Posts from the “Photography” Category

Mitch Epstein: In India

Posted on October 10, 2021

*Mitch Epstein. Ahmedabad, Gujarat, 1981.*

Coming of age in mid-century America, photographer Mitch Epstein was drawn to the mysticism and majesty of Indian culture. At Woodstock, he saw Ravi Shankar play sitar. In the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, he was transported half way around the globe. After seeing film clips of the Beatles visiting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Epstein paid $35.00 to be initiated into Transcendental Meditation in Schenectady, New York.

But it wasn’t until he met filmmaker Mira Nair, his girlfriend and later wife, that Epstein made the journey for himself. Between 1978 and 1989, Epstein took eight extended trips to India. “I was thrust into an unfamiliar world and in a healthy way, it was disorienting. I had to learn a new cultural language and build on it along the way,” Epstein says.

“That was humbling because I grew up in an era of great privilege and opportunity and took it for granted to a certain extent. Putting myself into a world that wasn’t my own, compelled me to let go of some of my perspectives as an American.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Mitch Epstein. Arabian Sea, Bombay, Maharashtra, 1983.*

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

Dario Calmese Takes On Racial Bias in Photography

Posted on October 1, 2021

*Medium Skin Tone Edited Using Adobe Premium Presets. Before and After Images. Courtesy of Dario Calmese*

Occupying the space of both art and artifact, photography has become one of the most influential forms of expression in world history. Fluent in every language, speaking more than a thousand words in every frame, the photograph’s ability to transcend time and space makes it an extremely supple too. But like all technological inventions, the perspectives and prejudices of its makers play an important part in shaping its abilities and development. Invariably, racial bias has long played a role.

With the creation and mass market distribution of color film in the mid-1950s, lab technicians established a system for calibrating skin tones that would enhance and flatter the features of their target market: white women. Until 1954, Eastman Kodak maintained a monopoly until the federal government asserted their power to break it up — but by then the damage had been done. Kodak produced the Shirley card, a prototype that would be remade for decades to come that featured a pale brunette as the gold standard for calibrating the light and shadow on skin tones during the printing process.

If you didn’t match these aesthetics, color film was unlikely to flatter you, especially if you possessed deeper, darker skin tones. writer Syreeta McFadden remembers seeing the evidence of photography’s color bias. “I was 12 years old and paging through a photo album…. In some pictures, I am a mud brown, in others I’m a blue black,” she wrote in a story for BuzzFeed News. “Some of the pictures were taken within moments of one another. ’You look like charcoal,’ someone said, and giggled. I felt insulted, but I didn’t have the words for that yet.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: Art, Dazed, Photography

The Personal Journey of Documenting Breast Cancer

Posted on October 1, 2021

*“When you are losing your sense of self, sometimes you feel like your mind is going with it; Or sometimes you justlike to shake up the neighborhood.” © Iri Greco / BrakeThroughMedia*

Over the past 50 years, breast cancer has been on the rise in industrialized nations due to a complex mixture of factors including genetics, modernization, and improved screening procedures. In 2020, female breast cancer became the most commonly diagnosed form of the disease, with an estimated 2.3 million new cases worldwide. One in eight women in the United States is expected to be diagnosed within their lifetime.

Despite its current prevalence, breast cancer has a long history. Because of its visibility, it was the most frequently described form of cancer in ancient texts. Mastectomies have been recorded as early as 548 AD, its earliest notation as recommended treatment for Eastern Roman Empress Theodora. Despite its long existence, breast cancer remained largely uncommon until the Industrial Revolution, when advancements in science and technology brought about seismic shifts — but remained a matter discussed behind closed doors until First Lady Betty Ford spoke openly about her diagnosis in 1974.

Since then, breast cancer has come to the fore, and with it a host of conversations that center, question, and expand the way we think about the disease. Artists have historically been at the forefront of the discussions, pushing the boundaries of representation and visibility with the understanding that “Seeing is believing but feeling is the truth,” a sentiment first espoused by seventeenth English clergyman Thomas Fuller that underscores the ways in which empathy can transform our worldview.

Read the Full Story at The Luupe

“My plait, which I cut off when I started to lose hair. I had long hair for all of my life before. I felt there were big changes in my life, but I didn’t fully realize them.” © Alyona Kotchetkova

Categories: Art, Photography, The Luupe, Women

Ruth Orkin: The Centennial

Posted on October 1, 2021

*People lying on Tanglewood Lawn, Lenox, Massachusetts, 1948 © Ruth Orkin*

At the age of 17, Ruth Orkin (1921–1985) decided to ride a bicycle from Los Angeles to New York in order to attend the 1939 World’s Fair. She made the trip in a matter of three weeks, photographing her journey along the way — a singular feat that spoke to Orkin’s ability to realize her greatest ambitions.

“Ruth had a big personality. She was very charismatic,” says her daughter Mary Engel, Director of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive, who is honoring the centennial of her mother’s birth with the new book Ruth Orkin: A Photo Spirit and exhibition “Ruth Orkin: Expressions of Life”. Working across genres, Orkin created a singular archive of mid-twentieth century life, capturing a feeling of optimism that defined the modern. Orkin’s empathic eye found its home whether photographing celebrities or strangers she encountered on the street.

Although Orkin was an unconventional mother, telling her children Mary and Andy to call her “Ruth” so she could hear them in a crowd, she never put work above her family. Although she always carried a camera around her neck, Orkin brilliantly integrated her practice into every aspect of her life to avoid any sense of intruding upon those she loved.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Geraldine Dent, Cover of McCall’s, New York City, 1949 © Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021*

*Famous Malted Milk, New York City, 1950 © Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Gillian Laub: Family Matters

Posted on September 29, 2021

*Gillian Laub, Grandpa helping Grandma out, 1999, from Family Matters (Aperture, 2021). © Gillian Laub*

On a brisk winter afternoon in 1999, Jewish-American photographer Gillian Laub stepped onto the streets of New York’s Upper East Side to enjoy a cigarette in between classes at the International Center of Photography. As she stood there, a Norwegian classmate spotted a gaggle of older women adorned in lavish furs and brightly colored lipstick walking down the block. He found them vulgar and called them as much. Gillian nodded along — until recognition struck.

“Gillian, oh my gawd, what are you doing up here?” her grandmother Bea screamed, the thick Bronx Yiddish accent filling the air like the full-bodied parfum of a potato knish served up piping hot from a sidewalk cart. Bea, accompanied by Gillian’s mother and her Aunt Phyllis, enveloped her with an effusive display of hugs and kisses, before rejoining a larger group of ladies making their weekly Upper East Side art crawl.

Gillian felt embarrassed, then defensive, wanting the Scandinavian student to understand and perhaps empathize with her family’s rags to riches story; their exuberant show of wealth — like their extravagant displays of affection — was evidence of their fierce determination to overcome prejudice and discrimination. Gillian fought back the urge to explain how a series of anti-Semitic pogroms during the Russian Revolution of 1905 split both sides of her family apart. Her great-grandparents fled Ukraine and headed to distant shores, arriving in the US in the early 20th century to make a better life for themselves.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Gillian Laub, Chappaqua backyard, 2000, from Family Matters (Aperture, 2021). © Gillian Laub*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, i-D, Photography

DASHCAM – Dash Snow: Photographs of Life

Posted on September 24, 2021

*Dash Snow. Untitled (Jade and Secret Nest), 2007.*

A mythic figure in every sense of the word, Dash Snow evoked the romantic archetype of the rebel who sacrificed everything, including, ultimately, his own life. A member of the 27 Club, Dash died from a drug overdose in 2009, just as his star was on the rise.

Born Dashiell Snow on the 27th of July 1981, Dash was the great-grandson of French aristocrats and art collectors Dominique and John de Menil, founders of the Menil Collection museum and the Rothko Chapel, a chapel and work of modern art home to 14 paintings by Mark Rothko, both in Houston. An anti-authoritarian to the core, Dash rebelled against his parents and was sent away to a boarding school for troubled youth. After getting out, he fled to New York during the 1990s and 00s — the last gasp of the city’s once-legendary libertine age — and quickly fell in with the city’s demi-monde.

As a member of the legendary graffiti crew IRAK, Dash was an integral figure on the downtown scene. His exploits became the stuff of legend alongside a wild cast of characters. The quintessential renegade, Dash embodied the ethos of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll as he charted his way from the upper echelons of society to the streets, refusing to play by the rules. But the very world he disdained loved him for his insouciance, catapulting him to art star for his antics — like sperm and glitter-encrusted collages of Saddam Hussein or the “hamster nests” whereby rooms would be entirely destroyed, made ritualistically with friend Dan Colen in hotels and later galleries.

In what would have been his 40th year, Morán Morán and the Dash Snow Estate have organized DASHCAM – Dash Snow: Photographs of Life, the artist’s first posthumous gallery exhibition in the United States. Guest curated by Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator of White Columns, New York, the exhibition focuses on Dash’s lesser-known black-and-white 35mm photography.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Dash Snow. Untitled (Self-portrait in Bedroom), 2008.*

*Dash Snow. Untitled (Gang Gang Dance), 2006.*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, i-D, Manhattan, Photography

Janette Beckman: Leaders of the New School

Posted on September 20, 2021

*Leaders of the New School, 1991 © Janette Beckman*

British photographer Janette Beckman arrived in New York City in December 1982 to spend the Christmas holiday with some friends. But after a couple of weeks in town, she was hooked — and never left. Beckman remembers staying in a loft of Franklin Street in Tribeca just opposite the Mudd Club when the neighborhood was still an artist’s outpost.

“I didn’t mind the sketchy industrial neighborhood. I had been living in an unheated squat in rainy London and there was heat!” Beckman revels in the memory of the steam heaters designed after the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that made rooms so hot, people were forced to throw open their windows in the dead of winter. “There were artists living in the building and I was in the thick of it. We’d go out to clubs and then meet up afterwards at Dave’s Corner Luncheonette, which was open 24 hours on the corner of Broadway and Canal Street. It was a very exciting time.”

Armed with her portfolio of photographs documenting London’s famed punk scene, Beckman went around to the record labels to see art directors in the hopes of shooting for them. But her photographs of the punk icons including Sex Pistols, Clash, and Siouxsie Sioux were too gritty for the high glossy aesthetics of 1980’s American pop. “They just looked at me and said, ‘We can’t really use you because the people in these pictures, their hair isn’t combed,’” Beckman remembers. “I was disappointed because I came from the music scene in England and thought I was going to get work.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

Bruce Davidson: In Color

Posted on September 14, 2021

*Central Park, 1991 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

As a teen coming of age, Bruce Davidson can remember his sense of color taking root in 1949. While working at a local camera store during his senior year of high school, Davidson was introduced to Al Cox Jr., a commercial photographer working in the town of Oak Park, Illinois. Cox invited Davidson to assist him with various tasks, including the painstaking process of making color prints in the darkroom. “It left an indelible impression on me at the age of seventeen,” Davidson wrote in Bruce Davidson: In Color, just re-released for the first time in five years.

After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Davidson enrolled in the Design Department at Yale University in the 1950s where he met artist and educator Josef Albers, one of the foremost color theorists of the twentieth century. “His demonstrations had an impact on me at the time but I was not yet committed to color as a way of life,” Davidson wrote.

After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army, Davidson returned to New York in 1957 to resume his photography practice. Drawn to the Old World atmosphere of the Lower East Side, Davidson discovered among the pushcart vendors, tailors, and merchants a feeling of connection and community among people like his grandfather, a Polish émigré who arrived in the United States at the age of 14. Here he began making color photographs of the city as it was then — a world of immigrants who brought their culture to the streets of New York.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Chicago, 1989 © Bruce Davidson, courtesy of Steidl*

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

Joe Conzo: Remembering 9/11

Posted on September 10, 2021

Photographer Joe Conzo remembers getting an early start on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to vote in the mayoral primary, which saw billionaire media mogulMike Bloomberg throw his hat in the ring for the very first time. As the grandson of Dr. Evelina López Antonetty (1922-1984), the legendary Puerto Rican activist affectionately known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx,” Conzo was raised to fight for the rights of the community throughout his life.

Growing up amid the rubble of “benign neglect,” wherein the Nixon White House implemented a policy to deny government services to Black and Brown communities nationwide throughout the 1970s, Joe Conzo learned the only way to create change was to do it yourself. Whether accompanying his grandmother and mother Lorraine Montenegro to protests or photographing the early years of Hip Hop as it came up on the streets of the Bronx, Conzo understood “all power to all the people” was not simply a slogan — it was the truth.

While serving in the Army, Conzo trained as a combat medic and decided to continue in that line of work after being discharged. In 1992, he became a member of the Emergency Medical Services (EMS), which merged with the New York Fire Department (FDNY) in 1996. By 2001, Conzo was working as a union delegate, a position that would come to serve him and his colleagues in ways he could never have imagined.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Blind, Manhattan, Photography

Joe Conzo: The Elements

Posted on September 8, 2021

*Sal & Mickey Abbatiello, The Fever: 365 Nights of Hip Hop*

“Never in my wildest dreams as a kid from the South Bronx did I think that photography would bring me around the world,” says photographer, author, and activist Joe Conzo.

Coming of age in 1970s New York, Conzo’s worldview was shaped by his grandmother, Dr. Evelina Antonetty, who was fondly known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx” for the work she did on behalf of the Puerto Rican community; his mother, community Lorraine Montenegro; and his father, Joe Conzo Sr., legendary bandleader Tito Puente’s personal manager and confidante.

Conzo witnessed the city’s infrastructure collapse under the weight of “benign neglect”, which denied basic government services to Black and brown communities across the United States, while landlord-sponsored arson reduced city blocks to rubble. He quickly learned the best way to create change was through collective action.

Read the Full Story a Huck

*Biggie Rolling Dice by Manuel Acevedo, 1994*

*Japanese Print by Manuel Acevedo, 1986*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Huck, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Jill Freedman: Street Cops 1978-1981

Posted on September 8, 2021

*NYPD Police officers stop and search a car in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, 1979. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)*

By 1975, New York City was $11 billion dollars in debt. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the city could no longer afford to maintain basic municipal services. Enraged about proposed budget cuts, unions representing the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the New York Fire Department (FDNY) created a pamphlet titled “Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” which they passed out at local airports and hotels. On the cover, a black hooded skull smiled menacingly; inside were a list of nine “safety” tips for tourists such as “Stay off the streets after 6 P.M.” and “Remain in Manhattan.”

Unsuspecting recipients had no idea they were caught in a propaganda war waged against Mayor Abe Beame, who took the battle to court and secured a temporary restraining order to protect the “economic well-being of the city”. But the image of New York had already taken a nosedive as Hollywood and the media capitalized on the gritty glamour of a city struggling to survive.

Taking a page from the new wave of neo-realist Hollywood films, including The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the Fear City pamphlet cast New York as a den of sin, doomed but for the heroism of the boys in blue. Copaganda, as it is popularly known, is a long-standing American trope, one which found increasing popularity with the arrival of television in the 1950s with shows like Dragnet, Naked City and Peter Gunn.

By the 1970s, copaganda was everywhere, slickly produced to package violence to the masses. American photographer Jill Freedman (1939–2019) was not impressed. “I hate the violence you see on TV and in the movies. I wanted to show it straight, violence without commercial interruption, sleazy and not so pretty without its make-up,” she wrote in the introduction to her 1982 monograph Street Cops, which is being republished and exhibited this month.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*A group of boys sit on a police patrol car in Alphabet City, New York City, 1980. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)*

*Two drug dealers are arrested on 42nd Street, New York City, 1979. (Photo by Jill Freedman/Getty Images)*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, i-D, Manhattan, Photography