentrification over the past 50 years. Yet, it is exactly these changes that have stirred Aitiram into action, calling forth a desire not only to honor the grandeur of yore but to inspire a new generation to carry forward a legacy that continues to reveal profound depths of knowledge, wisdom, truth, beauty, passion, and majesty.

Airitam’s photographs from The Golden Age will be on view in How do you see me? at Catherine Edeman Gallery, Chicago, from September 7 – October 27, 2018. Here, the artist shares experiences and insights she has gathered along the way.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Feature Shoot, Manhattan, Photography

Don Herron: Tub Shots

Posted on September 20, 2018

When artist Don Herron moved to New York City from Texas in 1978, the fledgling East Village art scene was just beginning to take shape. Soho was the capital of downtown New York, but artists were starting to take up residence in the Lower East Side, where rent was affordable and young artists could find a tight-knit community of peers.

While getting to know New York’s art luminaries, Herron conceived of a project he titled Tub Shots, wherein he would photograph downtown cult figures in their bathtubs. From 1978 to 1993, he photographed art stars like Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, and Annie Sprinkle, along with Warhol Superstars like Holly Woodlawn, and International Chrysis.

Some artists collaborated with Herron to stage a scene, while others opted for a bare bones approach; a few were exhibitionists, while others posed demurely. Each portrait offers a glimpse of the subject as they were rarely seen—in a space that is both private and sensual, vulnerable and daring.

Herron died in 2013, but a selection of his photographs are on view in Don Herron: Tub Shots at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York. VICE asked downtown icons Sur Rodney (Sur) and Charles Busch to share their memories of working with Herron and being part of the East Village art scene when the photos were made.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

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

Dapper Dan: Harlem Hustle

Posted on August 30, 2018

“I’m from the east side of Harlem, which was the power base when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s. I was always in awe of the Rat Pack – they influenced fashion. Before that, it was James Cagney and Edward G Robinson, the guys who played gangsters in Hollywood movies. But my biggest influence came from the Italians in East Harlem. Those were the first people in the ghetto we saw with Cadillacs, diamond rings, silk suits, all that.

“The experience that shaped my relationship with clothes and how transformative they could be came about as a result of how poor we were. We used to put paper in our shoes to cover the holes in the sole. Then we got more innovative and started putting in linoleum, because it didn’t wear out as fast. One day, when I was eight years old, I came home and my feet were killing me. My oldest brother took me to a Goodwill store. He asked, ‘You see any shoes you like?’ I saw some split-toe shoes with tassles. I took off my shoes and tried them on. They felt good. He said, ‘OK, take your shoes, put them on the rack. Let’s go.’ I will never forget that. I took care of those shoes like they were a living thing. They made me feel like somebody.

“Those shoes were also my initiation into elements of criminality. Later on, I used to boost my own clothes. I call it the ‘Robin Hood complex’. It’s OK if you need it. That led to me being involved in street things. I grew up before the drug epidemic. When that came, I chose to retreat. I went back to school and got pretty radical.“

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photography Petra Collins. All clothes Gucci-Dapper Dan collection. Styling Emma Wyman.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Dazed, Fashion, Manhattan

Marcia Resnick: Bad Boys

Posted on August 28, 2018

Fab 5 Freddy, copyright Marcia Resnick

While living in a loft in Tribeca during the 1970s, American photographer Marcia Resnick began creating a series of portraits of the enfants terribles living in her neighbourhood, capturing an era of anti-heroes whose influence continues to be felt across the worlds of art, music, film, and literature today.

Whether photographing artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, writers such as William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, musicians like Iggy Pop, Johnny Thunders, and Mick Jagger, or the baron of bad taste himself John Waters, Resnick had an eye – as the title of her new book suggests – for bad boys; punks, poets and provocateurs.

Every night, Resnick would infiltrate New York’s downtown art scene, hitting up CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, and the Mudd Club to catch the latest happenings. Here, she discovered subjects that she could photograph there and then, and also at her studio. Here, Resnick reflects on her Bad Boys photo series, which can be found in full in Punks, Poets & Provocateurs New York City Bad Boys, 1977–1982 (Insight Editions).

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Klaus Nomi, copyright Marcia Resnick

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography