Posts from the “Photography” Category

How Danny Lyon Became the Defining Photographer of America’s Outsiders

Posted on May 10, 2024

Few artists are willing to risk it all, except those who know no other way to exist. Photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon inherited the spirit of rebellion and resistance from his mother, who regaled him with heroic tales of her brothers’ fearless crusade against the Tsar in the Russian and Bolshevik Revolutions of the early 20th century. As a young boy growing up in Queens, New York, Lyon would lie in bed at night and dream of seeing the world – never knowing his destiny was inextricably bound to history, art, and film.

Now 82, Lyon charts his extraordinary journey in the new book, This is My Life I’m Talking About (Damiani), a picaresque memoir that reveals his natural gifts for storytelling. Like his photographs, Lyon’s prose is electric, poetic, and filled with explosive details, bringing readers into the middle of the action before roaring off to the next episode. The stories move with the same intense pace with which he worked, crisscrossing the country on his red Triumph motorcycle during the 1960s.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Danny Lyon. Susan Measles and Nancy Weiss.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

On Erwin Blumenfeld

Posted on May 1, 2024

Erwin Blumenfeld. Doe Eye, Jean Patchett, Vogue, January 1, 1950.

Born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1897, Erwin Blumenfeld was a generation older than Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and Irving Penn (1917-2009), who he worked alongside in the 1940s and 50s after emigrating to America. Blumenfeld took up photography at age 10, served in the German military in WWI, then moved to Amsterdam where he became part of the Dada art movement, embracing the experimental, conceptual, and radical aspects of photography.

Blumenfeld drew inspiration from American artist May Ray (1890-1976), whose innovations in the medium (solarizations, photomontage, collage superimpositions) became an integral part of the visual language of Surrealism — which Blumenfeld employed throughout his career. After Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, Blumenfeld created Grauenfresse / Hitler in 1933 (collage and ink on photomontage), which was later used for Allied propaganda. This work is aligned that of his contemporaries, German artists John Heartfield (1891-1968) and Otto Dix (1891-1969) whose work appeared in the infamous 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition.

Erwin Blumenfeld. Hitler, Grauenfresse (Hitler, Face of Terror), Holland, 1933.

Denied Dutch citizenship after being arrested for dropping a shoulder strap on his bathing suit at the beach, Blumenfeld — then a married father of three — moved to Paris in late 1935 to work a fashion photographer for French Vogue, thanks to an introduction from British photographer Cecil Beaton (1904–1980). After Hitler invaded France, the family was split and interned in camps across France, fortunate to reunite and escape on a perilous journey to the US in 1941.

Blumenfeld opened his studio on Central Park South in 1943, his connections and experience landing him at the center of fashion photography and glossy magazines. He shot for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, as well as picture magazines like Look and Life, which dominated the landscape of photography during the mid-20th century with their large format color spreads of long-form photo reportage.

Erwin Blumenfeld. The Red Cross, ‘variant’ of Vogue cover, 1945.

But for Blumenfeld, commercial photography was a means, not an ends, to continue to experiment, explore, and expand the language of photography beyond the capitalist enterprise that subjugated it in the service of sales and marketing. “Photography is a means of creating images, and, as such, it need not confine itself to dull records of ham sandwiches, or vacuous girls with paint. Unfortunately, there is a mistaken feeling among some of those who decide what people shall see that nobody but a select few cares to view anything but dull records,” Erwin Blumenfeld told Commerce Camera magazine in 1948.

That very year, Eve Arnold (1912–2012) started photographing fashion shows in Harlem, but couldn’t get the work published in the United States. She sent them to Picture Post in London, which ran them in 1951 in an 8-page feature accompanied by racist screed degrading the people she photographed. Arnold soon thereafter joined Magnum Photos, and never allowed her work to be used in such a manner again.

Erwin Blumenfeld. Rage of Color, Look, October 15, 1958.

Having survived World War I and escaped Nazism, Blumenfeld was uniquely poised to perceive the radical changes taking place in the United States during the 1950s as the political tides turned from the Red Scare to the Civil Right Movement. Recognizing the conceptual, aesthetic, and political limitations of the mainstream/state media, he continuously pushed the boundaries and reinvented the form, perhaps knowing how we see the world shapes how we think about it.

His granddaughter, Nadia Blumenfeld Charbit, wrote: “He deplored his difficulty in imposing his ideas on artistic directors obsessed with commercial prerogatives, but prided himself on ‘smuggling art’ into these images.” Blumenfeld may have employed similar techniques to ensure Bani Yelverton was cast for the Rage of Color shoot.

Categories: Fashion, Photography

Cheriss May: The Folkus Profile

Posted on November 15, 2021

*Cheriss May. Howard University hosted its 93rd annual homecoming game against North Carolina A&T at Greene Stadium in Washington, D.C., on October 22, 2016.*

January 6, 2021, started out like any other day for Washington D.C.-based photographer and Howard University adjunct professor Cheriss May. On assignment for Getty to cover the ceremonial Electoral College vote count inside the U.S. Capitol, May remembers the morning began quietly and security was high.

“I thought that the Capitol was the safest place in this country, and [Jan. 6] turned all of that upside down for me,” says May, who had also been at the Capitol during the height of the George Floyd protests, when building security was at its peak. The double standard for policing quickly revealed itself.

Barricaded for hours inside Congressman Jim Clyburn’s office, insurrectionists ran amok. May tried to get word out to her loved ones but she couldn’t get a signal. “I felt like my life was in danger. I felt trapped,” she says. May remembers kneeling on the floor with her camera poised to shoot as unidentified people demanded they open the door. This happened three times. The final time, the doors were breached by FBI and Capitol police with guns drawn.

“My life flashed before my eyes three times that day,” May says. “I didn’t know if I was going to make it out of there. What has helped me is the work. It helps me to live through it and to move forward. This is my passion and my purpose. To have that gives me strength.”

Read the Full Story at The Undefeated

*Cheriss May. Chadwick Boseman following the screening of Marshall at the 108th NAACP Convention in Baltimore, July 25, 2017.*

Categories: Art, Photography, The Undefeated

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”).

Read the Full Story at i-D

*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

Sarah Rose Smiley: Coming Home – Milk, Honey, Healing

Posted on November 1, 2021

*Coming Home: Milk, Honey, Healing © Sarah Rose Smiley and Taewee Kahrs*

Anyone who has survived trauma knows all too well that the healing process is non-linear; it moves like a circle, going around and around again in a cycle that can sometimes feel like it is spiraling out of control. For many sexual assault survivors, social stigmas and victim-blaming cause them to retreat into a state of isolation that further harms the healing process.

With the understanding that photography can be a therapeutic tool, American photographer Sarah Rose Smiley and collaborator Taewee Kahrs — both sexual assault survivors — created the project “Coming Home: Milk, Honey, Healing“. In drawing from their own experiences, they have created a series of intimate images of vulnerability, pain, loss, joy, and triumph that reflect their inner states and disrupt the buttoned-down images of survivors that mainstream media has constructed as “respectable” in order to make themselves visible to the people who need to see them most — other survivors struggling to heal themselves.

“Photography has always been a therapeutic tool and survival skill because it gave me an outlet when hard things were happening in my life,” says Smiley. “It showed me a type of world-building and laid the foundation for storytelling combined with social justice to share my experiences and those of others in a way that wasn’t speaking for them, but rather uplifting them.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Guns, Drugs and Rock & Roll: The Tumultuous Life of Jim Marshall

Posted on October 29, 2021

*John Coltrane, in his backyard in Queens New York at sunset, 1963 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

American photographer Jim Marshall died peacefully in his sleep in 2010 at the age of 74 — probably the least likely end to a tumultuous life fueled by guns, drugs, and rock & roll. A natural born provocateur, Marshall understood the power of art to transform our lives. In his hands, the camera became a tool for activism, a recorder of history, and a means to salvation.

Whether photographing Johnny Cash during his historic San Quentin and Folsom prison concerts during the 1960s or traveling with Joan Baez on voter registration drives through the South during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Marshall was anchored in his work. Photography gave him purpose, put him in community, and was a way to show love — things that sometimes slipped away when he found himself alone.

In those moments, Marshall looked for ways to escape, his efforts to self-medicate often snowballing into catastrophic acts of self-harm. “A lot of creative people get really stuck in addiction because they are so sensitive,” says photographer Amelia Davis, Marshall’s longtime assistant and sole beneficiary of Marshall’s estate. “They connect with people on such a human level that they want to numb themselves out because it is overwhelming, especially when you are doing it 24/7 like Jim. Photography was his life so when there was downtime, he started feeling all these things and it was too much for him.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Jimi Hendrix filming Janis Joplin backstage, Winterland San Francisco, 1968 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

*Monk Family, NYC, 1963 © Jim Marshall Photography LLC*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Music, Photography

Larry Racioppo: Coney Island Baby

Posted on October 29, 2021

*Larry Racioppo. Palm Reading sign and the Thunderbolt rollercoaster, 1978.*

With its beach, boardwalk, and amusement park, Coney Island has long been the perfect escape from the stress of everyday life. South Brooklyn native Larry Racioppo and his extended family reveled in the pleasures of “America’s Playground” during his youth and teen years.

In the late 1960s, Racioppo enrolled in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and traveled to rural California, where he served two and a half years. He returned home in November 1970, with the dream of becoming a photographer.

In early 1971, Racioppo and a friend drove out to Coney Island to revisit his childhood stomping grounds — only to discover “Electric Eden” was on the brink of collapse. The once bustling boardwalk empire had become a ghost town. Abandoned buildings, burned out lots, neglect, disrepair, and white supremacist graffiti had brought seaside paradise to a standstill.

“Seeing the physical decline in my neighborhood and the city in general saddened me,” says Racioppo. “When I went to Coney Island I was struck by its emptiness. I saw that some attractions like the Tilyou Theater were closed not for the winter but for good.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Larry Racioppo. Young Boy in the Arcade, 1979.*

*Larry Racioppo. Stauch’s Baths with WARRIORS graffiti, 1979.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Huck, Photography

Larry Racioppo: Bowery Street

Posted on October 27, 2021

Girl with cotton candy, Fourth Avenue, 1974 © Larry Racioppo

While working as a cab driver, cameraman, waiter, photographer’s assistant, bartender, and carpenter, Brooklyn native Larry Racioppo traveled around the city in the 1970s making photos of New York as it teetered along the edge of bankruptcy. Despite — or perhaps because of — the lack of basic government services, the people found a way to make the best of their circumstances through creativity.

“The 1970s were a tough time for all New York City,” says Racioppo. “Government services were being cut back and unemployment was relatively high — but the working class people I knew and lived among were familiar with hard times. Volunteers from block associations, local churches, and fraternal orders like the Veterans of Foreign Wars created and staffed community events regularly. Most of these activities were focused on helping kids have fun.”

It’s a way of life that only exists in tiny, ungentrified pockets scattered across the five boroughs today. In the new exhibition, Bowery Street, Racioppo explores one of the last remaining vestiges of old New York: an undeveloped three-block section of Coney Island’s amusement area that is still home family-owned booths and concessions offering games of chance and skill.

“Here are games with regulation size basketballs and narrow rims, games with water pistols and darts, rings to toss and bbs for shooting zombies. Because they remind the 1970s street fair games I played years ago, I really enjoy photographing them,” says Racioppo, who received a 2021 New York City Artist Corps grant to document this little corner of Brooklyn that echoes a way of life Racioppo photographed at the very dawn of his career.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Girl and boy on circular car ride, 13th Street, 1976 © Larry Racioppo*

*Ticket booth and empty ride, Fourth Avenue, 1974 © Larry Racioppo*

Categories: 1970s, Art, Blind, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, 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.”

Read the Full Story at i-D

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

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

Mel D. Cole: American Protest – Photographs 2020–2021

Posted on October 25, 2021

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Black American photographer Mel D. Cole took to the streets of New York to photograph the world as it transformed before his very eyes. Then George Floyd was murdered and everything changed.

As the history’s largest Civil Rights movement took root, Cole started following Justice for George Floyd for updates on Black Lives Matter protests in New York. Social media quickly became the nexus for community, with feeds popping up nationwide to spread the word on local rallies, food banks, and other collective actions.

Recognizing that “this is not a moment, it’s a movement,” Cole devoted himself to documenting protests around the country. He traveled to cities including Minneapolis, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Houston to bear witness as people from all walks of life took to the streets to demand justice.

“The movement needed someone like myself and my fellow photographers, videographers, and journalist to be out there, not afraid of the police. Protesters have to be fearless. You have to be out there and do it every single day,” says Cole.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

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