Posts from the “Photography” Category

Malick Sidibé: LOVE POWER PEACE

Posted on July 30, 2018

Untitled, 1979/2004 © Malick Sidibé

Malian photographer Malick Sidibé (1936-2016) bought his first camera, a Brownie Flash, in 1956 while working as an apprentice for Gérard Guillat in the nation’s capital of Bamako. Self-taught, Sidibé hit the scene, taking photographs at African events filled with teenagers coming of age at the same time that the country reached independence in 1960.

Whether photographing at parties or in his studio, Sidibé effortlessly captured the dignity, style, and pride of the first generation of post-colonial Malian men and women. Now, his portraits have become symbols of LOVE POWER PEACE – which just happens to be the title of Malick Sidibé’s seventh solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, on view now through August 10, 2018.

LOVE POWER PEACE presents a selection of previously unseen work from Sidibé’s archive that chronicles the creation of a nation liberated from nearly a century of French rule, filled with the hope, optimism, and boundless energy of youth. Photography gave Sidibé a means to mirror and amplify, creating exquisite images that speak to self-representation, to how one sees themselves and wants to be seen.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Au cours d’une soiree © Malick Sidibé

Les copins à Niarela, 1967/2008 © Malick Sidibé

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Africa, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Antwaun Sargent: The Way We Live Now

Posted on July 22, 2018

Tyler Mitchell, 2 Men, 2016 © Tyler Mitchell

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Twins), 2016 © Tyler Mitchell

In the new millennium, photography has been democratised en masse, inviting all comers to create an image that can speak a thousand words in all languages at the same time. In the new group exhibition, The Way We Live Now, currently on view at Aperture Gallery, New York, 18 artists from around the globe explore how photography has the power to shape how we see the world and ourselves.

The exhibition draws on more than 1,000 submissions to the Aperture Summer Open, in which artists were invited to reflect on how photography informs our beliefs about society, politics, beauty, and self-expression. A jury of four curators – including critic Antwaun Sargent – chose works that reflect on life in Latinx, Native American, African American, and queer communities in the United States, as well as life in Israel, South Africa, South Korea, and China.

“When we think about representation and visibility, what has aided and sped up the process of people being seen, their truth being amplified, and their voices added to our cultural landscape is the photograph,” says Sargent. “People want to show themselves, one of the easiest ways is by taking a picture.”

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Diego Camposeco, Sabrina, 2017 © Diego Camposeco

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Andrea Giunta: Radical Women – Latin American Art, 1960-1985

Posted on July 22, 2018

Paz Errazuriz (Chilean, b. 1944), La Palmera (The palm tree), 1987, from the series La manzana de Adan (Adam’s Apple), 1982-90. Gelatin silver print. 15 9/16 × 23 ½ in. (39.5 × 59.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Galeria AFA, Santiago. ©the artist.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, the phenomenal survey of Latin American artists, enters its final weekend at the Brooklyn Museum, where it will be on view through July 22, 2018. Accompanied by a catalogue of the same name published by DelMonico|Prestel, the exhibition is a stunning tour de force through a quarter century across the Western hemisphere showcasing an extraordinary group of women who experimented with photography, performance, video, and conceptual art to explore the issues of autonomy, oppression, violence, and the environment.

Photography plays a pivotal role in Radical Women, examining how it is both a work of art and a piece of evidence. Here archetypes and iconography are pushed to the edge as the artists featured here subvert expectations and stereotypes, offering fresh and empowering new perspectives for consideration.

Guest curator Andrea Giunta, who co-curated the exhibition with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, shares insights into the ways artists used photography to raise awareness, expose, and explore the issues facing Latin American women during a tumultuous and transformative time in history – issues that are as pertinent then as they are today.

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Maria Evelia Marmolejo (Colombian, b. 1958), 11 de marzo—ritual a la menstruacion, digno de toda mujer como antecedente del origen de la vida (March 11—ritual in honor of menstruation, worthy of every woman as a precursor to the origin of life), 1981. Photography: Camilo Gomez. Nine black-and-white photographs. Five sheets: 11 3/4 × 8 1/4 in. (29.8 × 21 cm) each; four sheets: 8 1/4 × 11 3/4 in. (21 × 29.8 cm) each. Courtesy of Maria E. Marmolejo and Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani, Milan. ©the artist.

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

Godlis x Angela Boatwright on Punk, Now & Then

Posted on July 22, 2018

Blondie, CBGB, 1977. Photo by GODLIS.

GBGB, 1977. Photo by GODLIS.

On a cool night late in the summer of 1976, David Godlis stood on the Bowery: a desolate NYC strip synonymous with flophouses and winos who’d lived under the shadow of the Third Avenue El train for more than a century. Although the train had been dismantled, that thoroughfare remained barren and bleak – but for a white awning emblazoned with black letters that announced “CBGB”.

At 25, Godlis had returned to his native New York towards the end of 1975 after spending seven years in Boston, where he studied photography alongside Nan Goldin and Stanley Greene at Imageworks. Back in town, he’d pick up the latest issue of The Village Voice and flip to the classified section where he perused the help-wanted listings. It was there that an ad for a bar repeatedly caught his eye. Intrigued, Godlis set out to catch a band called Television. When he arrived, the streets were completely empty. He spotted the white awning and said to himself, “That’s got to be the joint.”

He opened the door and stepped inside what felt like a new world: a long, narrow room illuminated by neon beer signs hanging on the wall. At the front desk sat Roberta Bayley, who had shot the cover of the Ramones’ first album, though Godlis didn’t know who she was at the time.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Punks at Indiana Street show, Boyle Heights, July 2015. Photo by Angela Boatwright.

East L.A. Liquor, N. Fickett Street, Boyle Heights. Photo by Angela Boatwright.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Huck, Music, Photography

Harvey Stein: Artists Observed

Posted on July 19, 2018

Tom Wesselmann © Harvey Stein

After moving to New York in the late 1960s to attend Columbia Graduate School of Business, Harvey Stein grew disenchanted with the corporate world and decided to pursue a career in photography. Entranced by the various art scenes in Soho, the East Village, Midtown, and the Upper East Side, Stein began to develop relationships with various artists, and decided to embark upon a project to learn about how they lived and created, and what inspired them to work, in order to see what lessons he could discern for his own burgeoning practice.

Between 1980 and 1985, Stein made the rounds, photographing and interviewing more than 165 New York artists for his project, Artists Observed, which was published the following year by Abrams. Featuring Christo, John Cage, Lee Krasner, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Bourgeois, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, and Marisol, Artists Observed is filled with bon mots from some of the most luminous artists of the era. Here, Stein shares his memories of these iconic encounters, along with the wisdom those artists offered him for the book.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Keith Haring, 1982 © Harvey Stein

Categories: 1980s, AnOther, Art, Photography

Vik Muniz: Photography and the Rebirth of Wonder

Posted on July 17, 2018

Vik Muniz, Double Mona Lisa (Peanut butter and Jelly), from the series After Warhol, 1999 © Vik Muniz/Galerie Xippas, Paris

Brazilian artist Vik Muniz isn’t like most photographers, who aim to capture extraordinary moments as they appear in real life. He’s known for making iconic images out of wacky materials, like the Mona Lisa rendered in peanut butter and jelly or Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergére collaged from magazine clippings, then photographing the end product. It’s artwork Muniz describes as “photographic delusions” that playfully toy with our sensory memories and inspire a sense of wonder.

His work can be amusing as well as poignant, as noted in his series Pictures of Garbage from the award-winning documentary Waste Land (2010), which follows Muniz as he works with the catadores, or trash pickers, of Jardim Gramacho, a 321-acre dump near Rio de Janeiro that was the world’s biggest landfill before it closed in 2012. Muniz turned their trash into large-scale photographic portraits of the pickers, which he then sold at auction for $250,000, and gave the bulk of the proceeds back to the catadores union to build a library and retrain workers once the landfill closed.

A retrospective of Muniz’s massively diverse artwork, Vik Muniz: Photography and the Rebirth of Wonder , just opened at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. The exhibition and an accompanying monograph, Vik Muniz (Prestel), celebrate the dazzling marvels Muniz’ constructs out of things like diamonds, toys, chocolate syrup, and sand.

VICE caught up with Muniz while the artist was traveling in Italy to chat about how technology has liberated photography and how unexpected images can subvert and change the way we see the world.

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Marlene Dietrich, from the series Pictures of Diamonds, 2004. Digital C print, 65.2 x 51.6 x 1.9 inches © Vik Muniz/Galerie Xippas, Paris

Categories: Art, Photography, Vice

Meryl Meisler: Fire Island 1977 – 1978

Posted on July 17, 2018

In July 1978, Donna Summer released Last Dance, the final word on the dancefloor – the last record spun at the club before the lights come on. American photographer Meryl Meisler could not have known then just how apt that track would be when it released during her last summer at The Survivor, a cottage on Fire Island.

Just one year earlier, Meisler had made her entrée to the Fire Island social scene, after meeting a hairstylist named Barnett through a friend of a friend she knew from her nights at Studio 54. Barnett had just gotten out of a long-term relationship and took a shine to Meisler. He extended an open invitation to his home, and for two seasons Meisler made her way to heart of Cherry Grove, accompanied by her childhood friend Judi Jupiter.

During those first years in between the Summer of Love and the advent of AIDS, New York was a carefree candyland, equal parts innocence and decadence. Camera in hand, Meisler captured a forgotten slice of New York LGBTQ history in these photographs, some of which appear in her books A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick and Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY ‘70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre Publishing). Meisler looks back at this Edenic idyll 40 years on.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Photography

Matthew Rolston: Vanitas – The Palermo Portraits

Posted on July 16, 2018

Matthew Rolston. Untitled, #Pa1061-1554, Palermo, Italy, 2013, from the series, “Vanitas” © MRPI

In 1597, the Capuchin friars of Palermo, Sicily, had a problem: The crypts they’d been using to bury their deceased brethren were overflowing. To have more space, the brothers excavated a huge underground cemetery, making use of ancient caves. When the time came to move the corpses to their new resting place, the friars discovered something remarkable. Forty five of the bodies were naturally mummified, with still-recognizable faces. The monks believed it was a miracle and proclaimed the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo a holy site. It is now filled with the elegantly dressed corpses of 8,000 Sicilians—some of them friars, but many of them wealthy civilians—who died between the 16th and early 20th century.

Over the centuries, poets and artists like Lord Byron, Otto Dix, Francis Bacon, Peter Hujar, and Richard Avedon have visited the catacombs, creating works of art inspired by these exquisite corpses. In recent years, American photographer and director Matthew Rolston—best known for shooting glamorous portraits and music videos for (living) celebrities like Beyoncé, Janet Jackson, Mary J. Blige, and TLC—turned his lens on the long-deceased residents of the Capuchin catacombs for a new series called Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits.

VICE caught up with Rolston to find out what it was like photographing corpses inside the catacombs in the dead of night and what Italian mummies could possibly have to do with artificial intelligence and evolution.

Read the Full Story st VICE Online

Categories: Photography, Vice

Amy Arbus: Tub Pictures

Posted on July 12, 2018

In 1992, Amy Arbus took a masterclass with Richard Avedon at the International Center of Photography in New York and embarked on a project that would forever change her relationship to the medium. She took a single roll of black and white self-portraits in a bathtub, where she began to confront and consider the death of her mother Diane Arbus, who committed suicide in one on July 26, 1971.

Then 38 years old, it had been 21 years since her mother’s death, and Arbus set about revisiting a scene she had never witnessed herself. The result was an intense series of eight photographs, which will be on view in Tub Pictures at The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA, from next week until August 8, 2018. We caught up with Arbus to discuss this powerful body of work, and the ways in which it transformed her life.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Categories: 1990s, AnOther, Art, Photography, Women

Marc H. Miller: Downtown Art Ephemera, 1970s-1990s

Posted on July 10, 2018

Public Art Fund, Spectacolor Lightboard, Robin Winters, Card, 1988. Courtesy online Gallery 98

Before the internet made it quick and easy to share information, artists relied on IRL tactics to promote their work. Posters, flyers, paper invitations, postcards, zines, objets d’art, and other ephemera represented a populist impulse: reach the masses and give them a taste of what was to come—something they could keep and collect without having to spend a dime.

Impermanent art, like graffiti and performance, came to the fore in the Lower East Side in the 1970s and 80s. Art ephemera was often all that remained after a show, and it took on new significance. The materials could be produced cheaply and distributed at will, transforming art in the age of mass reproduction into a marketing tool.

From his studio at 98 Bowery, artist, journalist, curator, and art historian Marc H. Miller amassed an impressive collection of rare ephemera from New York’s storied era of renegade artmaking from the 70s to 90s. His trove contains work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, the Guerilla Girls, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Gordon Matta-Clark, as well as galleries like FUN, Fashion MODA, P.P.O.W., ABC No Rio, Leo Castelli, and Tony Shafrazzi.

Nearly 200 items from Miller’s collection are on display in New York this month, in Downtown Art Ephemera, 1970s-1990s at James Fuentes Gallery. To celebrate, VICE caught up with Miller to chat about why these relics from the recent past have such power today.

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P.P.O.W, David Wojnarowicz, Early and Recent Work, Card, 1990. Courtesy online Gallery 98

Emily Harvey Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Henry Flynt, The Samo Graffiti, Card. Courtesy online Gallery 98

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Manhattan, Painting, Photography, Vice

Jill Greenberg: Alreadymade

Posted on July 10, 2018

While women account for 85% of consumer purchasing power, they are woefully underrepresented behind the camera, creating the images behind entertainment and advertising campaigns. Male photographers account for 90% of the commercial work – a disparity fueled by the “boys club” mentality that is out of step with the times.

Photographer Jill Greenberg decided to address the issue head on with the creation of Alreadymade, an online directory of women photographers, which she launched in tandem with a TEDx Talk titled “The Female Lens.” Here, Greenberg shines a light on the gender gap in the photography industry and the ways in which it reshapes the way we see the world.

“Here’s a dirty little secret about what photographers do: We make image propaganda!” Greenberg said in her talk. “So what happens when our views of the world are shaped by only a male lens? We are only getting the perspective, and biases of half the population. Almost every image we are surrounded by has been filtered through a man’s eyes, a man’s mind.”

With Alreadymade, Greenberg has created a platform featuring the work of 49 women. The list will continue to expand, with the oversight of an advisory board that includes Carla Serrano, CEO of Publicis New York, Judith Puckett-Rinella, Photography Director at Entrepreneur, and Meg Handler, Editor at Large for Reading the Pictures.

We caught up with Greenberg to discuss her vision for Alreadymade, and the significance of addressing gender parity in photography.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women