Posts from the “Photography” Category

Martine Barrat: Harlem in the 1970s and 1980s

Posted on November 10, 2020

*Martyine Barrat. Mabel Albert (Harlem), 1982.*

Hailing from France, Martine Barrat got her start as a dancer working with Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. After travelling to Edinburgh for the International Dance Festival, she met Ellen Stewarr – director of La MaMa Experimental Theater on New York’s Lower East Side.

“She offered me a ticket to come to the city, with my son, to dance with her company,” Barrat recalls. In June 1968, she arrived and made the city her home, settling into Harlem before moving to the South Bronx during the height of white flight.

With a group of jazz musicians, Barrat co-created the Human Arts Ensemble – a collective working with children staging street performances and running video and music workshops.

“I wasn’t trying to be a photographer,” Barrat says. “Two incredible philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari gave me a video camera saying we should document the events we were creating at La Mama every day with the kids from all over the city. This, I loved.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Martine Barrat. Love on her way to the Rhythm Club (Harlem), 1993.*

*Martine Barrat. Eric Williams, the dominoes champion (Harlem), 1983.*

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

Susan Meiselas: Tar Beach: Life on Rooftops of Little Italy 1920-1975

Posted on November 6, 2020

*Mildred Musillo, 197 Hester Street, Summer 1940.*

Even when the city is impoverished, real estate in New York is at a premium simply because living stacked one on top of the other in apartments with the feel of a cozy shoebox lends itself visionary appropriation of one’s greater environment. The lack of public spaces, courtyards, and plazas have driven New Yorkers to new heights of creativity, perhaps none quite as ingenious as “tar beach,” building rooftops reimagined as semi-private playgrounds.

The ultimate escape — without leaving home — tar beach offers city dwellers the space to feel like they are king of the world as they survey the jagged landscape from new heights, their views unimpeded by buildings blotting out the sun. The indelible sensation of being transported to a veritable mountaintop does marvelous things to one’s mind, opening a magical portal into a world where anything is possible. For over a century, it has been common practice for residents to don their finest threads, ascend to the top of a six-floor walk up, and make vernacular portraits.

“Do people still go up to the roof? And if they do, what do they see? Because we saw heaven,” Martin Scorsese writes in the introduction to Tar Beach: Life on Rooftops of Little Italy 1920-1975 (Damiani). Magnum Photos member Susan Meiselas collaborated with Virginia Bynum and Angel Marinaccio, natives of Manhattan’s famed Little Italy to create a family photo album-style volume filled with photographs taken on neighborhood rooftops between the 1920s and early 1970s.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Peter and Michael Cirelli (aka ‘My Dee’), 242 Mulberry Street, c. 1920.*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Diana Markosian: Santa Barbara

Posted on November 5, 2020

On January 2, 1993, Santa Barbara became the first American television show to air in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The beloved 1980s soap opera chronicling the lives of the wealthy Capwell clan of Southern California became a sparkling image of the American Dream, captivating a nation just liberated from the yoke of a communist regime.

Born in Moscow in 1989 – the year the Berlin Wall fell and the Eastern Bloc began to crumble to dust – photographer Diana Markosian grew up idolising Santa Barbara. “It was a window to another life that didn’t belong to us,” she says.

“We had nothing as a family. My brother and I were picking bottles to buy bread for my mom. Both my parents had PhDs, but couldn’t get work. My father was painting nesting dolls for tourists on the Red Square. They were reduced to nothing and they weren’t the only ones.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Steve Eichner: In the Limelight – The Visual Ecstasy of NYC Nightlife in the 90s,

Posted on November 3, 2020

*Grace Jones at Palladium, 1992 © 2020 Steve Eichner*

The 1990s were the last hurrah of bohemian New York. The decade kicked off with thehighest murder rate in city history, while the draconian Rockefeller drug laws disappeared a generation of Black and Latinx youth, and the AIDS crisis continued unabated. It had been more than a decade since the federal government left the city for dead — but from the ashes of destruction the phoenix that is New York would rise once again.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” philosopher Plato sagely opined, understanding nature abhors a vacuum, as does the human mind. New Yorkers have long applied the wisdom of classical antiquity without giving it a second thought; the nature of survival demands innovative solutions to keep us afloat. As Generation X came of age, they broke all the rules, reveling in a dizzying mix of sin, spectacle, and self-expression that percolated in the non-stop extravaganza of the ‘90s New York nightlife scene.

Here, a new group of upstarts of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and economic backgrounds came together on the dance floor in a celebration of PLUR (peace, love, unity, and respect) to dance until the break of dawn. Music was the draw — house, hip hop, techno, industrial, goth, drum and bass, grunge, and just about any other permutation of the underground sound drew an inexhaustible mix of partygoers dressed to impress. On any given night, one could party alongside celebrities, club kids, drag queens, ravers, hip hop heads, models, banjees, body boys, bondage slaves, Wall Street suits, and the bridge-and-tunnel set at legendary nightclubs like Tunnel, Roxy, Palladium, Club Expo, and Webster Hall.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Susanne Bartsch (center) at the Palladium, 1995 © 2020 Steve Eichner*

*The Palladium, 1995 © 2020 Steve Eichner*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music 1972-1981 – Photographs by Henry Horenstein

Posted on October 30, 2020

*Lovers, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Nashville, TN, 1975 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

*Ponderosa, Near Pikesville, KY, 1974 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

In the 1970s, country music reached stratospheric heights by seamlessly weaving itself into the fabric of American culture by blending elements of folk and rock music into its Southern honky-tonk roots. Songs of love and loss, booze and gambling, family and country — the triumphs and struggles of everyday folks trying to make it through life — fueled a new generation of artists who reveled in a compelling mix of nostalgia, heartbreak, and pride.

The ‘70s brought talents like Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Reba McEntire, and Emmylou Harris into the ranks, their raw talent and star power shining alongside luminaries like Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, John Denver, and Charley Pride. Throughout the decade, country music could be heard on popular television shows like Hee Haw as well as on local radio from coast to coast, the stars of the Grand Ole Opry were seen as national icons — with breakout performers like Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Marie Osmond going Hollywood.

Photographer Henry Horenstein, a dyed in the wool Yankee, began photographing the country music scene as part of a final assignment for his history professor, the famed British writer and socialist E.P. Thompson, who helped Horenstein understand the importance of recording, studying, and documenting the people who were going to disappear from history unless someone preserved their role in it. He did just that, amassing an extraordinary archive of the images now on view in the new exhibition,Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music 1972-1981 – Photographs by Henry Horenstein.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Dolly Parton, Symphony Hall, Boston, MA, 1972 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

*Drunk Dancers, Merchant’s Cafe, Nashville, TN, 1974 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

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

Earlie Hudnall Jr.: Past and Present

Posted on October 29, 2020

*Earlie Hudnall, Jr., Hot Summer Days, 2011, Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, TX*

Growing up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during Jim Crow, Earlie Hudnall Jr. discovered the importance of photography, keeping records, and documenting family and community through his grandmother Bonnie Jean.

“My grandmother was like the community historian in her own way,” Hudnall says. “In the summertime, we would sit on the porch. She would be telling stories so vivid your imagination almost came to life.”

Bonnie Jean kept albums that Hudnall would peruse, filled with photographs of community residents, primary school kids who grew up in the neighborhood, alongside family photos and works by her son Earlie Hudnall Sr. – an amateur photographer who made pictures while serving in the military.

Bonnie Jean impressed upon her grandson the importance of being aware of what was happening in the community. Hudnall recalls his family telling him about the lynching of Emmett Till, and stumbling upon newspaper clippings reporting an African American pilot shot down in the Korean War. Hudnall has kept them to this very day.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Earlie Hudnall, Jr., June 19, 1987, Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, TX*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

A Brief Story of Homoerotic Photography in America, Part I

Posted on October 28, 2020

*Tom Bianchi. Fire Island Pines. Polaroids 1975-1983 (Damiani)*

It wasn’t until 2003 — nearly 40 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed — that the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) gave LGBTQ people their Constitutional rights, ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that intimate consensual conduct is a liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. For the better part of American history, same-sex activity was treated as a crime to be persecuted under the law, for which citizens could be denied healthcare, housing, education, employment, and access across the board.

The American Psychiatric Association deemed it a pathology, dedicating more than 20 years to formalizing a language to describe and behaviors to treat what they erroneously deemed a form of mental illness until the egregious diagnosis was removed from the DSM-III-R in 1973. That same year, the Supreme Court modified its definition of obscenity in the landmark case Miller v. California from the of “utterly without socially redeeming value” to that which lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” providing protections to previously censored works of art and culture under the First Amendment.

Much as same-sex activity was criminalized, so was any expression of — a practice dating back to the 1873 Comstock Laws, a set of federal acts for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” which criminalized sending “obscene” materials, contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, personal letters with sexual content, or any information related to their topics through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). In brief, to be LGBTQ in America posed life-threatening risk.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Men in Showers Series – Plastic Series, Jean Eudes Canival, Paris, 1975 © The Estate and Archive of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos*

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

Alex Majoli: Magnum Artists – Great Photographers Meet Great Artists,

Posted on October 27, 2020

Alex Majoli Wall in the studio of artist Ellsworth Kelly.(Photo by Alex Majoli and Daria Birang.) Spencertown, NY. USA. 2012. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos

At 15, Alex Majoli joined the F45 bottega in Ravenna, Italy, working as an apprentice under Daniele Casadio. “I grew up in the studio, which specialized in art reproduction,” Majoli recalls. “Many times my master asked me to go to the studios of the artists while they were working to complete the catalogues. I learned that the place where one should take a picture of an artist is in their studio.”

The wisdom that an artist might best be understood situated within the environs in which they create has served Majoli extraordinarily well over the years. Although not primarily a portrait photographer, Majoli’s sensitivity to the complex interplay between his subjects’ inner worlds and outer lives has made him a gifted portraitist of leading contemporary artists.

In the new book Magnum Artists: Great Photographers Meet Great Artists, the title’s author and editor Simon Bainbridge brings together portraits by Magnum members of more than 100 of the most innovative artists of the past century. From Edward Steichen, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp to William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, and Naim June Paik,Magnum Artists offers an intimate look at a diverse array of men and women who have transformed the course of Western art.

Read the Full Story at Magnum Photos

*Alex Majoli Shirin Neshat, an Iranian visual artist, she is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. In her house in NYC. NYC. USA. 2009. © Alex Majoli | Magnum Photos*

Categories: Art, Magnum Photos, Photography

Judah Passow: Divis Flats Belfast 1982

Posted on October 25, 2020

The Troubles reached a fever pitch in 1982, as the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) struck hard, killing more British security forces than ever before. The grievous harm to the innocent was made plain on Thursday, September 16, when the INLA exploded a bomb hidden inside a drain pipe along a balcony in Cullingtree Walk, Divis Tower, Belfast.

Though aimed against a British Army foot patrol, the blast had the unintended effect of killing two local children, Stephen Bennet, 14, and Kevin Valliday, 12, along with soldier Kevin Waller, 20. Three other civilians and one soldier were also injured in the explosion.

It just so happened that earlier that year, Israeli photojournalist Judah Passow spent a couple of weeks documenting Divis Flats for the Observer magazine to create a portrait of a people and a place. These photographs have been published in Divis Flats Belfast 1982 (Café Royal Books).

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Danny Lyon: The Destruction of Lower Manhattan

Posted on October 22, 2020

*Barmen on the walls, 1967. From The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (Aperture, 2020) © Danny Lyon, courtesy Aperture*

In 1966, Danny Lyon, then 23, returned to his native New York City an emerging star on the photography scene. He spent the first half of the decade documenting the Civil Rights Movement as the official photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; at the same time he was a member of the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club, making what would become The Bikeriders (1968), a landmark monograph that exemplified the emerging school of New Journalism.

Lyon moved to Lower Manhattan just as the neighborhood was about to be torn apart to make way for the construction of the World Trade Center, under the auspices of David Rockefeller, founder of the Downtown Manhattan Association and brother of then-governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefellers decided to launch of a program of “urban renewal,” which wholesale erased a neighborhood dating back over a century. Recognizing this historic moment, Lyon set to work, creating the portrait of a world that would soon disappear in the landmark 1969 book, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, just reissued by Aperture.

“I came to see the buildings as fossils of a time past,” Lyon wrote in the book’s introduction. “These buildings were used during the Civil War. The men were all dead, but the buildings were still here, left behind as the city grew around them. Skyscrapers emerged from the rock of Manhattan like mountains growing out from the earth. And here and there near their base, caught between them on their old narrow streets, were the houses of the dead, the new buildings of their own time awaiting demolition.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Beekman Street and the Brooklyn Bridge Southwest Project Demolition Site, 1967; from The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (Aperture, 2020) © Danny Lyon, courtesy Aperture*

Huey and Dominick, foremen. Both men have brought down many of the buildings on the Brooklyn Bridge site. Dominick directed the demolition of 100 Gold Street., 1967; from The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (Aperture, 2020) © Danny Lyon, courtesy Aperture

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

Picturing Resistance: Moments and Movements of Social Change from the 1960s to Today

Posted on October 22, 2020

*©Bob Adelman Estate. Mourner with sign at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial service, Memphis, Tennessee, 1968.*

Protest is the very foundation upon which the United States was built. In demanding the government answers to the people and not the other way around, it is vital to a functioning democracy and at the core of the First Amendment.

In 2020, protests feel particularly ubiquitous; spurred on by the Black Lives Matter Movement, which has since become one of the biggest global civil rights actions in the history of the world. The protest movement as we know it today began with the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till — his killers declared not guilty the very same day Breonna Taylor’s would some 65 years later.

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” activist Fannie Lou Hamer famously said in a 1971 speech. It is a principle at the heart of Picturing Resistance: Moments and Movements of Social Change from the 1960s to Today (Ten Speed Press), a new book by Melanie Light and Ken Light.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*©1976 Matt Herron. A white policeman rips an American flag away from a young Black child, having already confiscated his “No More Police Brutality” sign, Jackson, Mississippi, 1965.*

*©Michael Abramson. The Young Lords, New York City, 1970.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Books, Huck, Photography