Posts from the “Photography” Category

Polaroid x Keith Haring

Posted on July 27, 2021

*© Keith Haring Foundation. Licensed by Artestar, New York*

Keith Haring first made his name under the streets of New York in the early 1980s when he hit the train stations with a piece of white chalk in hand, crafting luminous love letters to the city in the space where advertising traditionally went. Using the subway platforms as a “laboratory,” Haring developed a simple yet evocative iconography replete with flying saucers, barking dogs, and most famously the “Radiant Baby.” In a landscape filled with graffiti masterpieces, Haring’s work caught the eye of the citizenry and art world alike.

Haring, who understood branding long before it became de rigueur, quickly shot to the top with projects including the Public Art Fund’s One Times Square Spectacolor billboard series, collaborations with choreographer Bill T. Jones, as well as fashion designers Willi Smith and Vivienne Westwood. His work was also shown at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale. Through it all Haring maintained his commitment to making art for the people, creating the first major work at the now-famed Houston Bowery Wall and the Crack is Wack mural in Harlem — for which he was arrested on charges of vandalism in 1986.

A true egalitarian who believed in the power of art, Haring made sure his work was accessible to all — employing the very ethos of photography by creating an object that could be reproduced infinite times and therefore rendered affordable. In April 1986, he opened the Pop Shop in the heart of Soho, making t-shirts, posters, stickers, buttons, and other ephemera featuring his work — a move for which he was first criticized then later copied en masse.

“I could earn more money if I just painted a few things and jacked up the price,”Haring explained. “My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1980s, Art, Blind, Photography

Stanley Stellar: Artifacts at the End of a Decade

Posted on July 26, 2021

*Stanley Stellar. “Brian Michaels in a cowboy hat with a friend, West Side Highway NYC” (1981).*

On May 18 1981, the New York Native, the only gay newspaper in the city, published the first story on a new disease later identified as AIDS. After hearing rumours of a “gay cancer,” the paper’s medical writer Lawrence D. Mass contacted the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC claimed that word of a deadly threat descending upon the gay community largely unfounded – a pernicious start to what would become a longstanding pattern of malignant neglect by the federal government.

The advent of AIDS marked the end of a brief but shining chapter of LGBTQ+ history that began with the Stonewall uprising in 1969. As a new generation came of age during the Gay Liberation Movement, they transformed the street of New York into a garden of earthly delights, reveling in the bountiful pleasures of existence itself. No longer driven into the shadows, forced to deny their true selves, the community could openly partake in sex, love, friendship, and camaraderie.

Although the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) would not extend Constitutional rights to the LGBTQ+ community until 2003, change was in the air. After 20 years of pathologising homosexuality as a form of mental illness, the American Psychiatry Association removed it from the DSM-II in 1973 – the very same year that SCOTUS modified its definition of “obscenity” to finally legalise the depiction of male frontal nudity.

While established artists like Andy Warhol began experimenting with homoerotic photography in his series Sex Parts and Torsos, he struggled to call a spade a space, writing in The Andy Warhol Diaries: “I shouldn’t call them nudes. It should be something more artistic. Like ‘Landscapes’.” But a new crop of emerging artists including Antonio Lopez (1943-1987), Peter Hujar (1934-1987), Alvin Baltrop (1947-2004), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), and Peter Berlin were more inclined to embrace the spirit of the times, centring LGBTQ+ life in their work.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

*Stanley Stellar. “Grand Torino, Hudson River Waterfront, NYC” (1979).*

*Stanley Stellar. “Gay Pride Day on Christopher Street, NYC” (1983).*

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

Erwin Olaf: Strange Beaurt

Posted on July 23, 2021

*“Palm Springs”, American Dream, Self-Portrait with Alex I, 2018 © Erwin Olaf*

eality — like nature — is a wild, savage, and beautiful force, a truth so grand as to be sublime that we can never truly fathom it, though we most certainly may try. Art, in its most exalted form, transports us into an ineffable realm, a space where understanding lays beyond the word itself. “We all know that Art is not truth,” Pablo Picasso famously said. “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

These sentiments speak to the work of Dutch photographer and multimedia artist Erwin Olaf, whose carefully staged images occupy the liminal space between fact and fiction. In the new exhibitions “New Series: April Fool and In the Forest” and “Strange Beauty“, on view in Munich, Germany along with a catalogue, Olaf revisits his archive, looking back over his 40-year career that explores meditative aspects of human emotion, motivation, and thought as well as pressing social and political issues facing women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.

“I always have to be a little bit angry otherwise I don’t work,” Olaf says with a frankness that underlies the heart of a true revolutionary. A rebellion is driven by love, and a desire to tear down false truths propped up by our current world. “I always get the question, ‘Is it real or unreal?’ With photography, why are we thinking we are looking at reality? Olaf asks.

“For me, the camera is an instrument to register my imagination and to translate the things in my mind into an image. When we see a painting, we accept that it is from the mind and the spirit of the painter. It’s the same with music, literature, and film. You can go to the cinema in the afternoon, watch a movie, and cry your heart out when you know it’s totally artificial. But when it’s photography, it should be part of the ‘real world.’ I don’t think so.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*“Palm Springs”, The Kite, 2018 © Erwin Olaf*

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

Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History

Posted on July 20, 2021

*Vaginal Davis and Joan Jett Blakk at SPEW 2. Photo by Mark Freitas*

From the very start, queer identity has been a central proponent of punk culture, starting with the name itself being jailhouse slang to describe the man on the receiving end of anal sex. By the time punk culture was named in the mid to late 1970s, it was an amorphous space of freedom, where gender and sexuality were fluid.

“In the beginning, punk rock was exceptionally gender diverse,” says Walter Crasshole, who edited the recent book, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History (PM Press) along with Liam Warfield and Yony Leyser. “There were a number of LGBTQ+ protagonists in the punk scene, some who made that very clear and it was part of their identities, like Jayne County.”

But it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that queercore emerged as a potent force, rising from the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, the neoliberal policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the reactionary, hyper-masculine orthodoxy of the hardcore scene.

Recognizing the community no longer provided the support they needed to survive, a group of disaffected queer punks, artists, and musicians, including G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, began to develop their own scene, laying the groundwork for what would become first known as ‘homocore’, then take on the more inclusive name ‘queercore’ in the early ‘90s.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Deke Nihilson at Homocore Chicago. Photo by Mark Freitas*

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

A Visual Conversation Between Carrie Mae Weems and Diane Arbus

Posted on July 20, 2021

*Diane Arbus, Black boy, Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1965 © The Estate of Diane Arbus*

“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way,” Diane Arbus said — a truth that challenges us to acknowledge we are not fully in control of our lives or our destinies, but rather charged to navigate the world with the understanding there is always something that will escape our perception or comprehension. Such wisdom requires that we act with faith, yet remain receptive to what we may uncover along the way, for it is only in the unknown that possibility can be found.

Photography, being both incredibly precise and prone to all sorts of “accidents,” makes this abundantly clear; for all our intentions, there’s still space for new understandings to emerge. With the portrait, artists explore the landscapes of the physical and psychological worlds simultaneously.

For Diane Arbus and Carrie Mae Weems, the photograph is a space to consider communities largely misrepresented, marginalized, or erased from the history of Western art. Whether using documentary or staged photographs, Arbus and Weems create tender, thoughtful, and honest portraits that engage with complex issues of identity, gender, and race in contemporary American life.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup), from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990 © Carrie Mae Weems*

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

Alan Moss: East St. Louis, 1968–1971

Posted on July 20, 2021

The year was 1968, a time of massive political and cultural change. After completing his second year of grad school in biochemistry, Alan Moss, then 24, attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as an alternate delegate for Eugene McCarthy.

After witnessing the conflict between Vietnam War protestors and the National Guard, Moss had a change of heart. “I lost all interest in spending my time in a lab, shielded from the real world,” he recalls.

Classified 1A (eminently draftable), Moss had one last chance to defer: teach in a distressed school system. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to accompany his girlfriend entering a Masters program there. Although Missouri required a teaching certificate, Illinois did not, so Moss secured a position in East St. Louis, located just on the other side of the Mississippi River.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Hazel Hankin: Never Before Seen Photos of NYC in the 1970s &’80s

Posted on July 19, 2021

*Hazel Hankin. Skate dancers at Park Circle Roller Disco, Brooklyn, NY, 1978.*

*Hazel Hankin. Busy street scene, Lower East Side, 1976.*

Growing up in Midwood, Brooklyn, in the 1960s, Hazel Hankin led a sheltered life until she started going into Manhattan as a teenager. “The wider world of New York City opened up to me. It was gritty and a little scary, but also a place of energy, excitement and possibilities. It was a time of great social and political ferment,” Hazel says, rattling off an impressive list of liberation movements, anti-imperialist activism and radical feminist consciousness-raising groups that transformed her worldview.

As the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords fought for human rights, Hazel was keenly aware that the importance of justice extended to something as basic as housing. “New York was affordable,” she remembers. “You could live on a modest income, and there were jobs to be had if and when you needed one. If you were an artist, an activist, or just a young person trying things out, you could get an apartment, make a little money, and do just that.”

After graduating high school at age 16, Hazel enrolled at university the Pratt Institute in NYC but had to drop out after problems at home caused undue stress. “I rented an apartment with my friend Michele — who tells people now that we ran away from home together at 18,” Hazel says with a laugh, looking back fondly on her years living near the Flatbush entrance to Prospect Park.

Determined to continue her studies, Hazel got an office job working days and enrolled in Brooklyn College, where she studied painting and photography, taking courses at night. At that time, the contemporary art world excluded photography from its ranks, a practice that would continue for the next two decades. Largely unprofessionalised, photography drew artists like Hazel, who gravitated to the fluidity of form and could move seamlessly between portrait, documentary, photojournalism, and street photography over the course of a single afternoon.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Hazel Hankin. Two boys, Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1977.*

*Hazel Hankin. Neighborhood salsa band performance, Lower East Side, 1976.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Brooklyn, i-D, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1973

Posted on July 19, 2021

*Leni Sinclair. Black Panthers Meeting, Year Unknown.*

Born Magdalene Arndt in 1940, Leni Sinclair grew up in East Germany listening to jazz artists like Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald on Radio Luxemburg. At age 19, Sinclair moved to Detroit to study at Wayne State University. She quickly became involved with the radical political and cultural scene, becoming one of the two members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the city.

In 1964, she met poet John Sinclair, and married him the following year. Together they set up the Detroit Artists Workshop, a network of communal houses, performance space, and print shop that became the center for the Detroit music scene, attracting the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk, all of whom Sinclair photographed.

Police began targeting the Detroit Artists Workshop, raiding it in 1965 and 1967, and arresting John Sinclair on marijuana charges. Undeterred, the Sinclairs soldiered on, practicing the peace, love, and free vibes of hippie culture before such a thing existed. Throughout it all, they remained dedicated to art, music, and activism, going so far as to establish the White Panther Party to support the work of the Black Panther Party before the term “ally” gained clout.

With the publication of Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1973 (MOCAD and Foggy Notion Books), Sinclair looks back at her extraordinary work documenting the art, music and political scenes of late 1960s Detroit. The book opens at the March on Washington of 1963 and chronicles performances and artists’ events at the Detroit Artists Workshop, early concerts with the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges in the Grande Ballroom, anti-war protests, the Detroit Uprising and the Black Panthers, and Sinclair’s ongoing documentation of Sun Ra, and other luminaries in jazz, blues and rock and roll.

Here Sinclair looks back at a life on the edge, when radical culture transformed the face of the mainstream forevermore.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Music, Photography

Mime Imbert & Cristina Firpo: Prince Street

Posted on July 16, 2021

*Prince Street. Photography by Maxime Imbert, Styling by Cristina Firpo*

In 1974, Susan Meiselas moved to Mott Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s famous Little Italy neighbourhood, and soon after met a gaggle of preteen girls on the cusp of adolescence. She got to know this group, photographing their adventures as they traipsed around town, walking through the streets knowing that the world was theirs for the taking. Her photographs, which are brought together in the series Prince Street Girls, have become icons in their own right, capturing the innocent yet knowing pleasures of youth, when summers were bountiful and responsibilities were few.

Fast forward five and a half decades to April 2021, when photographer Maxime Imbert and stylist Cristina Firpo teamed up to shoot Prince Street, a zine printed in a limited edition of 100 copies. Photographed on location at a house in Eltham South, east London, Prince Street tells the story of four sisters spending the summer holidays at home. Dressed in vintage Prada, Fiona O’Neill, Helena Manzano, Alexandra Armata, and Ilana Blumberg, the girls effuse a sense of casual chic, ready for wherever life may take them.

A familiar sensation of excitement and boredom fills the photographs, lending the images a melancholic air and the viewer a sense of nostalgia for a perhaps simpler time. With a second edition potentially on the way, all profits from Prince Street will go to Hackney Quest, a charity organisation serving the young people and families of Imbert and Firpo’s own neighbourhood. Here, the duo tells us about the making of Prince Street.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: AnOther, Art, Fashion, Photography

Radical Tenderness: Trans for Trans Portraiture

Posted on July 16, 2021

*Julia and Maxi, 2003 © Johanna Jackie Baier*

“Visibility” is the buzzword du jour but like any other form of exposure it needs to be backed by viable changes in art institutions and industries, otherwise it runs the risk of being nothing more than a superficial act of tokenism. For trans artists, making work that depicts themselves and the worlds in which they live is an essential part of their activism.

In the online exhibition “Radical Tenderness: Trans for Trans Portraiture“, Alice Austen House executive director Victoria Munro and guest curator Dr. Eliza Steinbeck bring together the work of artists Johanna Jackie Baier (Germany), Zackary Drucker (US), Texas Isaiah (US), and Del LaGrace Volcano (US/Sweden) who use photography as an essential part of their practices of survival and care. Rather than follow the commercial trope of visibility, which caters to mainstream narratives that positions diversity as “one of each,” therefore reinforcing “otherness,” the artists featured here create a world that is inherently “for us, by us.”

“Photography for me is a survival strategy,” Del LaGrace Volcano says in the exhibition catalogue. “I am intersex but also trans and non-binary, so my approach is from the inside, not ethnographic or anthropologic. I make work with people I connect with or am hoping to know better. Afterwards, in silence, tenderly working with my memories of the photographic moments we created together, I wonder if they have any idea how much they all mean to me? Connection is the key ingredient and the process is as important, if not more so, than the product.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*My Name Is My Name I, 2016 © Texas Isaiah*

Categories: Art, Blind, Photography

Beau McCall: Rewind – Memories on Repeat

Posted on July 13, 2021

“Philadelphia is conservative, and I have never really been conservative because I’m a visual person,” says African American artist and Philly native Beau McCall. Known as “The Button Man” for his wearable art that transforms the universal fastener into sparkling gems that address issues of race, economics, social justice, and pop culture, McCall’s aesthetic sensibilities placed him in a league all his own from a young age.

Growing up, McCall’s sense of style evolved in tandem with his musical tastes – from hippie to punk to funk with effortless grace. Determined to forge his own identity, he used music and fashion to express himself, donning platforms, skinny pants, and midriff tops, with dreams of dressing like a rock star.

“If I went out shopping and saw something I couldn’t afford, I would go home and try to make something similar like the pants that FloJo used to wear with one leg,” he recalls. “I did that in seventh grade. I walked through the neighbourhood a couple of times and they thought I was crazy. I was in an individual. I never wanted to play follow the leader. I just wanted to have my own identity.”

After coming our in his teens, McCall found what would become his chosen family, a group of likeminded folks who shared his penchant for glamour and artistry – Joey, Tony, Trey, Tracy, James, Sifuddin, Moi Renee, Charles, Bianca, and Antoine AKA Dee Dee Somemore. “We all lived in the same neighborhood, bumped into each other casually, and gravitated to each other, knowing we were coming to terms with our sexuality,” he says. “When I started hanging with my gay friends, it was Diana Ross, Donna Summer, all the disco queens – so my visuals changed again and I started dabbling in drag. I was still expressing myself artistically.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Photography