Posts from the “Photography” Category

April Dawn Alison

Posted on August 8, 2019

“Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life,” the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez knowingly remarked, reminding us that what we see and what we believe is often just an illusion of sorts. Beneath it all, lays the true self, an identity we often keep hidden from the world — including ourselves.

But there are those who dare to delve into the person they are we no one else is there to witness it. These moments are a manifestation of something beyond the person others see: it is the self that exists within our deepest being. To record this, to document it, to create evidence of that which exists for no one else — this takes nerve. It is here our story of April Dawn Alison begins.

In 2017, a painter named Andrew Masulio donated an archive of over 8,000 Polaroids to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) — previously unseen self-portraits of April Dawn Alison, the female persona of Alan Schaefer (1941-2008), an Oakland-based photographer who lived in the world as a man. The archive reveals to us a fully-realized secret life beautifully revealed in the exquisite monograph, April Dawn Alison (MACK), selections from which are currently on view at SFMOMA through December 1, 2019.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Patrick Waterhouse: Restricted Images – Made with the Warlpiri of Central Australia

Posted on August 6, 2019

In 1899, British/Australian biologist and anthropologist Sir Baldwin Spencer and telegraph-station master Francis J. Gillen published The Native Tribes of Central Australia, an in-depth study of the customs and traditions of the Aboriginal groups living near Alice Springs. Initiated as members of the Arunta tribe, the authors were the first Europeans to witness the customs and social structures of a people that the state of Australia did not recognize.

The book featured 119 photographs, many of sacred rituals and ceremonies never seen by the Western world before. While the book caused a sensation in Europe, it failed to take into account the impact it had on those it documented — quite literally as such encounters with the disease-carrying Europeans often resulted in death:

“The very kindness of the white man who supplies him, in outlying parts, with stray bits of clothing is by no means conducive to the longevity of the native. If you give a black fellow, say a woollen shirt, he will perhaps wear it for a day or two, after that his wife will be adorned with it, and then, in return for perhaps a little food, it will be passed on to a friend. The natural result is that, no sooner do the natives come into contact with white men, than phthisis and other diseases soon make their appearance, and, after a comparatively short time, all that can be done is to gather the few remnants of the tribe into some mission station where the path to final extinction may be made as pleasant as possible.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Janette Beckman: Raw Punk Streets UK 1979-1982

Posted on August 5, 2019

Ladbroke Grove, London 1979 © Janette Beckman

In the mid-1970s, British photographer Janette Beckman tells VICE, she left her home in London to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. “I decided, ‘I’m leaving home. I’m going to be an artist and take drugs!’” she says with a laugh, sitting in the kitchen of her Manhattan loft.

She moved into a semi-squat in Streatham filled with art students and rented a floor for the impressive fee of £5 a week from an eccentric professor who taught at London University. “He was a spiritualist and was in touch with his dead wife,” Beckman reveals, before going on to recount summers spent at the professor’s nudist camp just outside the city, where they grew weed in the backyard.

Beckman completed her studies at the London College of Printing, then got a job teaching photography to teens at the Kingsway Princeton School for Further Education in 1976 just as punk exploded on the scene. Entranced by the raw energy taking aim at the establishment, Beckman found the perfect subject to launch her four-decade photography career.

With the publication of Raw Punk Streets UK 1979-1982 (Café Royal Press), Beckman delves deep into her archives, unearthing never-before-seen images of the UK punk scene in its formative years. We catch up with Beckman to discuss the D.I.Y. ethos that became the basis for punk—and her life’s work, which includes photographs of everyone from the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and X to Debbie Harry, Dee Dee Ramone, and Siouxsie Sioux.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Punk Girl, London 1979 © Janette Beckman

The Islington Twins, London 1979 ©Janette Beckman

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Music, Photography, Vice

Shunk-Kender: Art Through the Eye of the Camera 1957–1983

Posted on July 30, 2019

Harry Alexander Shunk (1924-2006) and János Kender (1938-2009), Self-Portrait, Italy, 1956.

Between 1958 and 1973, German Harry Alexander Shunk (1924-2006) and his Hungarian partner János Kender (1938-2009) collaborated with nearly 300 European and American artists to document some of the most iconic moments in modern art.

Together, they produced some 190,000 images in collaboration with artists including Man Ray, Roy Lichtenstein, Lou Reed, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, William Klein, and Yayoi Kusama — many of which have become an integral part of the history of art, and works worthy of veneration themselves.

“In the history of photography, ‘documents for artists’ exist in the shade, with a few rare exceptions,” writes Florian Ebner in an essay that appears in the new book, Shunk-Kender: Art Through the Eye of the Camera 1957–1983 (Éditions Xavier Barral), which accompanies the first exhibition of their work, now on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through August 5, 2019.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

John Baldessari, Pier 18, New York, 1971 © Shunk-Kender

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now Part II

Posted on July 25, 2019

Grace Jones, 1984. Photography by Robert Mapplethorpe, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 1998 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

In the three decades after Robert Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989, artists and critics have grappled with the artist’s complex legacy, questioning the objectification of his sitters. In the second instalment of Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now, curators Lauren Hinkson, Susan Thompson, and Levi Prombaum explore the dialectic between subversion, transgression, and exploitation that has made Mapplethorpe a lightning rod for controversy – then and now.

Lauded and vilified for his depictions of homoerotic desire, the black male nude and the female figure, Mapplethorpe brought underrepresented communities to the forefront of the art world during the height of the Aids crisis, which eventually claimed his life. His formally rigorous approach to image-making helped elevate photography to the pantheon of fine art, while his choice of subject matter fuels the culture wars that raged in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Where the first part of Implicit Tensions focused on Mapplethorpe alone, the new installment examines the artist’s legacy in a dialogue with six artists who use portraiture to examine our ideas about identity, visibility, and representation. The curators selected works by African, African-American, and white American LGBTQ artists including Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya that offer expansive approaches to the agency of the subjects in their work.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Siphe, Johannesburg (from Somnyama Ngonyama), 2018. Photography by Zanele Muholi, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Wendy Fisher, 2019 © Zanele Muholi, courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York

Self Portrait, 1980. Photography by Robert Mapplethorpe, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 96.4355 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

Categories: 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Photography

Werner Bischof: USA

Posted on July 23, 2019

Advertising signage, southern states, USA 1954. © Werner Bischof / Magnum Photos / David Hill Gallery

The Golden Gate Bridge from above, San Francisco, USA 1953. © Werner Bischof / Magnum Photos / David Hill Gallery

Magnum photographer Werner Bischof (1916-1954) arrived in the United States a year before his death and spent 1953 traveling across the continent. His series USA, currently on view at David Hill Gallery in London through July 26, 2019, is a vivid portrait of the nation as it rose to become a global superpower.

While most of his contemporaries were firmly entrenched in the tradition of black and white, Bischof broke free, using color to capture both the mood of a place and the quality of life, creating lyrical poems of extraordinary nuance and depth. The exhibition features a selection of 25 photographs that reveal his experiments in color and motion to capture the sensations of being in a rapidly modernizing country possessed with entirely too much faith in itself.

Writing in his diary in 1953, Bischof’s recorded his immediate impression of New York City as a “mechanized” and “numb” existence. “Now I realize what Chaplin’s Modern Times was really about,” the Swiss photographer revealed, recognizing the inherent dehumanization of the capitalist enterprise.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

The Golden Gate Bridge from above, San Francisco, USA 1953. © Werner Bischof / Magnum Photos / David Hill Gallery

Categories: Art, Feature Shoot, Photography

Christine Osinski: Summer Days Staten Island

Posted on July 15, 2019

Two Girls with Matching Outfits © Christine Osinski

In 1982, photographer Christine Osinski and her husband experienced the first wave of gentrification that would come to destroy New York. A real estate developer bought the downtown Manhattan building that they called home and priced them out, forcing them to move to Staten Island – a place which has long been considered the city’s “forgotten borough.”

“When you take the ferry, it’s like you are leaving the city behind,” Osinski says. “Staten Island was a place you weren’t noticed and people left you alone. There was a sense of being surrounded by water and being far away from things.”

To acclimate to her new environment, Osinski set out to take photographs of locals on the streets during the summers of 1983 and ’84. The photographs, now on view in Summer Days Staten Island, capture a chapter in New York history that has all but disappeared.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Young Man Pulling a Go-Kart © Christine Osinski

Two Girls with Big Wheels © Christine Osinski

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

Guzman: Scenes from a Pivotal Era in Louis Vuitton History

Posted on July 10, 2019

Photo: Guzman. Louis Vuitton Centennial Collection. Helmut Lang Record Album Case. Grandmaster Flash styled by Basia Zamorska. Hair Danilo Dixo. Make Up Mathu Andersen. Art Direction Maurice Betite at Euro RSCG Paris. Art Buyer Catherine Mahe. French Photo Agent Veronique Peres Domergue.

When Tom Ford joined Gucci in 1990, a new era was born: one that brought luxury goods to the forefront of popular culture. As the return of the double Gs took the globe by storm, in 1997, LVMH’s Bernard Arnault appointed Marc Jacobs as Creative Director of Louis Vuitton to design the company’s first ready-to-wear clothing line.

To prime the public for this pivotal moment in the esteemed fashion house’s 143-year history, Vuitton’s French advertising agency, Euro RSCG Paris, hired Guzman, the American husband-and-wife photography team of Russell Peacock and Constance Hansen, to shoot the 1996 campaign for the Louis Vuitton Centennial Collection—a celebration of the iconic Monogram Canvas print featuring original clothing designs by Vivienne Westwood, Manolo Blahnik, Azzedine Alaïa, Helmut Lang, Romeo Gigli, Isaac Mizrahi, and Sybilla.

“Vuitton’s past campaigns were focused on travel. This was a big departure for them,” Peacock says. “They were conservative and traditional. Wealthy people would buy Vuitton but it wasn’t a fashion statement. They wanted to be hip.”

By the mid-90s, Guzman had achieved recognition creating unconventional advertising campaigns for companies like KOOKAÏ and Tag Heuer as well as shooting album covers artists like Janet Jackson, Jody Watley, and Total. But, as Hansen explains, “We were outside the fashion box. We weren’t reverential. We didn’t understand the respect of the couture. We were working in hip hop culture, and went with what we knew.”

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Guzman. Louis Vuitton Damier Collection. Styled by Basia Zamorska. Hair Danilo Dixo. Make Up Mathu Andersen. Manicures by Bernadette Thompson. Art Direction Maurice Betite at Euro RSCG Paris. Art Buyer Catherine Mahe. French Photo Agent Veronique Peres Domergue.

Categories: 1990s, Art, Document Journal, Fashion, Photography

Victor Cobo: Remember When You Loved Me?

Posted on July 8, 2019

Over the past two decades, Victor Cobo has used photography to explore the dark corners of the human psyche. His work uses a compelling mix of documentary and staged scenes, addressing the primal mysteries of life and death, damnation and salvation, trauma and sex.

“I’m an emotional person that has had my bout with addiction, depression and anxiety,” Cobo says. “My biological father is mentally ill, was addicted to heroin and an acute alcoholic. I think the aspect of isolation and drama comes out in my work. I utilise to my advantage his psychosis that I most likely inherited. I try to turn these aspects of darkness into beautiful and sometimes even playful images.”

In the new exhibition Remember When You Loved Me?, Cobo uses photography to spellbinding effect. Drawing inspiration from surrealism, film noir, and German expressionism, the photographer has transformed the camera into a therapeutic medium.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Huck, Photography

Lee Stuart: Street Dreams – How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion

Posted on July 7, 2019

Jamel Shabazz. Young Boys, East Flatbush, Brooklyn, NYC 1981

“Rap is something you do! Hip hop is something you live!” KRS-One memorably said. Born in the Bronx in 1973, hip hop is not just music, dance, and art; it is a way of being in the world.

“I am a child of hip hop,” says Lee Stuart, Brand Director of Patta, a Dutch streetwear brand, who has curated the new exhibition Street Dreams: How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion. Organised chronologically, the exhibition presents the visual legacy of hip hop through a series of 30 songs and illustrates them with the art, fashion, and photography that defined the era.

“We’re not trying to be historians,” Stuart says. “We are trying to immerse people in these images, show them and make them part of this energy.”

To select the songs, Stuart did what all heads love: he gathered his team and debated the merits of each track. He then chose corresponding work by artists including Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley, Jamel Shabazz, Janette Beckman, Dana Lixenberg, Hank Willis Thomas, Kambui Olujimi, and Earlie Hudnall.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Earlie Hudnall, Gucci Brothers, 3rd Ward, Houston, TX, 1990 Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, Texas

Jamel Shabazz. Rude Boy, Brooklyn, NYC 1981.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Music, Photography

Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich

Posted on July 1, 2019

Peggy Moffitt modeling the topless swimsuit designed by Rudi Gernreich, 1964. Photograph © William Claxton, LLC, courtesy of Demont Photo Management & Fahey/Klein Gallery Los Angeles, with permission of the Rudi Gernreich trademark.

On June 16, 1964, Rudi Gernreich’s infamous monokini went on sale in New York’s most prestigious department stores. Buyers at B. Altman & Co., Lord & Taylor, Henri Bendel, Abraham & Strauss, Splendiferous and Parisette placed orders after William Claxton’s photograph of Peggy Moffit rocked the pop culture landscape.

Moffit was Gernreich’s muse and Claxton’s wife, and together this ménage a trios was pure fire. The idea for the monokini first came to Gernreich in December 1962 and first appeared in futuristic fashion feature in a late 1963 issue of Look magazine — after LIFE refused to publish them. In The Rudy Gernreich Book, Moffit recalls the editor at LIFE shamelessly told Claxton, “This is a family magazine, and naked breasts are allowed only if the woman is an aborigine.”

LIFE’s racist policy about women’s bodies cost them one of the biggest news stories of the year. They “goofed” Moffitt politely says. The magazine ordered a reshoot, demanding Moffitt cover her breasts with her arms. Moffitt described their art direction as “dirty.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Peggy Moffitt modeling dress designed by Rudi Gernreich, Fall 1971 collection. Photograph © William Claxton, LLC, courtesy of Demont Photo Management & Fahey/Klein Gallery Los Angeles, with permission of the Rudi Gernreich trademark.

Categories: 1960s, Fashion, Feature Shoot, Photography