Posts from the “Photography” Category

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

Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection

Posted on May 20, 2021

*Mickalene Thomas, Les Trois Femmes Deux, 2018.*

History is filled with works of art that have survived save one salient point: the name of the person to whom their creation might be attributed. In the 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, British author Virginia Woolf knowingly surmised, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

Even though it wasn’t until the twentieth century that women began to command the political and cultural capital to demand credit where it was due, their contributions are all too often left out of the pantheon alongside their male counterparts. It is only in recent years that mainstream institutions have begun to center those relegated to the margins of history, and in doing so offer new paradigms by which we may reconsider women’s roles in shaping the world.

The new exhibition, “Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection”, in Atlanta, brings together 100 works made over the past century, presents a panoply of perspectives and approaches across a wide array of genres including photojournalism, documentary, portraiture, and advertising. Featuring works by Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Sally Mann, Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Zanele Muholi, Sheila Pree Bright, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems, the exhibition explores image making through the female lens.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Nan Goldin, Cookie and Sharon on the Bed, Provincetown, MA, 1989.*

Categories: Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Remembering Tom of Finland Through Stories of Those Who Knew Him

Posted on May 19, 2021

*Tom of Finland, Untitled, c.1973, Tom of Finland Permanent Collection*

Those who had the pleasure of meeting Tom of Finland (born Touko Valio Laaksonen, 1920–1991) may have expected to encounter a walking, talking version of his drawings. Instead, they would have been greeter by a gentle soul, whose Finnish upbringing made him a quiet and reserved individual, who would easily slip into the fantasy world of his homoerotic drawings for hours at a time.

“If you know Finns, and most people don’t, they can be quite quiet,” says Durk Dehner, president of the Tom of Finland Foundation. “When I first went to Finland, Tom set up a cocktail party for me at his apartment. His friends started coming while he was arranging cocktails and preparing hors d’oeuvres. We were all sitting in the living room and nobody was saying a word. I was so uncomfortable, I went into the kitchen and said, ‘When are they going to start talking?’ He said, ‘Give them one more drink and they will,’ and that was the case. Of course six hours later I went into the kitchen and said, ‘When are they going to go home?’ That’s Finns in a nutshell.”

Although Tom was unassuming, he was confident and determined to create works of art that would empower and inspire gay men at a time when homosexuality – and very the depiction of it – was criminalised, stigmatised, and misrepresented. Tom’s groundbreaking drawings of bikers and leathermen, which he made from photographs now on view in the new exhibition Tom of Finland: The Darkroom, revolutionised the portrayal of gay men forevermore. “He wanted his history to be in his art,” Dehnrer says. And so it was – but still many wish to know, what was Tom of Finland really like? Here his friends, lovers, and models reminisce on the man behind the myth.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Tom of Finland, Untitled (Aarno), 1976, Tom of Finland Permanent Collection

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

Hannah Gottlieb-Graham: ALMA Communications

Posted on May 13, 2021

“I am a collaborative person,” says Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, founder of ALMA Communications, a New York-based firm specialising in publicity, partnership, and publishing. Its client-list includes Air Jordan and Fotografiska New York, critic and curator Antwaun Sargent, and photographers such as Tyler Mitchell, Andre D. Wagner, and Diana Markosian.

“My business operates at the intersection of contemporary art, fashion, beauty and social justice,” says Gottlieb-Graham. At just 26, she comfortably combines the language of the digital generation with a politically aware understanding of the power of art in centering previously marginalized groups within an institutional framework.

Since launching ALMA on 01 January 2020, Gottlieb-Graham has taken on more than 40 projects in the fields of art, photography, book publishing, film, fashion, beauty, and nonprofit. She signs clients for three or six-month contracts, with the aim of building lasting relationships. “When I work with a new client, we’ll sit down and talk about their wish list,” she explains. “I’ll make a strategy, and that will change depending on specific projects or launches. Nothing is cookie-cutter. Everything is personal.”

Read the Full Story at British Journal of Photography

Andre D. Wagner. Viola Davis and her 10-year daughter Genesis Tennon, for a feature titled Black Americana: A Photo Essay on Love and Pain, Directed by Regina King for W Magazine: The Directors Issue, April 2021.

Categories: Art, Books, British Journal of Photography, Exhibitions, 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

Sarah Hermanson Meister: Fotoclubismo – Brazilian Modernist Photography and the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, 1946–1964

Posted on May 10, 2021

*Gertrudes Altschul, Filigree (Filigrana), 1953, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2020 Estate of Gertrudes Altschul*

At precisely 2:34 p.m. on April 29, 1939, a small group of amateur photographers gathered in the Blue Room of the Martinelli building in São Paolo, Brazil, to create the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). Lawyers, businessmen, accountants, journalists, engineers, biologists and bankers… These white collar professionals shared a common love for the innovative possibilities of photography. Together, artists including Thomaz Farkas, Geraldo de Barros, Gertrudes Altschul, Maria Helena Valente da Cruz, and Palmira Puig-Giró, among others would gather regularly in the spirit of competition and camaraderie to create a space for shared discovery.

Informed by the movement towards abstraction dominating the modern art world, members of the FCCB pushed the boundaries of the medium into new realms, and their influence extended into artistic circles across Europe and North America. Like their peers working in painting, design, and literature, the FCCB found inspiration in majestic elegance of daily life, drawing from architecture, nature, texture, shape, shadow, solitude, and movement to create new ways of seeing the world.

For 25 years, the FCCB continuously challenged visual tropes, resisting the lure of repetition and cliché in a search for originality of style and technique. But with the Coup of 1964, in which the United States funded the Brazilian Armed Forces overthrow of President João Goulart, a brutally repressive regime dominated the country for the next twenty years. As the FCCB prepared for the Eighth São Paulo Bienal in September–November 1965, the government began to jail critics and intellectuals, an act that signaled the end of an era had arrived.

After the FCCB disbanded, they all but disappeared from the history of modern photography outside Brazil. In her final exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art, curator Sarah Hermanson Meister has organized Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography and the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, 1946–1964, a restoration of a vital but forgotten chapter of art history, opened since May 8. Featuring more than 60 photographs drawn from the MoMA’s collection, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue present a series of works that offer indelible insight into mid-century modernism with a Brazilian touch.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Maria Helena Valente da Cruz, The Broken Glass (O vidro partido), c. 1952, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2020 Estate of Maria Helena Valente da Cruz*

*Julio Agostinelli, Circus (Circense), 1951, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2020 Estate of Julio Agostinelli*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Latin America, 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

Andy Grundberg: How Photography Became Contemporary Art

Posted on May 6, 2021

*Jan Groover, Untitled, 1978 © Estate of Jan Groover*

From its very outset, photography occupied a curious place within the world of art, its mechanical nature offering a new way of seeing and recording, while simultaneously confounding the status quo at every turn. Its deceptive simplicity, margin for error, and ability to reproduce a single image infinite times challenged all that traditionalists held sacred about the singular work of art. Although photographers long sought for their work to be recognized — and valued — as art, it would be nearly 150 years before the establishment acknowledged it as such. Unsurprisingly it took artists themselves to show functionaries as much.

As a photography critic at The New York Times from 1981-1991, Andy Grundbergplayed a pivotal role in the elevation of photography within the art world. He arrived in New York in August of 1971 with youthful dreams of being a poet. He got a job working in Soho just as the neighborhood was transitioning from a manufacturing center to an artists’ outpost, working as a day laborer to help transform huge industrial buildings transformed into lofts. At the time, the New York art world was firmly entrenched on 57th Street, just a stone’s throw from Sutton Place, but by the end of the decade, the downtown scene would rise to prominence.

Photography, with its ability to do what no other medium could, played first a functional then a formal role in the contemporary art scene. In the new book How Photography Became Contemporary Art (Yale University Press), Grundberg pens the perfect mix of history and memoir that chronicles the mediums transformation in the 1970s and ‘80s. Offering a first-person account from the frontlines, Grundberg explores the radical artists and movements that shook up the scene and reflects on the medium’s relationship with feminism and artists of color.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Edward Ruscha, Phillips 66, Flagstaff, Arizona, 1962. From the book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963. © Ed Ruscha

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

The Prince Family: Houston Rap Royalty

Posted on May 5, 2021

*Jas Prince returns to his Texas ranch after visiting Jamaica and heads straight to his horse. Photography Rodney Pinz*

Blood makes us kin and loyalty makes us family,” says J. Prince, the godfather of Southern hip hop. Hailing from Houston’s Fifth Ward, Prince built his empire one brick at a time, rising to become one of the most influential figures in the culture. As DJs and MCs moved from park jams into recording studios in the 1980s, New York-based labels like Def Jam, Tommy Boy, and Sleeping Bag dominated the national scene.

“New Yorkers’ hustle game was so strong back in the beginning,” Prince says. “They spread it out throughout the South and monopolised our radio stations and our clubs. I had to change that narrative.” In 1987, he founded Rap-A-Lot Records, introducing a new style and sound with iconic artists including Geto Boys, Pimp C, Bun B, Do or Die, and Devin the Dude, which planted the seeds for a massive independent movement across the South that continues to this day. “I inspired the homies Master P, Cash Money, Tony Draper, everybody near Texas, to follow the blueprint,” Prince says.

A visionary whose legacy begins – but does not end – with hip hop, Prince has become a mogul whose interests also include a 1200-acre Angus cattle ranch, the aptly-named Loyalty Wines, and the Prince Boxing Complex, a multi-million dollar recreation centre located in the heart of the Fifth Ward, a historically Black neighborhood settled in Houston by freemen after the American Civil War.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

*J Prince Jr. greeted at Heart NightClub in Houston by a friend. Photography Rodney Pinz*

*Loading water at James Prince Sr.’s charity relief event for those affected by the Texas winter storm. Photography Rodney Pinz*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Fashion, 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

Tom of Finland: The Darkroom

Posted on April 29, 2021

*Tom of Finland, Untitled (Gavin), 1987, Tom of Finland Permanent Collection ©1987-2021 Tom of Finland Foundation*

Wars, for all their horrors, have been known to foster a sense of brotherhood among the men who fight in them. This was certainly the case with Tom of Finland – born Touko Laaksonen (1920–1991) – who was conscripted to serve in the Finnish Army during World War II and rose to become a lieutenant, beloved by his platoon for treating them with kindness and respect. The son of a country choral master, Tom seized the opportunity to strengthen the bond between his men and created the first men’s choir in the Finnish Army.

“They had a lot of time sitting around waiting for the Russians to attack them so Tom taught all of the men in his platoon how to sing,” says Durk Dehner, president and co-founder of the Tom of Finland Foundation. “He could take on initiatives that came out of his own inspiration and yet he had this sensibility of not having to stand out and be noticed.”

Flying under the radar, quite literally, Tom established a cottage industry selling drawings through his mail-order business, while also working a day job at an advertising firm. What few people know is the role photography played in Tom’s artistic process. Now, the new exhibition Tom of Finland: The Darkroom, opening April 30 at Fotografiska New York, brings together photographic portraits the artist used as reference images for his legendary and hugely influential drawings. Organised in conjunction with Tom’s 101st birthday on May 8, the exhibition explores this little-known aspect of the artist’s work, which was confined to his home studio and darkroom so as to protect him from persecution, prosecution, and imprisonment.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Tom of Finland, Untitled, c.1986, Tom of Finland Permanent Collection © 1986-2021 Tom of Finland Foundation*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography