Posts from the “Photography” Category

Douglas Corrance: New York 1970-1980s

Posted on August 17, 2021

By 1975, New York City teetered along the edge of bankruptcy, some $11 billion in debt. By October the situation had reached dire straits when President Gerald R. Ford refused a federal bailout, prompting the infamous Daily News front page: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”.

The headline cost Ford re-election the following year, and haunted him for the rest of his life – a fitting turn of events for the man who dared to turn his back on the city that never sleeps. New Yorkers, on the other hand, had no choice but to soldier on.

Despite the crumbling infrastructure and economic decline further exacerbated by the Nixon White House of “benign neglect,” which systematically denied government services to Black and brown communities nationwide, and landlord-sponsored arson that reduced city blocks to rubble at record speed, New Yorkers proved to be resilient.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake

Posted on August 15, 2021

*Hannah Wilke with Ponder-r-rosa 4, 1975*

Long before the selfie came into vogue, American artist Hannah Wilke (1940–1993) understood the importance of harnessing the power of self-representation through photography. At the tender age of 14, the native New Yorker donned her mother’s mink stole, white pumps, and nothing else to pose for a self-portrait in front of a wall bearing her birth name, Arlene H. Butler — lest anyone not know exactly who she was.

“I become my art, my art becomes me…. My heart is hard to handle, my art is too,” Wilke wrote in a letter published in the 1975 book, Art: A Woman’s Sensibility(California Institute of the Arts). With the understanding that a woman laying claim to her own body was a transgressive act, Wilke rose to prominence doing just that. Working as a photographer, sculptor, video artist, and performance artist who turned the female gaze on herself, Wilke’s art acted as a Rorschach Test — admiration and criticism revealing more about the viewer than the art itself.

Emblematic of the revolutionary times in which she lived, Wilke emerged from the 1960s with a practice that reshaped the conversation about the relationship between feminism, art, and the role of women in society just as the Women’s Liberation Movement took off. She used her work to establish an iconography that centers the female body and pleasure at a time when such topics were taboo and largely excluded from the male-dominated provenance of art history.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Hannah Wilke: Intercourse with… audio installation cover, 1975*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography

David Hurn: Isle of Wight Festival 1969

Posted on August 11, 2021

Now age 87, Magnum Photos member David Hurn remembers the fateful day in February 1954 that first brought photography into his life. While on break, the young army cadet training at Sandhurst Military Academy was paging a copy of Picture Post magazine and stumbled upon a photograph of a Russian army officer buying his wife a hat in a Moscow department store.

“I started to cry – not something one normally did in the officers mess,” says Hurn, who describes how the picture triggered a memory of his father who he hardly saw during World War II. “One of the first acts he did at the war’s end was to take my mother, me in tow, to Howells, a department store in Cardiff, to buy her a hat: my first recollection of their love for each other.”

Suddenly understanding the power of the photography, Hurn decided in that moment to become a photographer despite knowing nothing about the medium. “Thinking back, I have no recollection of ever having taken any pictures,” he says. “To give up a firm profession for a total abstract one was reckless.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Huck, Music, Photography

Stephan Erfurt: On the Road

Posted on August 6, 2021

*Stephan Erfurt. New York Bridges, 1988.*

German photographer Stephan Erfurt fell in love with photography in 1978 while exploring the streets of Paris with his father’s camera. Alone in the city and still learning French, the camera gave him courage and confidence, inspiring him to become what he describes as a “visual explorer”.

Erfurt stayed true to this approach when he moved to New York City’s infamous Alphabet City in 1984. “Our back window faced a burned down house and our front window looked toward Tompkins Square Park where a lot of drug dealing was going on,” says Erfurt, who grew up in a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Although it was quite a change of scenery, the photographer found an oasis nestled away in the building’s roof garden. “We spent many evenings there with friends, having barbecues, drinking gin and tonics, and with our heads in the clouds above New York,” Erfurt remembers.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Stephan Erfurt. Wall Street New York, 1985.*

Categories: 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Roland L. Freeman: Portfolio

Posted on August 6, 2021

*Roland Freeman. Community Elders, Mississippi, 1975*

Now age 85, award-winning photographer Roland L. Freeman’s photography career began on August 28, 1963, when he borrowed a camera from a friend to photograph the March on Washington.

“I really wanted to say something about what was going on. I chose photography as my vehicle,” he says. The new exhibition, Roland L. Freeman: Portfolio, looks back at the artist’s extraordinary archive of work documenting Black America during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.

Born in Baltimore and raised in rural Maryland, Freeman grew closely involved in the Civil Rights Movement after he unexpectedly joined his first march while taking his grandmother to buy a new dress for Mother’s Day.“There were protests held outside a Baltimore department store because Black women weren’t allowed to try on dresses,” Freeman remembers. “My grandmother said, ‘Give me one of those signs. I’m sick of this crap!’ That started it, and I’ve never looked back.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Roland Freeman. Hallway of Polk Home, Americus, GA, 1971*

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

Rick Castro: Reformation

Posted on August 6, 2021

*Rick Castro. Portrait of De’ Ephrim Manuel 2015.*

Vincent van Gogh observed, “Art is to console those who are broken by life” — a sentiment befitting the struggles of the current moment, as people attempt to establish an approximation of normalcy while the pandemic continues to rage. For photographer Rick Castro — better known as “The Fetish King” — art has provided sustenance and stability during this devastating time that hit him hard when Los Angeles went into lockdown in March 2020.

As businesses shuttered, people panic-shopped and store shelves were left bare; searching for some semblance of understanding, Rick began perusing the web from the safety of his East Hollywood home. “I would go on the newly formed COVID map, and there were cases surrounding me,” Rick says. “I felt like I was living in that Vincent Price movie, The Last Man on Earth, which became I Am Legend. I felt like that was going to be our destination — the final result.”

For many, 2020 was a period of collapse, of endings both literal and figurative. “I had no work,” recalls Rick, who had been organising a career retrospective at a Chinatown gallery that soon closed permanently. “In a week, everything I was working on that year came to an end. I applied for assistance and got turned down for most things; the few I got kept me going, but there was a time where I felt like I was going to lose my home.”

Feeling trapped, Rick knew he needed to escape. He headed to a little cabin that his father built in the late 1960s on a 2.5-acre property in the high desert of San Bernardino County. “It was in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “It was very bare-bones: no air conditioning and no central heat. There was no wifi. I had to use my cell phone as a modem, but that ran out way too quickly. I was really in seclusion, but I loved it. It gave me respite to relax and repair. I immersed myself in writing a daily journal on my blog that I called The Plague Diary: This Is How the World Will End.”

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Rick Castro. Apocalyptic Culture 2020.*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, i-D, Photography

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And

Posted on August 4, 2021

*Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire celebrates with her friends, 1980–83/2009. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York*

At the age of 45, Lorraine O’Grady emerged as an artist fully formed when she made her first public appearance as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” in 1980 at Just Above Midtown, the center of New York’s Black avant-garde run by revolutionary gallerist Linda Goode Bryant. Dressed in a handmade gown comprised of 180 pairs of white gloves, a sparkling tiara, and beauty queen sash, O’Grady entered the gallery bearing flowers and a cat-o’-nine-tails whip.

The flowers were for the audience, the whip she saved for herself in a performance that decried the respectability politics that consumed the Black American middle class desperately striving to find some semblance of protection from the horrors of systemic racism. But O’Grady, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, knew such ideas were illusions at best. As she whipped herself, she spoke verse, her poem ending in a firm declaration: “Black Art Must Take More Risks!”

O’Grady wasn’t wrong, and she wasn’t afraid – even if it meant her work would go without proper recognition for more than 40 years. Now 86, the artist is finally being given her proper due with her first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled Both/And and which just ended, and the publication of two collections of her work from Duke University and Dancing Foxes Press.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Lorraine O’Grady, Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in the White Kitchen tastes her coconut, 1982/2015. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

*Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two), 1983/2009. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Emeke Obanor: Legal Rape

Posted on August 4, 2021

In June 2020, the governors of Nigeria’s 36 states declared a state of emergency on rape. The Nigerian Governor’s Forum took action after women’s group spoke out following the brutal rape of students including Uwaila Vera Omozuwa, who died after being attacked in a church on May 27.

According to a 2014 UNICEF study, at least 25% of Nigerian girls have been sexually assaulted before the age of 18 — though it is a crime that has long been woefully underreported. “The truth is, the pain of women and girls — including the kind of pain caused by sexual violence — simply isn’t a big deal in Nigeria,” OluTimehin Adegbeye wrote in a September 4 Op-ed in The New York Times titled, “Nothing Happens When Women Are Raped in Nigeria.”

Adegbeye continued, “If anything, generalized female pain is a fundamental aspect of our social order. The more abuse a woman is able to meekly accept, the more virtue she is accorded by the people around her. And those who speak out against abuse are put back in their place.”

Such conditions make it all the more important to speak out and challenge the status quo, humanize the victims, center their stories, and advocate for restorative justice. In the series “Legal Rape,” Nigerian photographer and social activist Emeke Obanor does just this. By creating a series of collaborative portraits with survivors, Obanor creates a space to consider women and girls as individuals worthy of the basic rights and protections afforded to all.

The only way to create change it to dismantle pathological behaviors that have been normalized to protect predators from prosecution of their crimes. “The culture aspect includes gender norms that validate men as sexual pursuers and attitudes that view women as sexual conquests by which manhood is legitimized and women are objectified, as sexual objects to be owned, used, consumed, and even sexually abused by the ‘entitled’ male,” Obanor writes in his artist statement.

“The society on their part undermines the emotional trauma experienced by rape victims and thus become unsympathetic and sees it as a norm…. [Meanwhile] Some of the victims truly suffer uncomfortable memories such as nightmares, flashbacks, suicide thoughts and feelings of guilt. It can also manifest in physical ways, like chronic pain, intestinal problems, muscle cramps, paralyzed vocal cord, or as in TY case, sleep disorder.”

Recognizing the first step in healing is to break the silence, Obanor works with rape survivors to create a sage space where they can begin to heal in a process that allows them to slowly reclaim their voice and agency. Here, Obanor shares his work as an artist, activist, and advocate as a man speaking back to the patriarchy against the crimes it inflicts.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Africa, Art, Feature Shoot, Photography

The Fourth Annual Latin American Foto Festival

Posted on August 1, 2021

*Alfred Flores, 5, holds a bunch of quenettes in Patanemo, Venezuela, on July 17, 2020 © Andrea Hernández Briceño*

Strength, resistance, endurance, and adaptability are vital necessities for survival in a brutal world, one that continues to perpetrate the horrors of colonialism upon indigenous communities who have been rooted in the land for thousands of years. When looking at contemporary Latin America, we bear witness to an extraordinary blend of cultures in 33 nations on two continents fighting for survival in the wake of cataclysmic waves of warfare, ethnic cleansing, and environmental destruction.

With the Bronx Documentary Center’s (BDC) Fourth Annual Latin American Foto Festival(LAFF), which opened July 15, we see the stories of the people told by those who have lived it. Featuring a series of exhibitions, virtual and in-person workshops, tours, and panel discussions online and within the Bronx, the LAFF presents a series of powerful and poignant stories offering new paradigms that speak truth to power.

Curated by BDC Directors Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera, the LAFF features work by artists Andrea Hernández Briceño, Carlos Saavedra, Cristóbal Olivares, Florence Goupi, Luis Antonio Rojas, Pablo E. Piovano, Rodrigo Abd, Victor Peña, and Victoria Razo. On view until Sunday in installations at the BDC galleries, as well as on sidewalks, school exteriors, and in community gardens, the LAFF brings the story of Latin America to the Bronx, home to more than half a million Latinos.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*A working horse bites its tail during a break from carrying cocoa beans in a farm in Patanemo, Venezuela, on July 16, 2020 © Andrea Hernández Briceño*

Categories: Art, Bronx, Exhibitions, Latin America, Photography

Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography

Posted on August 1, 2021

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An American original, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) established himself as one of the foremost painters of Black life. His luminous portraits capture the hypnotic energy and effervescent attitude of a people whose style and flair has been often imitated but never duplicated. Coming of age during the Black Power movement, Hendricks recognized the resounding absence of Blackness from the canon of Western art and sought to redress it by creating a pantheon of life-size portraits of friends, relatives, and strangers he met on the street.

Using the techniques of Old Masters, Hendricks would go on to create portraits with more bounce to the ounce than the average masterpiece. Never one to fear going against the grain, Hendricks crafted his own lane, working in figurative art at a time when abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art dominated the contemporary art world. A year before his death Hendricks told the Brooklyn Rail, “I didn’t care what was being done by other artists or what was happening around me. I was dealing with what I wanted to do. Period.”

While setting the art world ablaze with his paintings, Hendricks also worked as a photographer, strapping the “mechanical sketchbook” to his neck before leaving home and using the camera to record sources of inspiration. The new book Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography (published by Skira), offers an extraordinary look into the artist’s little known photography practice, providing a vital look at the ways in which picture making informed his work.

Read the Full Story at Blind

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

Chris Miles: Notting Hill Carnival 1974

Posted on July 28, 2021

By 2019, the last year it was held before the Covid-19 pandemic,Notting Hill Carnival brought an estimated 2.5 million people to the streets of Ladbroke Grove, London, to celebrate Caribbean culture and community. Held over two days in August, the extraordinary event stands as a testament to the vision of Trinidadian journalist and activist Claudia Jones, who brought Carnival to London in 1959, following the Notting Hill race riots the previous year.

Televised by the BBC, the first edition was held indoors and featured live music, dance, and a beauty contest. In 1966, the Notting Hill Carnival moved outdoors, reclaiming the neighborhood formerly the stronghold of fascist Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and neo-Nazi Colin Jordan’s White Defence League. In 1973, Carnival director Leslie Palmer introduced costume bands, steel bands, and stationary sound systems to draw the new generation coming up on reggae music.

That same year, British photographer Chris Miles moved to London to study at the London School of Economics. “The social and physical challenges of the inner cities were major issues of concern at the time and I helped run a youth project in a deprived area near Waterloo,” he says.

By the mid ‘70s, the UK was struggling with widespread unrest in the face of inflation, lost wages, frequent power outages, and increasingly overt racism with the growth of the National Front. Groups began to organize against fascism and for equal rights.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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