Posts from the “Photography” Category

The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand

Posted on March 27, 2018

Untitled, 1970s. © Garry Winogrand

“I photograph something to find out what it will look like photographed,” American street photographer Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) famously said, revealing the fundamental principle of his philosophy. Through his lens, life was rendered anew, giving us a fresh perspective and vantage point for seeing the world.

“The more interested you get in Winogrand the more eager you are to see stuff you have not seen,” British writer Geoff Dyer reveals about the hunger that drove him to create The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (University of Texas Press), a luxurious meditation on the many ways in which the photographer’s remarkable images work.

The book, which is modelled on John Szarkowski’s classic book Atget, presents a brilliantly curated selection of 100 photographs, including 18 previously unpublished colour works, from the Winogrand archive at the Centre for Creative Photography. Each image is accompanied by an essay, in which Dyer explores the relationship between the artist, his subject, and the photograph in a wholly original manner that is as insightful as it is engaging.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Central Park, New York, 1970. © Garry Winogrand

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Huck, Photography

Steven Edson: Vintage New York City Street Scenes

Posted on March 25, 2018

Wedding couple NYC, 1973. © Steven Edson

Big car white shoes, 1973. © Steven Edson

Steven Edson was just eight years old when he was blinded in one eye by a pebble thrown by another child. While recovering, his neighbour, who was also an eye doctor, gave him a camera and he began to shoot. He quickly fell in love with photography – a passion he shared with his father, who always took pictures at various family occasions.

At home, he would page through picture magazines like LIFE and National Geographic, and came to admire the work of street photographers like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus.

Growing up in New York City during the ’50s and ’60s, Edson got to know the streets of his native town, which soon became the backdrop for a series of black and white street photographs and portraits. “New York was rough and unpolished,” Edson recalls. “It was filled with buses, taxis, and trucks all honking their horns, while the fumes of exhaust spilt out into the street, choking your breath. The subway was also extremely loud but offered the thrill of sending you barreling down the tracks through the darkened tunnels.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

NYC street scene. © Steven Edson

Man hugging woman, 1974. © Steven Edson

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

Ed Templeton: Hairdos of Defiance

Posted on March 23, 2018

Californian photographer Ed Templeton gives us a preview of his upcoming exhibition featuring 20 years worth of photos of the Mohawk

Hailing from southern California, Ed Templeton got into the punk and skateboard scene in 1985. At that time, the aesthetics of rebellion were becoming codified as politics and style become strongly intertwined. Perhaps the most visible symbol of rebellion was Mohawk, a hairstyle that took its name and style from an Iroquois tribe residing in Quebec and New York.

Composed of a series of carefully crafted spikes of hair running down the center of a shaved head, often dyed bright colors like orange, blue, and green, the Mohawk brazenly respectability politics and polite society. By radically altering their appearances to signify displeasure, disgust, and rejection of the status quo, punks firmly drew a line in the sand, one that squares found intolerable and rude.

Templeton, however, understood that Mohawks were a message about authenticity in a fake world. In celebration, Roberts Projects in Culver City, CA, presents Hairdos of Defiance, an exhibition of 42 photos made in the U.S. and Europe over the past 20 years accompanied by a book from Deadbeat Club. Like his 1999 book and exhibition Teenage Smokers (Alleged Press), Templeton looks at the ways that kids revel in acts of disobedience to establish their independence and refusal to conform. Here, Templeton speaks about how the Mohawk has become a symbol of opposition, integrity, and self-determination for more than forty years.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Nicole R. Fleetwood: Prison Nation

Posted on March 23, 2018

Jack Lueders-Booth, from the series Women Prisoners, MCI Framingham (Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Framingham), 1978–85. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

Slavery in the United States was never abolished – it simply changed shape, allowing the government, corporations, and individuals to continue to profit off the oppression and exploitation of men, women, and children since the 13th Amendment of the constitution was ratified in 1865.

The 13th Amendment, which legalises slavery in the case of incarceration, has spawned a massive prison industrial complex. Although the US is a mere 5 per cent of the world’s population, it accounts for 25 per cent of the prisoners in the world – with 2.2 million people behind bars today. Invariably, race plays a major factor in who is imprisoned, with the police, courts, and legal system working against American citizens of African and Latinx communities for the past 150 years.

While millions of families have been torn apart and destroyed, for millions of other Americans, the prison industrial complex can be summed up as: “Out of sight, out of mind”.

But photography has the power to change the way we see the world, enabling us to look directly at what is happening here and now. With its Spring issue, titled Prison Nation, Aperture Magazine takes on the issues at hand, examining the historical and contemporary implications of present-day slavery in the United States.

Co-edited by Aperture Magazine’s editor, Michael Famighetti and scholar Nicole R. Fleetwood, Prison Nation features work by Jamel Shabazz, Joseph Rodriguez, Lucas Foglia, Hank Willis Thomas, Pete Brook, Jack Lueders-Booth, and Bruce Jackson, and examines all sides of the crisis, looking at how photography can be used to create a visual record of the issues at hand. Prison Nation empowers readers to educate themselves so that they can begin to understand that the “land of the free and the home of the brave” is anything but.

Here, Fleetwood shares her insights into how we can work together to take on the abuses of the state, by changing the way we look at the system and those who are forced to live inside the belly of the beast.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Jamel Shabazz, Pretrial detainees all part of the “House Gang” (sanitation workforce) pose in the day room of their housing area, Rikers Island, 1986. Courtesy the artist.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Photography

Janette Beckman for BUST Magazine

Posted on March 19, 2018

In my latest 8-page feature for BUST Magazine, Janette Beckman shares stories of a life in photography, starting in the squats of Streatham while a student at St. Martin’s back in the 70s all the way up to the present day, with big plans for 2018, just you wait and see. JB has been a fixture on the scene photographing the underground before the crossover came.

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

Morgan Ashcom: What the Living Carry

Posted on March 19, 2018

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” American writer William Faulkner wrote in the 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, recognising the long shadows that hang over us. A Mississippi native and Nobel Prize laureate, Faulkner’s words speak a profound truth about the American South, a land shrouded in myth and mystery, where illusion and reality are forever intertwined in the tales people tell.

Photographer Morgan Ashcom, a native of Free Union, Virginia, understands this underlying truth: our stories have just as much (if not more) influence on our identity than the facts themselves. Like Faulkner, Ashcom understands that the South is not so much a “geographical place” as it is an “emotional idea,” one which he deftly explores in What the Living Carry, a new exhibition currently on view at Candela Books + Gallery to time with the publication of a monograph by the same name from MACK Books.

What the Living Carry tells the story of life in a fictional Southern town named Hoys Fork, where memories of the past perfume the air like bouquets of magnolias blossoming on the trees. The town is nestled in the landscape, a timeless space that evokes the myths of how the country was formed, driven by a belief in Manifest Destiny: that people are entitled to take what is not rightfully theirs.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Huck Magazine Cover Story: The Journeys Issue

Posted on March 14, 2018

I could not be more thrilled to discover my feature on Ryan Weideman’s vintage taxi cab photos made in the 80s and 90s has been selected for the cover of the new issue of Huck Magazine.

Ryan took me back to the nights when the “Speed Deman” cruised the streets of New York. His stories had me holding on to the edge of my seat, and when it was all said and done he imparted a classic bit of taxi cab wisdom that concludes our wild ride.

Read the Announcement at Huck

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Huck, Photography

Nicola Brandt: The Earth Inside

Posted on March 14, 2018

Guardian I, Namib Desert (2017). © Nicola Brandt

The Shape of Memory, Wlotzkasbaken, Namibia (2012). © Nicola Brandt

The Herero Wars of 1904–1908 are considered by many to be the first genocide of the 20th century. During the “Scramble of Africa,” imperialist powers in Germany descended upon present-day Namibia in southwest Africa in 1884. Two decades later, when the Herero people rose in revolt, General Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order to kill every man and drive women and children into the desert.

At the end of 1904, the Germans divided up survivors, sending some to concentration camps and others to work slave labour for German businesses. Within four years, up to 110,000 Herero had been killed – yet it would be nearly a century before the government of Germany publicly acknowledged and apologized for the acts of genocide, as reported in The Guardian in 2004.

As a woman of German descent born in Namibia, photographer Nicola Brandt feels a profound connection to its legacy, creating The Earth Inside, a body of photographs and Indifference, a video, that examine the landscape where these European atrocities took place. “As an artist sensitive to the histories and memories contained in the landscapes and structures that relate to our past, it is difficult not to engage with our colonial inheritance and its effects,” she explains.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Next to the Graves, Swakopmund, Namibia (2012). © Nicola Brandt

Categories: Art, Huck, Photography

Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself

Posted on March 9, 2018

New York City, 1974. © Joel Meyerowitz

At 80 years old, American photographer Joel Meyerowitz is still going strong, forging a singular path that has taken him around the globe several times over. Hailing from East Bronx, Meyerowitz began his career as a street photographer, capturing the curious, quirky moments that reveal themselves as quickly as they disappear.

Today, Meyerowitz now finds himself living on a farm in Tuscany, amassing an archive of 50,000 photographs in just about every genre imaginable. “How come I found myself here, living in Italy and making still lifes when I am a street photographer Jew form New York City? What am I doing here?” Meyerowitz laughs.

He set out to answer this question in Where I Find Myself (Laurence King), a career retrospective presented in reverse chronological order. Here, Meyerowitz takes us on a magical journey from the present into the past, guiding us through the many chapters of his well-lived life.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

The Best Photography Stories of February 2018

Posted on March 8, 2018

American Gods, 2017. Photography John Edmonds

I am delighted to have three of my features selected by Dazed as the best photography stories of February 2018, including:

JOHN EDMONDS’ PHOTOS CELEBRATE THE FAMILY WE CREATE, NOT THE ONE WE GET

John Edmonds photographs have won him critical acclaim and now landed him alongside Carrie Mae Weems and Gordon Parks in a current exhibition. Pushing the boundaries of what black masculinity means, alongside his own experiences as a queer black man, his images explore the necessity of finding a support system that truly supports you.

“Untitled (Nathan Shapiro)”, (1984). Image: © Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection) at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Untitled (Nathan Shapiro), 1984, Vintage chromogenic print (negative sandwich) retouched with ink, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

THE ARTIST THAT NAN GOLDIN CALLED BOSTON’S FIRST PUNK

Mark Morrisroe was a contemporary of Nan Goldin and the unofficial leader of the famous The Boston School of artists. Tragically, he passed away from complications due to Aids at just 30 (in 1989), but he left behind him an incredible oeuvre of polaroids and images that cemented his legacy in the art world. With a show currently on at ClampArt, New York, running until the end of March, we spoke to gallerist Brian Clamp to help us shine a light on the enigmatic artist.

Photography Dani Lessnau

THIS ARTIST PUTS A CAMERA INSIDE HER VAGINA AND TAKES PHOTOS OF HER LOVERS

Dani Lessnau makes tiny pinhole cameras and places them inside her vagina in order to take (consenting) photographs of her lovers. In an interview with Dazed Digital, the artist explored her impetus for the project alongside her influences.

See the Full Selection at Dazed

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Photography

A Portrait of Ming Smith, Pioneer Photographer & Model

Posted on March 6, 2018

Pioneers are often so far ahead of the curve that few know who they are and what they accomplished though we may all benefit from their work. Many simply live their destiny, leading quiet, humble lives, bearing the stripes and scars of the struggle while their legacy allows generations to succeed because they refused to fail.

In 1973, Ming Smith moved to New York. A recent graduate of Howard University, Smith took up modelling to support herself, working alongside Grace Jones, Bethann Hardison, Toukie Smith, Sherry Bronfman, and Barbara Smith – the first generation of African-American women to break through the colour barrier which had kept them out of the fashion and beauty industries.

Living in a studio apartment on Carmine Street in the West Village long before gentrification had set in, Smith invested all of her earnings into her true passion: photography. She carried her camera wherever she went, taking photographs while working in Paris and on assignment in Africa. Photography was a means to survive the challenges of daily life, providing a space where she could integrate with her authentic self, combining the profound power of the black experience with the universal beauty of humanity.

A woman of principle, poetry, and poise, Smith is a true pioneer in every sense of the word. The first woman member of Kamoinge, the African-American photography collective established in 1963, Smith is the first black woman to have work included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art – the very establishment that championed the transformation of photography from a vernacular activity into a fine art.

Despite her historic achievements, Smith never pushed herself into the public eye. It is only in 2017 that the world is catching up with her. Smith kicked things off with a solo exhibition at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York; is featured in the landmark exhibitions We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85; Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power; and Arthur Jafa’s recent show at Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London; and is wrapping things up with a big bow, as Karl Lagerfeld personally selected her photograph of Sun Ra for Paris Photo (Steidl).

Below, Smith shares her journey as an artist and model, reflecting on the challenges of breaking boundaries in fashion and art, and the importance of staying true to yourself while navigating this thing called life.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Africa, Art, Dazed, Photography