Posts from the “Photography” Category

Gail Thacker: Between the Sun & the Moon

Posted on November 3, 2017

Photo: Self portrait 1995. Photography Gail Thacker.

In the late 1970s, Gail Thacker studied painting at Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts, alongside Mark Morrisroe, Pat Hearn, George Condo, Jack Pierson, and Tabboo! The golden haze of the hippie movement had faded away and in its place punk became the call of the day. The DIY ethos enabled artists to create life and work on their own terms, forgoing the established trends in search of freedom and truth.

After graduating in 1981, Thacker headed south, living in the suburbs so that she could easily commute into New York. Though the art world was experiencing a vital renaissance as the downtown scene brought fresh life to the art world, the dark specter of Aids devastated a new generation of youth coming of age.

Morrisroe’s illness became a turning point in her life. When he became gravely ill, he gave Thacker a box with hundreds of sheets of Polaroid 665 film and asked her to use it. She incorporated the Polaroids into her practice, using them as a means to record the world in which she lived – but her photograph was not meant to merely document the world as it was. It became a means to reveal the alchemical properties of life itself.

Through the great fortune of a mistake, Thacker discovered that the negatives could be manipulated through the unintended but inevitable experience of decay. She adapted her process to explore the balance between creation (life) and destruction (death) in art, transforming her work into a metaphor for existence itself: the risk and reward cycle of possibility – loss or win.

Using herself and friends as subjects, Thacker has created works that evoke the unconventional spirit of Old New York – where life itself could become a work of art. Each work Thacker creates is a singular moment that embodies the ephemeral and the eternal in equal part. The photograph, as object, is as fragile and resilient as life itself: marked, torn, taped, collaged, and altered by the passage of time.

Thacker’s work has been gathered for Between the Sun & the Moon, opening today at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, and running through December 22. A book of the same name will be published by QCC Art Gallery Press. Thacker speaks with us about how to navigate the porous boundaries between life and art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Sarah & Katrina 2007. Photography Gail Thacker

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

Brian “B+” Cross: Ghostnotes – Music of the Unplayed

Posted on November 2, 2017

Jay Electronica, Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt. August 2011 / Nas, Los Angeles, California, US. November 2010. Photography Brian “B+” Cross

From left to right, Beni B, Chief Xcel, and Lyrics Born at Records, downtown Sacramento, California, US. May 1995. This is the cover of “Endtroducing” by DJ Shadow. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana, US. August 1998 / Grand Wizard Theodore, Manhattan, New York, US. February 1996. Theodore is the first person to ever scratch a record. His hands started a revolution in music. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.

Life moves in circles, though we may not notice until the revolution is complete. In 1996, DJ Shadow released Endtroducing…, his debut studio album on Mo’ Wax Recordings, with curious photo on the cover. It showed two guys inside a record store: one in profile, the other’s face blurred – neither were DJ Shadow.

It was a scene from everyday life, the very thing you’d recognize as a fellow hip hop head. It stood out for it unpretentiousness, it’s lack of glamour and glitz. Just as hip hop was going pop, Endtroducing… was taking it back to the earliest days of the art form when the DJ was king and crate digging was everything.

Five years later, an editor at C Photography in Spain reached out to Brian “B+” Cross, the photographer who created this seminal image. They wanted to feature it in their annual. Cross agreed – then sent along more images turning their request into a 15-page spread. When it was published, David Hamrick put a Post-It note on the page. Then, in 2015, when he was the director of the University of Texas Press, he reached out to Cross to see if he had more work, thinking it could make an excellent book.

The inevitable does not need a plan; it simply arrives. Cross had been working on Ghostnotes, a collection of photographs made throughout his career, for nearly two decades. The book was conceived as a mixtape, a visual corollary to the sounds of the African diaspora that flow through hip hop, uniting generations of people from all walks of life in the rhythms of the drums, the heartbeat of the art form.

Weaving together threads the combine documentary and portrait photography, Cross guides us through a musical landscape, crafting a composition as brilliantly conceived as a work by Miles Davis. Conceptualized with “A” and “B” sides, Ghostnotes takes us on a journey around the world, brilliantly synthesizing hip hop, Jamaican dub, Brazilian samba, Ethiopian jazz, Cuban timba, and Colombian cumbia. The book features portraits of everyone from The Notorious B.I.G., Eazy-E, and Kendrick Lamar to George Clinton, Brian Wilson, and the Watts Prophets, among so many more. Cross speaks with us about his journey bringing Ghostnotes to life.

Read the Full Story at Miss Rosen

The Notorious B.I.G., Beverly Hills, California, US. April 1995. Biggie was murdered outside this building three weeks later, and there is still no plaque or monument to commemorate his death. Photography Brian “B+” Cross

Forest Lawn, Glendale, California, US. February 14th, 2006. J Dilla’s funeral. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.

Categories: 1990s, Africa, Art, Books, Bronx, Dazed, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Sean Maung: The Vaqueros of Santa Monica Boulevard

Posted on November 2, 2017

Photo: Copyright Sean Maung

Photo: Copyright Sean Maung

Santa Monica Boulevard is one of Los Angeles’ most fabled thoroughfares, running West from Silver Lake, through Hollywood and Beverly Hills all the way to Ocean Avenue, just off the Pacific.

“There are different areas on Santa Monica that have different flavours,” photographer Sean Maung, an LA native, explains. “When you say ‘Santa Monica Boulevard,’ most people think of West Hollywood, which has a very strong gay and lesbian scene. But I’ve always been really attracted to Santa Monica Boulevard in East Hollywood.”

The random mix of people from local Russian, Thai, and Latino communities appealed to Maung, who has been documenting the street culture of his hometown for over a decade. While photographing transgender prostitutes working the street late at night, Maung saw the words “Club Tempo” on an orange sign in front of a mall and thought to himself, “What’s Club Tempo?And why is it in the back of a strip mall in East Hollywood?’”

He would soon find out.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Photo: Copyright Sean Maung

Photo: Copyright Sean Maung

Categories: Art, Huck, Photography

Laurence Rasti: There Are No Homosexuals in Iran

Posted on October 31, 2017

Photo: From There Are No Homosexuals In Iran. Photography Laurence Rasti

In February 1979, the Persian Empire came to an end. After 2,500 years of a continuous monarchy, Iran became an Islamic Republic governed by Sharia Law – making homosexuality a crime subject to the imprisonment, corporal punishment, and execution.

At its core the issue is intercourse. Any activity outside heterosexual marriage is viewed as a violation of religious law. Interestingly, transgender people are considered heterosexual and will not be persecuted if they complete gender confirmation surgery, which may be partially funded by the state. As a result, Iran ranks as second in the world, following Thailand, for gender realignment surgeries. Many gay men have been pressured by their families to become transgender – or are forced to flee the country in order to save themselves.

Many come to Denizli, an industrial city in southwest Turkey that acts as a transit zone, allowing Iranian refugees to live in a state of purgatory while they wait patiently for a visa to live in yet another country. Since the U.S. travel ban was implemented and Canada stopped accepting Iranian refugees, their circumstances are becoming increasingly dire and difficult. While homosexuality is legal in Turkey, homophobia remains an issue that all LGBTQI people must face. Although free from the Kafkaesque struggles of their native land, the Iranians must remain anonymous in order to protect themselves

It is here in Denizli that Swiss-born Iranian photographer Laurence Rasti began her work. While pursuing her BA in photography from Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne, Rasti began focusing on issues of gender and identity. As a first-generation Swiss woman, she began using photography to examine the cultural codes of both the East and the West. Between 2014 and 2016, Rasti made ten trips to the city to photograph men and women driven to hide in plain sight. By befriending the people and earning their trust, Rasti created a series of intimate portraits that were singled out for distinction to the Magnum Photography Awards 2016 by juror Amy Pereira, Director of Photography at MSNBC.

On November 4, Rasti will publish her first book There Are No Homosexuals in Iran (Edition Patrick Frey). The title was inspired by the words of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a speech given at Columbia University on September 24, 2007. “In Iran, we do not have homosexuals like in your country,” the then President proudly declared, failing to shed light on the circumstances that enabled him to make this claim.

Rasti shares her experiences making this work, offering insights on how to photograph invisible people with compassion, dignity, and respect.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: From There Are No Homosexuals In Iran. Photography Laurence Rasti

Photo: From There Are No Homosexuals In Iran. Photography Laurence Rasti

Categories: Art, Books, Dazed, Photography

City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection

Posted on October 27, 2017

The Death of Graffiti by LADY PINK, 1982, acrylic on masonite, 19×22.” Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

DUMP KOCH painted by Spin, photograph by Martha Cooper, 1982.

It began in the stacks. Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, came across a collection of black books Martin Wong had donated to the Museum in 1994, just five years before he would die from AIDS in San Francisco. The black books were the site of sketches and drawings, works on paper that were passed from head to head, giving writers a look at what their contemporaries were doing with marker in hand and giving them a space to contribute to the conversation.

In total, Martin Wong (1946-1999) donated 55 black books and more than 300 mixed media paintings on canvas, cardboard, paper, and plywood. The work Wong collected includes early permutations of designs that would later appear on trains and buildings throughout New York City. And though those paintings are long gone, their legacy lives on.

Opening February 4 at the Museum of the City of New York, City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection presents 105 works by legendary writers DAZE. DONDI, FUTURA 200, Keith Haring, LADY PINK, LEE, and SHARP among others, alongside historical photographs by Charlie Ahearn, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, Jon Naar, and Jack Stewart. Paired together, the paintings, drawings, and photographs take us back to a time and a place that, though not far away at all, no longer exists in our daily lives.

It is the photographs that create the context, a context that may be difficult to imagine for those who did not live it. Trains were bombed with spray paint and marker both inside and out, as masterpieces ran the entire length of whole cars and tags decorating the interiors. This was the era of an artistic impulse made manifest as by any means necessary, of going down to the yards after dark or walking through live and dead tunnels to paint. This period in New York City history marks the creation of a style and a culture that has swept the world with anti-authoritarian delight. It was here in these black books and paintings that a new world was born, and it is here in these photographs that this world remains forever more.

Graffiti Kids, photograph by Jon Naar, 1973. ©Jon Naar

Redbird (Stay High 149) photograph by Jon Naar, 1973. ©Jon Naar

Corcoran observes, “We decided to show the Martin Wong Collection because we thought it had real cultural significance to New York’s story over the last thirty, forty years. Graffiti was such an omnipresent part of life in New York. It was loved and hated, there was no in between. Whatever you thought of it, theirs is not doubt it had an affect on the culture in general. Style writing as it is known today was born in New York and became a worldwide phenomenon.”

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue of the same name, published by Skira Rizzoli with the Museum of the City of New York, featuring essays by Charle Ahearn, Carlo McCormick, Sacha Jenkins, Lee Quiñones, Chris “Daze” Ellis, Aaron “Sharp” Goodstone, and Sean Corcoran. The essays create a context for Wong’s obsession for the art, an obsession that adds intimacy and understanding to his need to collect, to document, to preserve. Twenty years ago, Wong knew, intuitively, that neither he nor the graffiti of the era would be with us today. And it is in this way that “City as Canvas” is more than an exhibition of art, but it stands as a monument to an era that has come and has gone. And era that is preserved forevermore in the photographs that show what had come of these preparations for masterpieces that once dotted the subway lines and crowned Kings.

For those who once witnessed the world that lives in these photographs, City as Canvas is like a teleportation device into the past. The raw, live energy of the letterform set against a backdrop of freedom at an cost beings us back to that old school D.I.Y. vibe of the 1970s and 80s New York. And for those who missed it, the Museum exists, as a place of honor and veneration to the legacy we as New Yorkers carry forth.

First Published in L’Oeil de la Photographie
March 20, 2014

Howard the Duck Handball Court photograph by Charlie Ahearn. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

Lion’s Den Handball Court photograph by Charlie Ahearn. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

Martin Wong, photograph by Peter Bellamy, 1985.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Photography

Meg Hewitt :Tokyo Is Yours

Posted on October 27, 2017

Photo: Meg Hewitt. Johnny, Golden Gai 2015

Photo: Meg Hewitt. Legs – after Daido, 2016

In March 2011, disaster befell Japan as the Great Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster hit the nation in record time. Five years later, Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan revealed that the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of nuclear destruction that would have required the evacuation of 50 million people – a feat he acknowledged was near impossible.

As this science-fiction horror story played out in real time, Australian photographer Meg Hewitt began to imagine the density of Tokyo, the feeling of being trapped as a cloud of nuclear fallout spread, and the disturbing question of whether or not to trust the government and big business. For Hewitt, thinking was not enough: she needed to experience life in Tokyo for herself.

Over a period of two years, Hewitt created a body of photographs inspired by the curious co-existence of darkness and light, trauma and innocence, death and life – which she crafted into the newly released monograph, Tokyo Is Yours. Hewitt combines the raw edge of Anders Petersen with the knowing glance of Daido Moriyama, the haunting glamour of Fritz Lang with the graphic traditions of Manga through a careful edit and sequencing that pairs unlikely moments to sublime effect.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Japan, Photography

Lilla Szasz: Mother Michael Goes to Heaven

Posted on October 26, 2017

Lilla Szasz fell into the underworld when she began documenting teen girls living in a detention home in Budapest. Here, she met girls who had turned to sex work to survive. While they were locked up, pimps waited outside the gates for their release, with ample supplies of drugs to keep them caught in a cycle of addiction and debt.

Their tragic stories spoke to Szasz. She yearned to know more about the people living on the edge, on the margins of society. In 2008, she travelled to downtown Budapest, where she met Monica and Michael, young sex workers who shared a flat. Their neighbours had been extorting them, threatening to call the police, so they moved to a larger place in the slums, where no one cared what they did.

At the age of 23, Monica left her home in the countryside, having been regularly abused by her alcoholic father. She met a man that she wanted to marry, discovered he visited sex workers, and broke up with him. To get revenge, she became a sex worker, and like her father, she began to drink. She met Michael, 31, who was already hustling, in a bar. She moved in with him, and together they were able to cover all orientations and needs of their clients. A drag queen named Alexander, 22, later joined them. The two men became a couple, highly volatile in nature, marked by physical abuse and mind games.

Their years together were filled with love and strife, by jealousies, betrayals, poverty, and fights. Yet they were a family, a deeply unhappy family, but bonded to each other all the same. Szasz’s photographs tell the story of three people trying to create a home, searching for love that they are unable to sustain or nourish. Trapped in a cycle of pain and addiction, they struggle to survive.

The toxicity of the environment eventually caused Szasz to end the project, which she titled “Mother Michael Goes to Heaven” – after Michael committed suicide in the flat in 2010. Like so many people who have never known a good family, these three found their way to each other and held on as long as they could. Szasz speaks with us about her experiences with people who were living on the edge, desperately trying to create a family yet unable to meet their own basic needs.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

All Photos: Lilla Szász: Mother Michael Goes to Heaven, part from series (2008-2010)

Categories: Art, Dazed, Photography

Samuel Fosso: Self-Portraits

Posted on October 18, 2017

Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.

Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.

At the tender age of 13, Samuel Fosso set up Studio Photo Nationale, and began his career as a photographer. The year was 1975, and Fosso was working in the city of Bangui, located just inside the border of Central African Republic.

“With Studio National, you will be beautiful, stylish, dainty and easy to recognize,” Fosso promised. Here he works taking passport, portrait, and wedding photographs for the community—but it was his self-portraits that brought the artist global acclaim.

“I started taking self-portraits simply to use up spare film; people wanted their photographs the next day, even if the roll wasn’t finished, and I didn’t like waste. The idea was to send some pictures to my mother in Nigeria, to show her I was all right.,” Fosso told The Guardian in 2011. “Then I saw the possibilities. I started trying different costumes, poses, backdrops. It began as a way of seeing myself grow up, and slowly it became a personal history – as well as art, I suppose.”

And from this seed of genius, a life’s work arose, one that is rooted in the complexity of layering, meaning, and identity inherent to the self, and just how plastic these things are when we skate along the surface of life, mistaking appearances for the thing they claim to represent.

Like a great actor, Fosso delves deep within himself and returns with an understanding of human nature and the way it manifests in the body, and on the face, through costume, gesture, and expression. For the past forty years, Fosso has honed his craft, creating a body of work that examines the experience of life as a West African man.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.

Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.

Categories: 1970s, Africa, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Pieter Hugo: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Posted on October 15, 2017

Emeka, motorcyclist and Abdullahi Ahmadu Asaba, Nigeria, from the series “The Hyena & Other Men”, 2005-2007, 2007. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg

Imagine coming of age as a white man in South Africa during Apartheid. How does the truth of your people weigh on you: does it turn you into an accomplice or does it push you into the margins of resistance? It’s a question worthy of consideration outside the frame of SA – it speaks to the nature of existence: do you stand for or against oppression?

South African photographer Pieter Hugo took to the camera to address his questions and concerns, using the medium as a means to examine, document, and subvert, creating several bodies of work that are deeply layered and resonant, charged with strength, emotion, and defiance.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg/Prestel) beautifully presents Hugo’s most important series made over the past two decades. Here we see how Hugo inherently understood his position as a white man in South Africa and the legacy it entailed, neither shirking from, diminishing, or rationalizing the horrors of his people. Instead he took his inheritance as the opportunity to set the record straight, to stand as an outsider and from this vantage point, use the camera to speak truth to power.

Of the first series, Looking Aside, made in South African between 2003 and 2006, Hugo writes, “In this early body of work I explicitly took a confrontational stance, an attitude that is rehearsed in a lot of my subsequent work. It is an unflinching series. I wanted the intensity of my own gaze.”

That gaze was informed by two trajectories: the falsehoods of photojournalism as informed by American ideologies steeped in superficial humanism and the use of photography by the South African government as a means to control apartheid through a system of classification and separation. With these currents flowing through his mind, Hugo pointed his camera straight on, creating a series of portraits that defy romanticism, intended to discomfit and disconcert with their lack of heroicism, beauty, or pretense.

This direct approach makes use of the camera as a tool of aggression, for it forces us to look, to see, to recognize a picture of humanity that has been whitewashed, distorted, or completely denied. Whether photographing the vestiges of the Rwandan Genocide in 2004 or The Hyena & Other Men in Nigeria in 2005-2007, Hugo’s photographs are challenging and confrontational, yet courageous.

Hugo’s willingness to upend tradition was transformative. Where The Hyena & Other Men was shocking when it was first released, it has now become embedded into the fabric of fine art photography. And this is where things begin to shift, as Hugo’s work blurs the boundaries between documentary, portraiture, and fine art to create a new kind of environmental portraiture.

Obechukwu Nwoye, Enugu, Nigeria, from the series “Nollywood”, 2008-2009, 2008. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg

Green Point Common, Cape Town, from the series “Kin”, 2006-2013, 2007. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg

From the Wild Honey Collectors, shot in Ghana in 2005, to Nollywood, made in Nigeria in 2008-2009, we see the emergence of a new aspect to Hugo’s work. “In my development as an artist,” Hugo writes of Nollywood, “this project was the first time I really questioned the veracity of the portrait. I became aware of how one can play with portraiture, this it can be much more than just the superficial depiction of a subject.”

And so, by the time he was making Kin in South Africa between 2006-2013, and Permanent Error in Ghana in 2009-2010, everything had changed. Hugo’s portraits had entered into a new realm, one that was just as direct but less antagonistic. They were subtle and complex yet at times eerie and apocalyptic. Their humanism was neither sentimental nor idealistic; instead they captured the disturbing fact that reality is deeply unnerving.

Rooted in truth, we simply look and we observe, but it is how we react — and what we do with that reaction, that speaks of and for our character. Since seeing Hugo’s photographs made for Permanent Error, published by Prestel in 2011, I felt a shift: a purpose and a calling in my writing about photography and art.

His photographs are made inside a circle of hell. The Agbogbloshie dump, located on the outskirts of Ghana’s capital, Accra, is a wetland turned wasteland, a slum and a workplace populated by thousands of men and boys who refer to this area as Sodom and Gomorrah. This is a slum of the twenty-first century, a place that Western countries would never allow within their borders, a place that could only exist among disenfranchised—in the rice fields of Guiya, China; behind the electronics markets of Lagos, Nigeria; in the back alleys of Karachi, Delhi, and Hanoi. It is the place where pits are dug and fires burn, and in those fires, our Information Age truly leaves its mark.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that we now produce 50 million metric tons of e-waste per year, and 6,500 tons will arrive each month at the Port of Tema, where it then finds its way on to Agbogbloshie. The workers in these poisoned pits make their living first by hauling then smashing, gutting, and burning the televisions and computers to recover copper, steel, and aluminum. The only thing green in this equation is the money being made by electronics manufacturers, whose sales are booming—despite the recession—for computer games, printers, electronic toys, MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS devices, camcorders, tablet readers, computers, and televisions.

In 2001, when the book was released, United States, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Japan, and South Korea refuse to honor the Basel Ban Agreement, which was created in 1995 to ban the export of all forms of hazardous wastes for any reason. Of these countries, only the US refused to ratify the original 1989 United Nations treaty known as the Basel Convention, which created a full an on the export of toxic wastes for any reason from developed to developing countries.

The result of this failure is the creation of places like Agbogbloshie, where the unrelenting waves of the Information Age crash upon the shores like tidal waves. Pieter Hugo’s photographs show us the price of progress, an unquantifiable desecration of the earth and its inhabitants. This kind of inhumanity reaches a level on unconscionable ignorance that Hugo’s photographs brutally address. Baring witness to a new kind of inferno that is in its nascent stage, Hugo’s photographs stand as a testament against our complacent assumptions. “Recycling” is the chipper chatter of marketers leading the masquerade.

Permanent Error stands in dark warning and reveal the reality of our brutally consumerist lifestyle. We share this responsibility, just as we share this earth. You and me, your friends and family, all of us are the reason Agbogbloshie exists. I’ve never gotten over this and it challenges me to come to terms with not only my work as a writer but as someone complicit in the destruction of the planet.

Hugo reminds me that reality exists beyond our experience of it, and at the same time it is our responsibility to come to terms with our inheritance. To avoid and ignore, to rationalize, to pretend or play dumb is nothing more than a lie. On the path to solutions, we must first speak the truth, to ask the disturbing questions, and come to terms with our guilt. Too many get caught up in shame and blame, in a disingenuous paradigm that asserts itself to avoid responsibility.

That we don’t have the answers is rational. How could we when we can barely speak or acknowledge the truth? Hugo reminds us, the first step towards salvation is owning up, baring the burden, and transforming it through the action of redemption and salvation in the name of humanity.

Thoba Calvin and Tshepo Cameron Sithole- Modisane, Pretoria, from the series “Kin”, 2006- 2013, 2013. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Photography

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco

Posted on October 12, 2017

Photo: Antonio Lopez, Pat Cleveland, Paris (Blue Water Series), 1975. Copyright, 2012, The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Photo: Antonio Lopez, Corey Tippin and Donna Jordan, Saint-Tropez, 1970. Photograph by Juan Ramos. © Copyright The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, 2012. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Deep in the mountains of Puerto Rico lies Utuado, built by Spanish imperialists nearly 300 years ago. It is here that Antonio Lopez (1943–1987) was born. The son of a father who crafted mannequins and a mother who made dresses, Lopez was a child prodigy who began to sketch at the age of two, revealing a gift that would revolutionise the fashion industry and prefigure the times in which we currently live.

At the age of seven, Lopez and his family moved to New York City, where he grew up living a double life, making mannequins with his father but playing with dolls out of sight. His burgeoning bisexuality would soon drive a wedge between Lopez and his family, inspiring him to create his own centered in his artist studio at Carnegie Hall.

As the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements made space for those who had been previously marginalized by the mainstream, Lopez and his creative partner Juan Ramos (1942–1995) introduced goddess-like visions of his muses to the world in the pages of Vogue, WWD, and The New York Times. His discoveries, known as “Antonio’s Girls” included Grace Jones, Pat Cleveland, Cathee Dahmen, Tina Chow, Jessica Lange, Jerry Hall and Warhol Superstars Donna Jordan, Jane Forth and Patti D’Arbanville – women who not merely beautiful but were extraordinary characters and artists in their own right.

In celebration of his glorious career, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump, will make its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 12. The documentary charts Lopez’s rise from the streets of the Bronx to the pinnacle of the Parisian demimonde. As the dominant fashion illustrator of the late 1960s and 70s, Lopez arrived on the scene just as ready-to-wear came into existence, bringing his distinctive Afro-Latinx sensibilities into the mix.

Antonio Lopez 1970 brings us back to a pivotal period in fashion history when the aristocratic hierarchy of the couture houses was falling away. In its place, Lopez emerged with a vision so modern that he was boldly ahead of his time – James Crump reflects on the ways in which Lopez’s Afro-Latinx roots transformed the fashion industry.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Eija Vehka Ajo, Juan Ramos, Jacques de Bascher, Karl Lagerfeld and Antonio Lopez, Paris, 1973. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Dazed, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Jane Friedman: How to Find Artists That Can Change the World

Posted on October 3, 2017

Photo: Mark Sink, Grace Jones, ca 1988

Artwork: Arturo Vega, “Supermarket Sign(Steak Sale)”, 1973. Acrylic on canvas 48 x 72 x 1 1/2 inches

Located in the heart of New York’s East Village, Howl! Happening was established in memory of artist Arturo Vega, who designed the iconic Ramones logo. Vega, a Mexican national, fled his native land in 1968 when the government rounded up 148 of the country’s most notable artists and intellectuals, putting their lives at risk. Vega fled to New York where he had prominent connections, like Jane Friedman – the woman made rock’n’roll journalism a legitimate business.

New York native Jane Friedman grew up on Broadway, as her father handled public relations for legendary shows along the Great White Way. Friedman followed in her father’s footsteps, and along the way, she realised her talents would be best served by supporting the greatest artists of the time. She went on to craft a new lane in the media, representing artists like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, as well as doing PR for the famed musical Hair. She was also Patti Smith’s manager throughout her career.

Friedman has been a behind-the-scenes fixture in downtown New York, working with artists and musicians to ensure their success and legacy. When Vega, one of her dearest friends died in 2013, Friedman set up Howl! Arts, a non-profit organisation that preserves the culture of the East Village and the Lower East Side in a rapidly gentrifying city that has effectively erased so much of the New York’s fabled past.

Taking its name from Allen Ginsberg’s famed 1955 poem, Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project is the cornerstone of the organisation. A gallery, performance space, and archive located around the corner from where CBGBs once stood, Howl! Happening has been home to a series of phenomenal shows including exhibitions by Patricia Field, Lydia Lunch, Taboo!, PUNK Magazine’s 40th Anniversary, and The East Village Eye – as well as on-going events and performances that showcase the very best of the community, which continues to thrive despite the exponential explosion in the cost of living.

This month, Howl! presents Love Among the Ruins: 56 Bleecker Gallery Street and the late 80s New York, a group exhibition that looks back at the famed East Village gallery and performance space that served as a vital intersection of music, fashion, art, and nightlife during one of the most vital and devastating period of New York history. Featuring works by nearly 100 artists including David LaChapelle, Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dondi White, Stephen Sprouse, and George Condo, to name just a few, the exhibition is on view through October 7, 2017.

Friedman speaks with us about what it takes to cultivate a community of artists that can change the world, while staying true to your roots, and shares images from the ongoing show.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Straight to Hell flyer

Photo: Mark Sink, Keith Haring, ca 1988

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Painting, Photography, Women