Posts from the “Photography” Category

Ryan McGinley: Mirror Mirror

Posted on November 7, 2018

Dick, 2018. © Ryan McGinley, Mirror Mirror (Rizzoli Electa)

The self that we present to the world is groomed, clothed, and adorned. In the mirror, we preen and pose– much in the same way we might do a for a photograph. But what if all that frippery was stripped away?

This is the question American photographer Ryan McGinley explores in his new conceptual book Mirror Mirror (Rizzoli Electa). Over a two year period that began in Spring 2016, McGinley invited 100 friends to participate in a project that would require them to take nude self-portraits taken inside their New York City homes. He provided 15 door-sized mirrors, a camera and five rolls of film, and let them run free. As the project progressed, McGinley reviewed the contact sheets, refining the instructions to bring out his subjects’ best, before making the final selection of images for the book.

The self-portraits, titled only by first name (and last initial at times), take anonymity and intimacy to newfound heights. Viewers feel a sense of exploration, experimentation, and discovery that lead to the moment these images were made.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Jade, 2018. © Ryan McGinley, Mirror Mirror (Rizzoli Electa)

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Broy Lim: and now they know

Posted on November 7, 2018

and now they know by Broy Lim, published by Steidl

and now they know by Broy Lim, published by Steidl

In recent years, a global trend has taken hold as countries with statutes against gay sex have begun repealing their oppressive laws. As of September, the number of nations with anti-homosexuality laws dropped to 73, after India overturned Section 377A, adopted from the British Penal Code 158 years ago.

Inspired by this action, members of Singapore’s LBGTQ+ community put pressure on the government to repeal that same penal code. In response, Attorney-General Lucien Wong to release a statement on October 2 confirming the government’s continued prosecution of same-sex sexual activity, which carries a two-year prison sentence.

“There are no anti-discrimination laws in Singapore to protect people in the LGBTQ community,” artist and photographer Broy Lim tells Another Man. As a result, many people choose to lead a closeted life inside an extremely conservative, heteronormative society. Lim followed this path, maintaining two lives, until the opportunity to speak his truth revealed itself.

In and now they know, winner of the Steidl Book Award Asia, Lim gives us a look into his private life through a series of intimate photographs and handwritten verse. Here, he shares his discovery the power that comes from publicly declaring himself to the world.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

and now they know by Broy Lim, published by Steidl

Categories: AnOther Man, Art, Books, Photography

Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay

Posted on November 6, 2018

At the tender age of eight, Anthony Friedkin discovered what would become the two greatest passions of his life: photography and surfing. Growing up in Los Angeles, Friedkin enjoyed weekends and summers at the family beach house in Malibu, where he developed an unquenchable love for the ocean.

In 1970, at the age of 21, Friedkin began The Surfing Essay, a visual diary of his life as a member of California’s celebrated surf scene – a project that has continued for more than 45 years. After a near-death accident two years ago, Friedkin decided to organise the work into an exhibition and book.

Now, a selection of 50 hand-printed black and white photographs will be on show at Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay, opening November 8 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York. The consummate insider, Friedkin delved beneath the Hollywood stereotype of the blonde, bronzed Adonis to reveal the extremely individualistic athletes who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of the perfect wave. Here, he shares his journey of discovery, celebration, and triumph over circumstance.

Read the Fill Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Kimberly M. Jenkins: Fashion and Race

Posted on November 6, 2018

An image by Stevens Añazco featured in Fashion and Race: Deconstructing Ideas, Restructuring Identitiesvia @stevensanazco

When Vogue Italia published the ‘all black’ issue in July 2008, it asked: “Is Fashion Racist?” In the decade since, the question has come to the fore countless times, demanding investigation, critique, and, ultimately, dismantlement.

Inspired by the conversation the question posed, Kimberly M. Jenkins, a fashion educator and independent researcher, began developing an academic initiative. It began with the course “Fashion and Race”, which she has taught at the New School’s Parsons School of Design since Autumn 2016. “The first thing we do in the class is to go about discussing what race, systemic oppression, and white privilege are to set up the terms we will be relying upon in order to look at how the construction of race has shaped fashion and beauty industries,” Jenkins explains.

Driven to bring her vision to the public, Jenkins created The Fashion and Race Database Project, an online archive filled with vital source materials. Now, as part of the third and final phase of the project, Jenkins has curated Fashion and Race: Deconstructing Ideas, Reconstructing Identities, a group exhibition of student and graduate work, which runs until 11 November.

The artists featured in the show confront and subvert racism to assert their vision and claim their space as people of colour navigating worlds of fashion and beauty. In How to Be Black, Avery Youngblood, a ‘Beyoncé Formation Scholar’, simulates a ‘how-to’ guide,’ recording the everyday life of a young, multidimensional black woman, while Jamilla Okubo created Hair as Identity, a zine that explores preconceived notions of black hair. Kyemah McEntyre presents her dashiki prom gown, which went viral in 2015. Jenkins also organised a free film screening of The Gospel According to André, followed by a Q&A with André Leon Talley and director Kate Novack. Here, Jenkins speaks about how the next generation of artists are becoming the change they want to see in the world.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography

Posted on November 2, 2018

John M. Valadez, Brooklyn and Soto, from the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio, ca. 1978

In the years following World War II, America’s Latinx communities were becoming increasingly marginalised and misrepresented. The Latinx immigrants joined African Americans who fled the South during the Great Migration, one of the largest, most rapid movements in history. Cities became the point of arrival for millions of migrants, who entered into established communities where their cultures took root, such as Spanish Harlem, the South Bronx, and East Los Angeles.

Many of their stories have largely gone untold, and E. Carmen Ramos, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s deputy chief curator and curator of Latino art, aims to correct this. In Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography, Ramos has organised the work of 10 Latinx photographers – Manuel Acevedo, Oscar Castillo, Frank Espada, Anthony Hernandez, Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Ruben Ochoa, John Valadez, Winston Vargas, and Camilo José Vergara – who documented their communities as insiders.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

John M. Valadez, Couple Balam, from the East Los Angeles Urban Portrait Portfolio, ca. 1978

Camilo José Vergara, 65 East 125th Street, Harlem, 1977

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

Patrick Potter: Skins – A Way of Life

Posted on October 29, 2018

A group of skinheads sitting on the steps of Thomson House, works entrance, Newcastle on September 12, 1970. Photography NCJ

Skinhead culture emerged on the streets of London in 1969, as Mod scene was dying out and a new wave of bourgeois bohemians revelled in the “turn on, tune in, drop out” rhetoric of Timothy Leary. The self-indulgent pretensions of the hippie scene were an affront to Britain’s working-class youth; they created the figure of the skinhead, a back-to-basics rebel who was largely misunderstood.

The original skinheads were the first generation to be moved from historic East End slums and into then-new 1960s brutalist estates. Angry to be cut off from the old networks of support, skins sought to honour this devastating loss by creating their own utopian mythology of a shared working-class past.

Embracing their feeling of marginalisation from the mainstream, skins adopted a uniform that begins with a shaved head and ends in Doc Marten boots, with a nod to the style and sound of the Windrush Generation. Quintessential rebels in search of a good time, skins decamped en masse to pubs, football games, and gigs featuring ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dub DJs and bands.

Skins overtly rejected the historic codes of working-class deference, modesty, and rigid morality and, in the process, became a perfect target for both police harassment and fascist tactics during the 1970s and 80s, forever tainting the image of skinhead culture with the spectre of hooligans and neo-Nazis.

In the new book Skins: A Way of Life (out today via Carpet Bombing Culture), author Patrick Potter sets the record straight with a phenomenal history skinhead culture in the UK. Here, Potter gives a guide to the truth about this subculture.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Skinhead couple Glenda Peake and Tony Hughes. October 7, 1969.
Photography Doreen Spooner, Daily Mirror

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography

Stephane Raynor: All About the BOY

Posted on October 25, 2018

BOY Poster designed by Peter Christopherson 1978

In 1976, Stephane Raynor opened BOY on King’s Road, and it quickly became the Mecca for the punk scene that was taking London by storm. The store created a cohesive brand identity long before anyone was thinking on those terms, drawing its name from provocative tabloid headlines like “Boy Stabs PC” and “Boy Electrocuted at 30,000 Volts,” which had been clipped and hung as décor.

“The ‘70s were awesome. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but the world knew I’d arrived,” recalls Raynor. “Imagine a wasteland of a city like London where we could do whatever we wanted. There was no capitalism and that was fine for a small bunch of renegades like us.”

“I was an art anarchist. I didn’t believe in much. I wanted to create and destroy at the same time. I was living in a bubble, taking everything in around me but not knowing if I would succeed or crash and burn —and for some reason, it didn’t matter. I had no fear of consequences.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Punks at the Roxy, London, 1977 Photo by Derek Ridgers

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Books, Fashion, Huck, Music, Photography

Diana Markosian: Quince – Coming of Age in Cuba

Posted on October 23, 2018

Diana Markosian Girls stand outside their friend’s quinceañera venue as they wait for their big entrance © Diana Markosian | Magnum Photos

Diana Markosian Teens gather in the courtyard of a church as they prepare for their friend’s quinceañera festivities © Diana Markosian | Magnum Photos

After being awarded the 2018 Elliot Erwitt Fellowship Grant to travel to Cuba for one month, Diana Markosian set forth to explore the exquisite moment of transformation, as a girl becomes a woman in society, and the way this experience informs the feminine identity. The ensuing project, Quince, which is made up of portraits and imagery from locally made magazines, will be shown at Paris Photo, in the Grand Palais, from November 8-11.

“A lot of my work is about the past and memory. It is less about going somewhere and more about finding my way into that country and my understanding of what that country represents for me,” the Armenian-American artist explains.

Born in Moscow in 1989, Markosian’s early years were shaped by living through the total collapse of the Soviet Union. She discovered an immediate and intimate parallel between her childhood experiences and the lives of those she encountered during her visit, “The 90s in Cuba was a time that is referred to as the ‘special period’ — a moment when the country, which was dependent on the Soviet Union, was in total economic collapse. It’s something I experienced first hand living in Moscow and Yerevan as a child.”

In sharing these stories, Markosian felt a connection to the lives of those she met in Cuba, and realized the story she was searching for could be found deeper in the countryside. She began traveling outside of Havana, going from town to town, until she arrived in Matanzas, famed as the birthplace of the Afro-Cuban music and dance traditions of danzón and rumba.

Here, she met a few girls and their parents, who struck up a conversation by showing Markosian a photobook that was made for their daughter’s quinceañera, a Latin American tradition celebrating a girl’s 15th birthday. As Markosian leafed through the book, she became intrigued.

Read the Full Story at Magnum Photos

Diana Markosian A girl rides around her neighbourhood in a pink 1950s convertible as her community gathers to celebrate her 15th birthday © Diana Markosian | Magnum Photos

Categories: Art, Latin America, Magnum Photos, Photography, Women

David Bailey: Peru

Posted on October 21, 2018

David Bailey is at home anywhere he goes. Driven by a profound sense of curiosity and a desire to engage, the photographer’s observant eye and quick intellect allow him entrée into just about any situation he chooses for himself; his calm confidence combined with an easy laugh span any chasm where language might otherwise be a barrier.

“They probably think I am mad for wanting to take a picture of them,” Bailey tells AnOther, reflecting on his experiences travelling through Peru in 1971 and 1984, with Grace Coddington for British Vogue and the Wool Board, and for Tatler, respectively.

Bailey made a practice of shooting fashion in the morning and evening so that he had the day to himself. He made his way through the cities and the towns, travelling across the plains and into the mountains, to create a captivating portrait of a people and a place collected in the new exhibition David Bailey: Peru, opening October 19 at Heni Gallery, London, and accompanying book publishing November 1.

Bailey’s Peru unfolds like an epic poem filled with magic and mystery, history and myth, as scenes of daily life evoke a sense of timeless wonder and awe. Now in his 80th year, Bailey laughs, “You ask me to remember what, 60 years ago?” – only to do just that for us.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Art, Books, Fashion, Latin America, Photography

Mike Miller: California Love

Posted on October 18, 2018

A fourth generation native of Los Angeles, photographer and director Mike Miller has been repping the West Side since the early ’70s. His story reads like a Hollywood film: a young upstart who went on to find his calling in art – with no less than supermodel Linda Evangelista gifting him his first camera, a Nikon F2, formerly owned by Peter Lindbergh.

Yet it’s not the gloss of high fashion for which Miller is best known. Instead, it’s the grit, glory and glamour of the LA hip hop scene – a legacy that’s being celebrated in new exhibition California Love, currently on view at M+B Photo in Los Angeles.

Growing up in Hollywood, Miller and his brothers got into enough trouble for his mother to pack the family up and head out to Santa Monica when he was 12. Living on the beach changed his life. “I wanted to be a director, with no clue how to get there,” he recalls. “Some of my neighbours were big producers and they put me on at Warner Brothers and Fox Studios when they started as 20th Century Fox. My friends from the beach were 50, 60 years old and I was like 15 but they were my bros. We connected on different levels because back in the day, that’s the way it was.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Sara Bennett: Life After Life in Prison – The Bedroom Project

Posted on October 17, 2018

SHARON, 57, back in supportive housing seven years after her release. Corona, NY (2017) Sentence: 20 years to life Served: 20 years/ Released: May 2010 “My body tells me, I was in prison, but my mind tells me that I never spent a day there. I have this sense of freedom and a strong sense of feeling liberated. I am so in touch with my womanhood, of being a mom and a grandmother, a friend and a partner, a spiritual sister. I’m in touch with all that . . . my room is a place of peace and a sanctuary to come home to every day. I love turning the key in my door.”

American photographer Sara Bennett knows the legal system from a vantage point few have. Working as a public defender specializing in cases with battered women and the wrongly convicted, Bennett has developed a profound understanding of the impact that prison has on innocent and vulnerable lives.

The experience of prison resonates long after release for many who are consigned to spend years inside the system. Over the past five years, Bennett has begun documenting the lives of former inmates in the project Life After Life in Prison. Here we see women making their way back into the world, adapting to the challenges of life after having lost it all.

With a humanist eye and a sensitivity to detail, Bennett shares stories rarely told anywhere: the struggles of the dispossessed and marginalized who carry the weight of redemption on their own shoulders. It is only when they are able to retreat into their own private worlds that they may lay down their burdens for a moment.

It is here that The Bedroom Project centers itself, deep within the most intimate space of one’s domicile. Here, Bennett creates a series of portraits that reveal each of these women within the sanctity of their private lives. In each photograph, there is a sense of relationship between subject and space, in the way they dress, decorate, arrange, and pose for the portrait. A sense of consistency begins to reveal itself, a sense that we may know and be known through the way we live.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

TRACY, 51, in her own apartment three-and-a-half years after her release. Jamaica, NY (2017) Sentence: 22 years to life Served: 24 years Released: February 2014 “I imagined coming home, living in a one- or two-bedroom apartment, where one was a master and an extra room for guests. Here I have that. I call this room my “doll house,” my safe haven. I feel at peace. I’ve finally unpacked. I spend a lot of time in here. I take pride in everything. I put more into this room than into the kitchen. I know I need to eat, but my room is my nutrition.” © Sara Bennett

Categories: Art, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women