Posts from the “Photography” Category

Irving Penn: Photographism

Posted on January 15, 2021

*Irving Penn. Girl Behind Bottle, New York, 1949.*

In 1996, Vasilios Zatse began his journey with Irving Penn, starting as an apprentice to the master photographer and rising to become the deputy director of the Irving Penn Foundation. Zatse remembers arriving at Penn’s Fifth Avenue studio for the job interview, expecting to see the most modern equipment, only to be whisked back in time.

“When you stepped into the studio, it was as if the outside world didn’t exist. You were in Penn’s world,” Zatse says. “It felt like an atelier. It was a studio with very plainly painted walls, white and battleship grey, and creaky worn wooden floors and some of the cameras that dated to his beginnings at Vogue magazine, going back as far as the early 1940s or early 50s.”

Penn never fixed what already worked, but he constantly sought new solutions to old problems. “Penn was not one to accept given formulas, approach a task or an idea in a very elemental fashion,” Zatse says. “On more than one occasion he built his own cameras for specific concepts or ideas. Penn was not shy about thinking outside of the box.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Irving Penn. Two Hairy Young Women, New York, 1995.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Paolo Roversi: Birds

Posted on January 12, 2021

Rei Kawakubo is the living embodiment of radical fashion, her powers extending far beyond the runway. Known for her reticence to explain her masterful, mindboggling designs to the press, the founder of Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market has deftly maintained her enigmatic charms for more than half a century.

A true rara avis, Kawakubo told the Guardian in 2018 that she identifies punk “as a spirit, as a way of living”. Eschewing all that is popular in favour of that which is original, rebellious and authentic, Kawakubo, now 78, is one of the greatest designers working today.

One of Kwakubo’s gifts is her ability to trust that once she has done her part, we will do ours. It is a position she extends to collaborators alike. “Rei doesn’t give any instruction or any rules,” observes Italian photographer Paolo Roversi, who has worked with Kawakubo for four decades. “She lets you do your interpretation of her ideas, and still today it is the same. She did not change.”

Roversi remembers meeting Kawakubo in 1983 when she presented her first collection in a Paris hotel. “I was a little shocked because this moment was the Vogue designers: Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler. Then Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto changed a lot of those things. Rei was even more revolutionary – there were sweaters with holes, strange shoes. You felt she was taking a risk. She was going in the direction where no one was going before. Everything was different and new.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Fashion, Photography

Guzman: Newark in the 1970s

Posted on January 12, 2021

Newark in the 1970s was synonymous with urban despair. During the “Long Hot Summer of 1967,” Newark became the site of one of the race riots sweeping across some 159 American cities. The four-day uprising, sparked by police brutality against Black cab driver John William Smith, resulted in 26 dead, 15,000 wounded, 1,600 arrested, and $10 million in property damages.

Soon thereafter, the Nixon White House instituted a policy of “benign neglect,” denying basic government services to Black and Latinx communities as a means to further systemically oppress the poverty-stricken underclass. By the mid-1970s, Newark had fallen on hard times. The January 1975 issue of Harper’s Magazine ranked the 50 largest American cities in 24 categories, from parking space to crime. The article concluded, “The city of Newark stands without serious challenge as the worst city of all… Newark is a city that desperately needs help.”

Despite it all, Newark maintained a style and identity all its own, perfectly exemplified by Arts High School, a public school dedicated to nurturing the talents of inner city youth. Established in 1931, Arts High School was the first visual and performing arts high school in the United States, and counts Black Panther’s Michael B. Jordan, Pose’s MJ Rodriguez, jazz icons Sarah Vaughan and Wayne Shorter, and Broadway stars Melba Moore and Savion Glover among its alumni.

At the outset of her career, Constance Hansen, now one half of the husband and wife photography team Guzman, arrived at Arts High School after graduating from Pratt Institute with an art education degree in art therapy in 1971. Hansen remembers, “Newark was still fresh from the riots. It was pretty rough. Everything was falling apart. The city was underfunded, as was the school. There was a recession, money was tight, but I never thought about any of that.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1970s, Art, Blind, Photography

Michael Brennan: They Must Fall – Muhammad Ali and the Men He Fought

Posted on January 8, 2021

*The Deafening Silence. Muhammad Ali in retirement, Los Angeles, Wednesday February 23, 1983 © Michael Brennan*

To be a world champion boxer, you must be a warrior in and out of the ring, a master of both the sport and the psychology that allows one man to dominate another. Muhammad Ali, the G.O.A.T. (“Greatest of All Time”), learned this lesson at the start of his career, when he converted to Islam and faced the rage of the mainstream press during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

But it didn’t stop there. On April 28, 1967, Ali refused to be inducted into the Armed Services to fight into the Vietnam War on religious grounds. The following day, the U.S. government stripped him of the World Heavyweight title and had his boxing license suspended. Sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, so he did what any fighter would do — he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was overturned in an unanimous decision in 1970. Ali immediately set forth to restore his reputation and his career, training harder than ever before and taking on all contenders in the ring.

As it so happened, Ali unknowingly crossed paths with Michael Brennan that same year while the British photographer sat in an airport outside Glasglow, Scotland on a quiet Saturday afternoon. “Suddenly the departure lounge doors opened and five or six big Black guys lead by Ali came running through the airport, chanting,” Brennan says. “They went out [on to the tarmac] and up the stairs of the airplane. The door closed and the airplane took off.”

A member of Ali’s camp was seated near Brennan and they began to chat. He gave the photographer his card and invited him to call whenever he was in the states. Three years later Brennan did just that when he moved to New York City. “In the early days, I wasn’t getting much work and I knew that if I took the bus to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, walked to Ali’s camp, and knocked on the door, he would come out. I would take a picture and that was the rent paid for the next month,” he remembers.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Sonny Liston. Fought Ali twice: February 25, 1964, title fight, Miami Beach; RTD after 6thround, and 25 May 1965, Lewiston, Maine; KO’d in the 1st round © Michael Brennan*

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

Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang

Posted on January 8, 2021

The postwar boom in America cast a golden glow around the 1950s, the first decade when youth culture came into vogue. With the advent of television and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Hollywood quickly discovered a new archetype: the disaffected “rebel without a cause.” Co-opting working class aesthetics, Hollywood transformed the image of disenfranchised teens into anti-heroes for a new generation coming of age.

But the reality was much bleaker than a James Dean flick. Gangs provided what the community could not: a sense of family and belonging for those living on the margins. By the 1950s, juvenile delinquency was on the rise, and the mainstream media began targeting them as new class of criminals to be vilified.

After joining Magnum Photos in 1959, Bruce Davidson, then 25, read a newspaper story about white and Puerto Rican street gangs rumbling on the streets of New York City and decided to investigate.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Running the Streets: Martha Cooper’s New York State of Mind

Posted on January 6, 2021

*Martha Cooper. Kids climbing fence, Lower East Side, Manhattan, 1978*

Freedom, creativity, and innovation — these are the hallmarks of Martha Cooper’s journey around the globe over the past 60 years. Hailing from a long line of strong, independent women dating back to her maternal great aunt, Henrietta Szold, a prominent activist inducted into the American Women’s Hall of Fame, Cooper grew up in a family of feminists empowered to follow their destinies.

At the tender age of five, Cooper was instilled with a profound sense of autonomy when her mother taught her to walk a mile to kindergarten on her own through hometown Baltimore. “My mother showed me the first day,” Cooper says. “The next day she followed behind to make sure I got it right, then that was that. I grew up very free.”

Cooper took her penchant for adventure to new heights in 1965. After completing her work in the Peace Corps to study ethnology at Oxford University, she went on the ride of her life, traveling from Bangkok to London by motorcycle alone. After graduating, she returned to the U.S. to catalogue artifacts at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. Soon bored working behind a desk, Cooper yearned to be back in the field.

Read the Full Story at Urban Nation Museum

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

Erik Madigan Heck: The Garden

Posted on January 6, 2021

Umbrella, The Garden © Erik Madigan Heck

At a time where many have fled cities in search of seclusion amid the verdant reassures of the natural world and become family photographers out of cheer necessity, their options limited by the strictures of social isolation, American artist and fashion photographer Erik Madigan Heck has been years ahead of the curve.

The Garden, Heck’s four-gallery exhibition and forthcoming book, is an ongoing body of work depicting the artist’s wife and two sons set amid a landscape that evokes the myth and majesty of childhood fairytales. Describing himself as “a painter who uses a camera,” Heck transforms the original photographs into storybook scenes through the meticulous process of adding luminous layers of color and exquisite patterns while simultaneously flattening the images by removing shadows and depth of field.

Like Edouard Vuillard, the French Impressionist painter he admired as a child, Heck transforms the picture plane into a dreamscape where reality and fantasy become one. Where he once altered the photograph in the darkroom, Heck now does it digitally to produce the same effect: a photograph that transcends notions of the documentary nature of the medium.

“The original photographs I take don’t really resemble the end results,” Heck reveals. “When everything is so immediate, there’s a real luxury in being able to put something aside, come back to it. There are photographs taken years ago and I’ll go through the archive and pull something out and then start reworking it. Sometimes I will spend weeks where I will do a little color, put it aside, and come back to it, which is basically the same way you would approach painting on a canvas. Time with the piece erases the moment when you took the picture first in because it’s no longer about that day you took the photograph.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Eniko in Flowers, 2020 © Erik Madigan Heck*

*Untitled, The Garden, 2019 © Erik Madigan Heck*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Patty Carroll: Collapse and Calamity

Posted on December 29, 2020

Home is the ultimate escape from the pressures of daily life, a private getaway where we can unwind and be our true selves. But it’s not always that simple. At a time when people are practicing social isolation in a Sisyphean attempt to stanch the exponential spread of COVID-19 across the United States, homes have been transformed into offices, schools, restaurants, and gyms — spaces that are constricting, even claustrophobic, in their limitations.

In challenging times, humor can be the best medicine. A little levity goes a long way when the weight of the world sends us climbing the walls. In the world of American photographer Patty Carroll those walls bite back is a series of Baroque horrors taken from the on-going series, “Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise.” Her exhibition, Collapse and Calamity, presents delightfully decadent scenes of death that come about in an ill-fated quest to create the “perfect home.”

Inspired in part by the board game “Clue,” Carroll crafts melodramatic moments of domesticity gone awry. Every corner of the home becomes suspect, the setting for a disaster so luxurious it’s hard to do anything but laugh. Nestled deep in the desire for an opulent oasis are the very seeds of demise. “The perfect home is a blessing, a joy, and a burden that you want to have this thing and it’s never going to be perfect but you keep trying,” says Carroll, who came of age in the 1950s and ‘60s, at a time when the consumerist lifestyle was being perfectly crystallized.

“Mid-century design is almost mythical in its idea about perfection. It was a time of hope. It all happened after the big war and everyone was becoming prosperous. It was a magical, glamorous time. People dressed up for dinner in their perfect homes where the drapes matched the wallpaper and the sofa. My mother’s house was never that good; it wasn’t even close. Later on you tell yourself, ‘I’m going to give myself the perfect life I never had.’”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*A Shadow of Her Former Self, 2019 © Patty Carroll*

Categories: Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Huck: Top Ten Photo Stories of 2020

Posted on December 23, 2020

In a challenging year, visual storytellers are still finding exciting ways to document – be it through innovative new projects, or old archive series now seeing the light of day. Here are the best ones we covered this year.

Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha

Growing up in Germany, Russian Ghanaian artist Liz Johnson Artur spent her summers in the former Soviet Union. But in 1986, she received an invitation to stay with a family friend in Brooklyn. Deep in Williamsburg, long before it was gentrified, Artur found herself in a Black community for the very first time.

“Up until then I hadn’t really travelled in any countries that had a Black population,” she says. “Coming to Brooklyn was something I didn’t expect, but I realiszd I could take pictures of people.”

Karen O’Sullivan: Somewhere Below 14th & East

By the ’80s, New York’s Lower East Side (LES) had been decimated by the ravages of drugs, “benign neglect” and landlord-sponsored arson. As squatters took over abandoned buildings, living side by side with black and Latinx residents, they immersed themselves in the sound of hardcore, punk, and hip hop exemplified by bands like The Clash, Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, Black Flag, the Misfits and Minor Threat.

The LES became the Mecca of all things anti-glamour and glitz, raging against the Reagan-fueled yuppification of Manhattan. As the centre of resistance from the coming onslaught of gentrification, the neighborhood welcomed outcasts into the mix, giving them an outlet for creativity and self-expression in an increasingly neoliberal city.

Sergio Purtell: Love’s Labour

In 1973, at the tender age of 18, Sergio Purtell fled his hometown of Santiago, Chile, for the United States. The decision came after General Augusto Pinochet and Admiral José Merino lead a coup d’état, killing the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. Once situated in his new home, Purtell began studying photography, going on to receive a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MFA from Yale.

“Photography had the ability to sustain time itself – it was to be discovered not constructed,” Purtell says. “One could use one’s intuition to drive one’s motivation. Suddenly the world started to make sense to me.”

Read the Full List at Huck

*Liz Johnson Artur, Josephine, Peckham, 1995.*

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

Amani Willett: A Parallel Road

Posted on December 21, 2020

atural extension of Manifest Destiny, the mythic American road trip supposes freedom can be found on stolen land. Crafted by colonisers, the belief that one could simply jump in a car to escape the oppressive confines of society was a privilege granted to and moulded for the self-actualisation of, by and large, white men.

But those without their protected status have long warned of America’s vast network of highways and roads. In 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a Black travel writer hailing from Harlem, began publishing The Negro Motorist Green Book – a handbook showcasing stores, motels, and gas stations that welcomed Black travellers in New York City. An immediate success upon release, Green expanded coverage to include other US destinations in annual editions over the next 30 years.

“The Green Book is a testament to the courage, perseverance and unwillingness of Black Americans to be cast aside. But, it also told of the legitimate fears and threats that awaited them,” says Amani Willett, author of the new book A Parallel Road (Overlapse), a five-year project that examines the American road trip from a Black perspective.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography

The Ten Most Visually Arresting Photo Books of 2020

Posted on December 16, 2020

Thrilled my features on Sunil Gupta: Lovers – Ten Years On (Stanley/Barker) and Tyler Mitchell: I Can Make You Feel Good (Prestel) were chosen among the ten best photo books of 2020 by AnOther.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Tyler Mitchell. Untitled (Park Frivolity), 2019.*

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Fashion, Photography