Posts from the “Photography” Category

Rick McCloskey: Van Nuys Blvd. 1972

Posted on August 26, 2019

After World War II came to a close, a new phenomenon crept across the United States. As many adolescents no longer had to drop out of school and get a job to support their family, the era of the teenager began. Born of a potent combination of combination of leisure time, disposable cash, angst, boredom and rebellion, teens soon discovered true freedom came from owning or borrowing a set of wheels.

The car — perhaps the most potent symbol of American self-determination at the expense of the environment — became the vehicle to freedom of a sort: the ability to go cruising at night. From the late 1940s through well into the 1990s, cruising down the main streets, avenues, boulevards, and specially designated strips became the coolest thing a teen could do.

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California during the 1950s and ‘60s, American photographer Rick McCloskey spent his youth cruising Van Nuys Boulevard every Wednesday night. His family home, just one city block from “The Boulevard” was located a few blocks from the famed Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant, home of the All-American meal: burgers and milkshakes.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1970s, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Michele Saunders Old School Rules for Nightclubbing

Posted on August 22, 2019

“My life lead me to the Garage,” Michele Saunders tells Document Journal. Growing up in France, her father would play jazz records, nurturing a lifelong passion for music that took shape when she moved to America to attend Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. On Wednesday nights, she’d road trip down to New York to catch the world famous Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

In 1979, she met her soon-to-be husband Andre Saunders, who was producing Billy Nichols’s disco classic, “Give Your Body Up to the Music,” mixed by Larry Levan, resident DJ at the Paradise Garage. Andre invited her to see Nichols perform—an experience that would change her life.

“The very first time I went, I was backstage, dressed in a Norma Kamali outfit with high heels and a fur coat,” Saunders recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh my God! I am going to be back next week by myself, no husband, no high heels, no fur coat. This is where my new home is going to be.’”

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Categories: 1980s, Document Journal, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park

Posted on August 22, 2019

Under the cover of darkness, Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki crept through Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama Parks during the 1970s, in search of an illicit world known to a select few. Moving like a hunter on the prowl, Yoshiyuki used infrared film and flash to capture public displays of sex between heterosexual and homosexual couples—and, perhaps more shockingly, the voyeurs who gathered to watch.

“One day I stumbled on the scene—and [an] incredible scene [Laughs]. That was when I was still an amateur,” Yoshiyuki tells Nobouyoshi Araki in a conversation titled “Tiptoeing into the Darkness…With Love,” featured in the new book Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park.

“I was shocked. They were actually fucking,” Yoshiyuki says. “When I saw them I knew this was something I had to photograph.”

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Document Journal, Japan, Photography

Mike Osborne: Federal Triangle

Posted on August 22, 2019

Many Americans profess surprise at the inhumane social practices coming from the present White House. Perhaps they are comforted that they once had the luxury to have never been concerned about the forces of the military and prison industrial complexes weighted against foreign lands and U.S. citizens alike.

Perhaps the carnage of AIDS never touched their families. Perhaps they were never the victim of land grabs, medical experimentation, or any number of the genocidal acts waged by this nation that are documented in the annals of history and the on-going subject of current events.

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them,” poet Charles Bukowski opined, summing up the new wave of “Not my country!” that greets those who have chosen denial over truth up until it finally affected them.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Vivian Maier: The Color Photographs

Posted on August 22, 2019

Chicago, April 1977 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

Self-Portrait, Chicagoland, October 1975 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

When legendary American photographer Vivian Maier died in 2009 at the age of 83, she left behind some 40,000 Ektachrome colour slides that had gone unseen and unpublished. Thankfully, a new exhibition and monograph – titled Vivian Maier: Colour Photographs – showcase the stunning works made by the artist, who worked in total seclusion throughout her life.

For more than 40 years, Maier work as a nanny on Chicago’s wealthy North Side. Her job gave her the ability to hit the streets with her camera and take portraits of modern life during the second half of the 20th century.

“Look closely art the many self-portraits Vivian Maier made, and you will see her disguises, her cloak of invisibility,” photographer Joel Meyerowitz writes in the book’s foreword. “She’s as plain as an old-fashioned school marm. She’s the wallflower, the spinster aunt, the ungainly tourist in the big city… except… she isn’t!”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Untitled, c. 1977 © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York © Vivian Maier

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Greg Ellis: Sex Crimes

Posted on August 21, 2019

Beau Rouge, Los Angeles, 1954, Gelatin silver print from original large-format negative© The Estate of Bob Mizer (1922-1992). Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

It wasn’t until 2003 that the US Supreme Court finally gave LGBTQ people basic civil rights protection under the Constitution, ruling that sex between consenting adults of the same gender in private was not a crime. Under the current administration, though, these rights are slowly being chipped away in an effort to take the nation back to a time when citizens could be targeted for what have been interchangeably known as Crimes Against Nature, Unnatural Acts, and Sex Crimes.

For generations, these draconian laws lead to incarceration, institutionalisation, familial rejection, public shaming, loss of employment, denial of healthcare, and even death for members of the LGBTQ community. “This is our history,” says Greg Ellis of Ward 5B, who has co-curated Sex Crimes, a new group exhibition with Brian Clamp. “Times have changed, there have been gains made, and I think it’s good to put this context out there to say, ‘hey, not too long ago this is where we were, and we don’t want to head back there.’”

Rooted in the decades before Stonewall, Sex Crimes features work by artists including George Platt Lynes, John S. Barrington, Bruce of Los Angeles, James Bidgood, Mel Roberts, Jim French, and Jack Smith, all of whom created homosexual art and literature under the threat of arrest.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Untitled (Cowboy) / P00103, c. 1967-9, Vintage Polaroid print (Unique)© The Estate of Jim French (1932-2017). Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

Categories: 1960s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Michele Saunders & Tina Paul: The Last Nights at Paradise Garage

Posted on August 19, 2019

From 1977 to 1987, Paradise Garage reigned supreme over New York’s downtown nightclub scene. Located at 84 King Street, the Garage was home base for resident DJ Larry Levan (1954-1992), whose signature style of dance music became the definitive sound of New York—popularized by West End Records founder Mel Cheren (1933-2007), who financially backed the club.

Over a customized sound system designed by Richard Long, Levan would weave spellbinding tapestries of house, disco, rock, and pop tracks that kept revelers coming back for more. The Garage regularly hosted live performances by the hottest artists of the era, featuring everyone from Grace Jones to Whitney Houston, Sylvester to Divine, Klaus Nomi to New Order, Gwen Guthrie to The Clash.

Modeled on David Mancuso’s legendary invitation-only parties at The Loft, where no liquor was served, the Garage was a members-only club that curated its attendees as carefully as Levan selected his records. The three decades after the club closed, it remains an icon of New York’s nightlife hey-day, living on as the annual Paradise Garage Reunion, to be held this August 30 and 31 at Elsewhere in Brooklyn. In advance of the festivities, Garage members Michele Saunders and Tina Paul look back at the last weekend at the legendary club.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Categories: 1980s, Document Journal, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Elspeth H. Brown: Work! A Queer History of Modeling

Posted on August 19, 2019

Ruth Ford, c. 1930s. Portrait by George Platt Lynes

Lily Yuen with fellow performers, in Lily Yuen Collection, Schomburg, Folder 6: scrapbook 1926-1930. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Fashion models, first described as “mannequins” arrived in New York via London in 1909. Their purpose, as their name denotes, was to sell merchandise to a burgeoning consumer class — while simultaneously advertising archetypes that simulated insatiable desire.

This desire was cultivated within something the product could never supply — a psychological state of want and aspiration designed to heighten insecurity and anxiety through the creation of a state of constant craving. Tapping into the psychological underpinnings that can only exist when survival is no longer the mainstay of one’s being, merchandisers understood the link between consumption and identity necessary to maintain the capitalist enterprise.

Glamour, romance, sex, and pleasure became the foundation upon which the mannequin was based — making the very spectacle of the human body and visage an object available for purchase. In the creation of the model, the individual was reduced to a thing that could be commodified and exploited for the express purpose of profits.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

George Platt Lynes with Paul Cadmus, on the set, c. 1941 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Categories: Books, Fashion, Feature Shoot, Photography

The Second Latin American Foto Festival

Posted on August 16, 2019

Fred Ramos. A Honduran child plays near train tracks in Arriaga, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, October 2018.

Johis Alarcón. Nicole Carcelén, 19, plays with a cotton plant in her hair. The black slaves who first came to Ecuador were forced to work in cotton fields, cane fields and coal mines. For Nicole, cotton plants represent the strength of her ancestors and the strength of their blood. La Loma, 2018

With the second edition of the Bronx Documentary Center’s Latin American Foto Festival, curators Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera provide a space for photographers living and working in Latin America to tell their stories on their terms. The Festival, held in nine venues throughout the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx, gave some 50,000 residents — many of whom are Latinx immigrants — the opportunity to engage with stories from their homelands through exhibitions, workshops, tours, and panel discussions.

The history of colonized lands is rarely told by those who have suffered the fate of centuries of imperialism that have systemically decimated the people and the lands of every continent outside Europe. Over the past 200 years, the people of Latin America have fought for independence and sovereignty, and against puppet regimes installed by the United States that first began in 1823 under the Monroe Doctrine.

As ICE raids systemically target Black and Latinx communities, the Foto Festival provides a pertinent moment to pause and reflect on the impact of white supremacy in its many forms, and the ways in which those it aims to exploit, oppress, and erase fight back in a struggle for life or death.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Chris Gregory. Ruta del Progreso

Yael Martinez. Family heart .photos on the wall of Perla Granda’s (my sister-in-law) bedroom of her missing brothers. She is 14 years old, she is in high school. She lives with her mother and Her sister Sandra at Taxco Guerrero Mexico On September 10,2013.

Categories: Art, Bronx, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Latin America, Photography

Wynn Miller: A Portrait of East LA in the 1970s

Posted on August 16, 2019

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Wynn Miller first visited the city’s Eastside in the 1970s, after an invitation from his brother-in-law to meet members of the Arizona Maravilla gang. “It was a foreign world to me; I was a surfer,” Miller remembers. “I didn’t know anything about the gangs.”

“I took a few pictures and when I got home I made a few prints in my own darkroom. I thought they were really cool so I decided to take a chance. I took pictures of their kids and that was my way into the gang life.”

Over the next year, Miller would spend his weekends in the area, creating a series of black and white environmental portraits. Recently on view in the exhibition On the Edge of Society, his photographs are an intimate look at the brotherhood in a disenfranchised community living on the margins of society.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1970s, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop

Posted on August 8, 2019

Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (male couple), n.d. (1975-1986)

In the brief window between the Stonewall Rebellion and the advent of AIDS, New York City became a wonderland for the sexually adventurous. As the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, the spirit of anarchy arose among the dilapidated ruins of the bustling metropolis. Raised on free love, a new gay underground emerged in the bars and clubs, as well as on Manhattan’s West Side Piers where encounters with rough trade in derelict warehouses flourished in broad daylight.

From 1975 to 1986, African-American artist and Bronx native Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) dedicated his life to documenting this little-known chapter of gay history, amassing a singular archive of work that preserves the era perfectly. At a time when the nearby Meatpacking District still ran red with fresh blood, Baltrop captured the grit, grime, and humanity that thrived in an enclave of illicit pleasures of the flesh.

Largely excluded from the art world during his life, Baltrop is finally receiving his due with a major exhibition, The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop, opening August 7 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The museum is home to the Baltrop Archive, a trove of personal documents, photographs, and ephemera that provides a first-hand account of the challenges he faced throughout his life.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (male portrait), n.d. (1975-1986)

Bottom: Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (sunbathing platform with Tava mural), n.d. (1975-1986)

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Document Journal, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography