Posts from the “Photography” Category

Gloria Oyarzabal: Woman go no’gree

Posted on March 14, 2019

The search for knowledge, wisdom, and understanding lies in the process of distilling fact from fiction, truth from lie, meaning from myth. It is the sifting through appearances where deception flourishes, in search of the source of authenticity and integrity upon which existence takes root.

“One consequence of Eurocentrism is the racialization of knowledge: Europe is represented as the source of knowledge and Europeans, therefore, as thinkers,” photographer Gloria Oyarzabal observes, recognizing the systems of power profiting off this misinformed belief.

These systems of power feed off a form of colonization that extends beyond the centuries-long rape, pillage, and enslavement of the people and the land — it is the colonization of the mind, a far more insidious programming that is more difficult to detect and eradicate, for its forms are multifarious, moving like a virus from one person to the next.

The programming runs so deep that many will fight to defend its dastardly deeds before do something so honorable as change their mind. Often times, the programming only ends when one finds it is too foolish and disgraceful to hold irrational thoughts. Then it becomes a process of decolonizing the mind of the bankrupt ideologies and logical fallacies one has been fed throughout their lives, and do the work of self-education, recognizing that blind spots will be revealed.

In her series, Woman go no’gree, Oyarzabal has done just this in a photographic exploration of gender, history, knowledge-making, stereotypes, and clichés of Africa. Using a mixture of archive colonial images mostly found in magazines, street photos taken with a digital camera, and studio photography found or made during her artist residence in Lagos in 2017, Oyarzabal employs a visual language that subverts and spellbinds in equal part, leading us into a silent realm of symbol and iconography. Here, Oyarzabal shares her journey with us.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Africa, Art, Feature Shoot, Photography

Gail Buckland: A Life in Photography

Posted on March 5, 2019

Author. Educator. Curator. Gail Buckland’s life in photography is as vast as the medium itself, revealing a love that was born of a dream. Buckland remembers how it all began.

“I wanted to be a journalist. My first choice school was Northwestern, the Medill School of Journalism. After she was accepted, my family drove out to visit the school. We drove a thousand miles, and the first thing my parents wanted to find was the Hillel on campus. We kept walking around campus, passing blonde, blue-eyed people the entire way,” she says.

“On the drive from Evanston, Illinois, back to New York, my parents questioned my choice. ‘Why not go to a Liberal Arts school here?” So I went to the University of Rochester. I never thought about photography. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Then, my freshman year I had a dream. I woke up and I wanted to be a photographer. And that was it.”

From that first moment of unconscious clarity, Buckland’s life has lead her along a path, one that has allowed her to pursue her passion for the medium. Like so many who dedicate themselves to the photograph. Buckland was lead to the form by a need to see more than her immediate senses would allow.

“I remember one time at AIPAD, I was leading a panel discussion with Ralph Gibson, Eva Rubenstein, Duane Michals, and a few other people. I asked them, ‘What was the one photograph you saw that changed the course of your life?’” she says.

“At the end, someone asked me to answer my own question. I remember where I was. I went to MoMA and saw Edward Weston’s photograph of a cabbage leaf. I never saw a cabbage lead look like that, and I had been eating cabbage my entire life. It was a revelation. I need a way of seeing more deeply because my own eyes aren’t doing it for me.”

It was here, in this recognition that not only her eyes but also her emotions and her own personal photography would be aided by a study of the masters of the medium. Buckland began to consider the photograph as more than a work of art and a record of the world, but a tool to help herself and others see life more clearly.

“In school I studied the the metaphysical and psychological realms of photography influenced by the teachings of Minor White and Roy Hattersley, and I was also taking photos to be like Dorothea Lange. I was idealistic. I wanted to change the world in the 1960s, like many others. I was very influenced by Cornell Capa’s ‘Concerned Photographer’ shows at Riverside Museum. Capa used that phrase to describe the position some adopted with their work, using photography as a tool for humanitarian service to educate and change the world,” Buckland explains.

“Once I latched on, I absorbed as much as I could. But I did not want to live in this country under Nixon. I was very radicalized at this time and I wanted to get out before I planted a bomb or did something I would later regret. I went to Manchester, England. I had been printing photographs I had taken the summer before on a trip to Crete with a group artists and I had no one to show them to so I looked up Bill Brandt, who was the only photographer I knew in England. He agreed to see me, saying, ‘I know what it means to be a photographer in a foreign country.’ We spent hours going over my prints. I was an undergraduate and Brandt was enormously generous.”

Brandt gave Buckland invaluable advice. He let her know she could crop her prints. By giving her full authority over her work, Brandt let her know she did not, as a creative mind, need to follow the rules of the establishment. Buckland was free to set her own path, and so she began to explore her options.

Buckland recalls, “I made the transition into curatorial work because I needed to earn a living. At that time, no one was doing anything with old photographs in the UK, and that combined my interests in photography and history. The Royal Photographic Society was hiring part time, and the Arts Council was also hiring part time. So I worked at both.”

In spring 1972, the Victoria & Albert Museum hosted “From Today Painting is Dead.” The title of the show is from a quote attributed to French painter Paul Delaroche, probably made in 1839 when the artist saw [heard about? Please check] examples of the Daguerreotype.

“The exhibition at the V&A was the biggest and most important photography show in the UK in 50 years. I went to Windsor and chose photographs from the Queen’s collection and to many other major collections. I also compiled the 1000 entries , written mostly by the curator of the exhibition Dr. David Thomas, for the catalogue,” Buckland notes.

“At the same time I was working at the Royal Photographic Society, cataloguing the collection. I catalogued 350 Roger Fentons and 600 Julia Margaret Camerons [GB: check numbers]. I eventually became the Curator of the Royal Photographic Society, and then I later left to concentrate on the work of William Henry Fox Talbot.”

Fox Talbot was a British savant and photography pioneer who invented the photogenic drawing and calotype process the foundation of photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Buckland spent seven years on the research, which resulted in the landmark exhibition, “Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography” at the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1979 and book of the same name.

“Photography has allowed me to explore all areas of life. In my day, photography was a specialty unto itself. I like to say I’ve done everything from Fox Talbot to Rock and Roll,” she adds in reference to “Who Shot Rock and Roll,” a ten-museum exhibition tour and book that featured works by photographers from Richard Avedon, Albert Watson, and David LaChapelle to Dennis Hopper, Andreas Gursky, and Ryan McGinley.

The author of fourteen books on photography and history, Buckland has collaborated with luminaries including Cecil Beaton, Sir Harold Evans, and Al Gore in her illustrious career. She remembers when Beaton put her name as large on the cover as his own and told her, “We are partners in this project.” From those early heady days in England, Buckland has come full circle, now working in Brooklyn on a new exhibition and book of photography for 2016.

“I like looking at the pictures. I don’t like making the final selection. You know you have to do it, but I prefer the actual research and the pleasure of entering someone else’s world. It is like the end of Ulysses: ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ The act of creation is such an affirmation. I just feel more alive from it. I respond to art in the deepest, most profound way. I can’t imagine my life without it,” she says.

“Now at my age, I’m not interested in playing it safe. I am not curating for my colleagues. You can have popular and critical success: you don’t have to sacrifice one for the others. It’s not just about celebrating established people; it’s about taking risks too. My mission now is to break down the hierarchies and enlarge the field.

“Photography is the great democratic art. A judicious use of words can help enrich an experience. It’s difficult to write a book. After fourteen books, it doesn’t get any easier. It’s torture—but it helps me understand what I think, and how to be clear about my thoughts, about what is now forty years of working in – and teaching – photography.”

Categories: Photography, Women

Vincent Cianni: We Skate Hardcore

Posted on March 4, 2019

Welcome To Crooklyn, Walking Across the Williamsburg Bridge 1996. © Vincent Cianni

Under The Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Williamsburg Brooklyn 1996. © Vincent Cianni

In 1993, photographer Vincent Cianni moved to the south side of Williamsburg, as the next generation of Puerto Rican and Dominican teens were coming of age.

“Life was played out in so many different ways on the sidewalks, stoops, and playgrounds,” he remembers. “I started playing handball in McCarren Park and started to take my camera with me. It became part of my connection to the neighbourhood.”

After about a year and a half, Cianni came upon a scrappy group of local kids and teens who had built a skate ramp in a vacant lot by the river at North 7th Street. They were there to refine their skills, so they could get sponsored to skate professionally. “Like basketball, it was a way out of poverty and the experiences that they have growing up,” the photographer explains.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Sugeiry Touching Scarface with Knife, Bedford Avenue Williamsburg Brooklyn 1998. © Vincent Cianni

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

Olivier Fatton: Coco

Posted on March 4, 2019

Coco, Copyright Olivier Fatton.

Éve-Claudine Lorétan – alias Coco – met photographer Olivier Fatton on a Sunday in November 1989, at a sauna in Bern, Switzerland. Their meeting would mark the final act of Coco’s short life, in which she was at once fashion model, performance artist, and tabloid sensation.

“We fell in love at first sight,” Fatton says, speaking through a translator from Paris. “I had the impression I just met an angel. At the time, I was really drawn to aesthetics. Coco looked so beautiful that I just wanted to take pictures of her.”

Before meeting Coco, Fatton, 32, had been photographing male nudes in staged scenes, awash with beauty but empty of love. Their connection was absolute and instantaneous. They went for coffee, then to bed, in short order.

“I want to be your model. In return, you’ll document my transformation. I’m going to have a sex change,” Coco told Fatton, as he recounts in a new book, Coco.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Coco, Copyright Olivier Fatton.

Coco, Copyright Olivier Fatton.

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

Rosalind Fox Solomon: Liberty Theater

Posted on February 27, 2019

Rosalind Fox Solomon, ‘Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1976’ in Liberty Theater (2018). © Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, ‘New Orleans, Louisiana, 1992’ in Liberty Theater (2018). © Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, American artist Rosalind Fox Solomon traveled across the South creating a powerful series of photographs that reveal the state of the nation during the first decade following the Civil Rights Movement. It is here in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina that we are privy to the complex interconnection of life rooted in the triumphs, tragedies, and traumas of the past.

At the time Fox Solomon started making these images, she had begun taking trips to New York to study photography with Lisette Model, a master of the human psyche laid bare in silver gelatin. Fox Solomon’s work bears witness to the power of photography to cut to the quick, to go beyond the luxuries and limitations of language by focusing solely on action, gesture, and expression to tell us more than word could ever say in a single, fleeting moment.

Fox Solomon’s photographs resonate with quiet grandeur, visceral eccentricity, and profound depth of ineffable emotion. Over the next two decades, she traversed the deepest reaches of the South to create Liberty Theater (MACK), an exquisitely nuanced portrait of the profound interplay of race, class, and segregation.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Rosalind Fox Solomon, ‘New Orleans, Louisiana, 1993’ in Liberty Theater (2018). © Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

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

Jamie Diamond & Elena Dorfman: Surrogate – A Love Ideal

Posted on February 20, 2019

Elena Dorfman. Ginger Brook 4, 2001. From the series, Still Lovers

In a culture where overexposure has become the new norm, intimacy and bonding is becoming increasingly complex. People adapt in any number of ways, adopting attitudes, behaviours, and even objects that allow them to channel the desire for love in a tangible way.

In the new exhibition Surrogate. A Love Ideal, opening February 21, American photographers Jamie Diamond and Elena Dorfman explore the expression of familial and romantic love between human and doll — an expression that elicits feelings of surprise, confusion, disgust, and even empathy from those who see it from the outside looking in.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Jamie Diamond. Mother Kyla, 2012. From Forever mothers

Categories: Art, Huck, Photography

Brenda Ann Kenneally: Upstate Girls

Posted on February 14, 2019

Kayla and James © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

In the dystopian mythos that fuels the American Dream, poverty is a mark of character upon which outrageous projections are made. Many, clinging to the illusions of living in a meritocracy, where everyone starts on a level playing field, prefer the ignorance of ideology above all, villainizing the victims of a system designed to create a permanent underclass upon which America’s Next Top Billionaire will assuredly feast.

Poverty, as it is presented to us, is a choice — the wrong one, the experts suggest. “If only these people would X, Y, or Z,” the armchair analyst adds without the slightest shame, from the comforts of their breakfast nook while scrolling the latest headlines on their news feed.

“X, Y, or Z” could be any number of conservative talking points that focus the minutiae of personal accountability while turning a blind eye to the crushing weight of living hand to mouth in country that has designed systems to profit off your demise.

Artist Brenda Ann Kenneally knows how the game is played better than most, and uses her knowledge and wisdom expose the truth — rather than perpetuate the lies told and sold. In 2002, she and author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc began collaborating on a magazine assignment in Troy, New York, a once-thriving city whose fortunes have gone dark.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Tony in the dark bedroom, looking out the window © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

Dana nursing KyLanne the day before she took her baby home © Brenda Ann Kenneally.

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Paolo Roversi: Doubts

Posted on February 12, 2019

“For me to take a picture is an act of love, something to connect with the rest of the world and… voila!” Italian photographer and AnOther Magazine contributor Paolo Roversi says on the phone from his Paris studio of nearly four decades. “It’s like a kiss. It is to exchange a regard. It is very simple.”

Very simple – and pure. For Roversi, the photograph is an invitation to discover what lies beyond the known, creating a space where anything is possible. “I like to be lost in mysteries. I don’t like to explain everything. I don’t like to ask. I do not look for the answer in fact. I am happy with only the question,” he says.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Vanguard Revisited: Poetic Politics & Black Futures

Posted on February 8, 2019

Pirkle Jones, Free Huey rally, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park (formerly DeFremery Park) © Regents of the University of California. Courtesy Special Collections, University Library, University of California Santa Cruz.

Pirkle Jones, Black Panthers discussing their reading material, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland, CA, #101 from A Photographic Essay on The Black Panthers. Commissioned by Swedish magazine, Vi. © Regents of the University of California. Courtesy Special Collections, University Library, University of California Santa Cruz.

In 1968, the Black Panther Party (BPP) stood 2,000 strong; armed not just with firearms, but a knowledge of the Constitution, state, and local laws. Initially organised to fight police brutality, the group quickly organised to institute community social programs. Leadership understood the power of the press and began working with writers, artists, and photographers to get the word out.

That year, Kathleen Cleaver met husband and wife photographers Pirkle Jones (1914-2009) and Ruth-Marion Baruch (1922-1997), and gave them unprecedented access to the inner circle of the BPP. Of the work they made, Baruch said: “We can only tell you: This is what we saw. This is what we felt. These are the people.”

The photographs – first printed in The Black Panther weekly newspaper – were immediately well-received, and an exhibition of the work, Black Panthers: A Photo Essay, opened at San Francisco’s de Young Museum shortly after. More than 100,000 people attended the show, despite City Hall’s best efforts to pressure the photographers to delay or cancel it.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Larry Racioppo: Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971-1983

Posted on February 7, 2019

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, a movement was afoot. The media called it “white flight” and sang it from the rooftops. The cities were being abandoned as white families ran for the hills of suburban towns just as Black and Latinx populations were finding a foothold in northern climates following the Great Migration, Operation Bootstrap, and Operation Peter Pan.

By the 1970s, a new era had begun — one of fueled by urban decay that left only the most strident New Yorkers in place. It was a city of true grit, where only the strongest survive, a city filled with idiosyncratic characters that were simultaneously celebrated and vilified. It was, simply put, a “New” York in every sense of the word.

Brooklyn native Larry Racioppo headed west for two years before returning to his hometown in December 1970. He took a job at the phone company and a class at SVA, which inspired him to start photographing the world in which he lived. Then little by little, everything began to change.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Photography

New York in Photo Books

Posted on February 6, 2019

Life is Good & Good For You in New York by William Klein (1956)

There are eight million stories in the naked city — at any given time. As the years slip away, one fact remains: the only constant is change. “New” is the truth. Nothing ever stays the same, except the photographs. This, my friend, is the only time you can and will ever go home again.

At a certain point, even if you weren’t there, you know the photograph. It’s become a memory of another time and place that has now become a part of a history that ceaselessly fascinates. The city has a curious ability to romanticize the dog-eat-dog Darwinian principles that made Frank Sinatra proudly proclaim, “If I can make it there I can make it anywhere.”

It’s vast, self-aggrandizing sensibilities spring up from the bedrock upon which the city is laid, it’s towering testaments to capitalism lining the island of Manhattan like so many rows of jagged teeth, while the outer lying boroughs nestle around like kin, creating a sprawling mass of magnificent encounters that can only happen in a place like this.

New York is not just photogenic, it’s the very landscape where genres flourish and styles abound — advancing the medium as only a true muse can. In New York in Photo Books (RM/Cento José Guerrero), editor Horacio Fernández takes us on a spellbinding tour of the city that never sleeps in ink on paper.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

New York by Keizo Kitajama (1982)

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