Posts from the “Photography” Category

Willy Spiller: Hell on Wheels

Posted on November 7, 2016

SUBWAY NEW YORK, 1977-1984 © by Willy Spiller 2016

Warm and faded colors of yesterday, oversaturated with blues and yellows, create a nostalgic haze enveloping with a warm embrace, reminding us of a time that has come and gone in just about every single way.

Willy Spiller’s photographs of the New York City subway system circa 1979 capture the feeling of the city at a crucial time. Two years after the brink of bankruptcy, the city struggled to come back from abject neglect and abuse under the federal government’s policy of benign neglect. As white flight took hold and the city was abandoned en masse, what remained with the True Yorkers who would not—or could not—leave the city that never sleeps.

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SUBWAY NEW YORK, 1977-1984 © by Willy Spiller 2016, courtesy of Sturm & Drang.

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

Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements

Posted on October 30, 2016

Photo: Thjorsà River #1, Southern Region, Iceland, 2012. © Edward Burtynsky 2016. Courtesy Flowers Gallery, London / Metivier Gallery, Toronto

We have entered the Anthopocene Era, marked by the turning point when human activities began to make a significant global impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Many place the starting point with the Industrial Revolution, when mass production became the norm, and the machine rose to prominence as evidence of humankind’s ability to dominate nature—without thought or concern to the long term.

We’ve been riding this train for two centuries, quick to ignore evidence to the contrary, lest it cause us any intellectual or physical discomfort. The human impact on the planet is marginalized or excused while the changes to climate are carefully swept under the rug. The increase in extinctions and the decline in biodiversity go unremarked.

As Alduous Huxley observed in Vanity Fair in 1928, “”The colossal material expansion of recent years is destined, in all probability, to be a temporary and transient phenomenon. We are rich because we are living on our capital. The coal, the oil, the phosphates which we are so recklessly using can never be replaced. When the supplies are exhausted, men will have to do without…. It will be felt as a superlative catastrophe.”

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

The World Famous “Afghan Girl” Makes Headlines as Refugee Arrested in Pakistan

Posted on October 30, 2016

Photo: Fair use/NADRA

The “Afghan Girl” became a worldwide phenomenon when she appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic. Just 12 years old, she had searing green eyes that pierced the soul, speaking of knowledge and wisdom untold. Photographed by Steve McCurry in the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan, the girl was stripped of her name and her history, reduced to a symbol of propaganda in the Cold War.

The “Afghan Girl” became “the most recognized photograph” in the history of the magazine, catapulting McCurry to new heights of fame. Described as “The First World’s Third World Mona Lisa,” the portrait became emblematic of the West’s approach to the refugee crisis, using beauty and suffering to drive newsstand sales.

The identity of the “Afghan Girl’ was unknown until 2002, when a National Geographic team traveled to Afghanistan to locate her. She was found in a remote region of her native land after leaving a refugee camp in 1992, where she was identified as Sharbat Gula, then age 30. There she saw the photograph for the very first time.

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Categories: 1980s, Crave, Photography

Ruddy Roye: When Living is a Protest

Posted on October 19, 2016

Photo: Ruddy Roye. Blood, Sweat and Tears (Ryan), Morton Street, Newark, NJ, December 19, 2015 Archival pigment print on metallic paper, printed 2016, 35 x 35 in Edition of 10; Signed by photographer verso

From the top of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke, delivering a sermon to the world, one that resonates in our mind’s ear whenever we hear the words, “I have a dream.” The timbre of his voice is permanently imprinted on our soul, his words among the most patriotic ever spoken. On the eighth anniversary of the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, Dr. King’s testimony was centuries in the making, calling forth the ancestors of this country’s earliest days.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter,” Dr. King warned. There is an exquisite horror to the dying soul that lurks within the living body, feasting upon flesh and bone. It has been said that silence equals death; to speak against injustice and oppression is the essence of what it means to be American. These are the words that photographer Radcliffe “Ruddy” Roye carries within himself, revealing on his Instagram: “It is a creed I live by at whatever cost.”

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Categories: Art, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Liz Deschenes / Sol LeWitt

Posted on October 17, 2016

LIZ DESCHENES, Untitled (LeWitt) #6–14, 2016, Photogram, 122 1/2 x 122 7/8 x 1 3/4 inches

“Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach,” Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) famously wrote as the first of 35 “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” published in 1969. It’s the perfect way to introduce his understanding of the work that artists create that manifests the Idea in physical space.

By forgoing the impulse towards linear thought, we lean more heavily on our sensory, perceptual, and emotional reactions. In doing so, we can be liberated from the tyranny of linear thought, its presumption of supreme validity, and its insistence on a singular way of comprehending the world. By abandoning the rational, we open ourselves to new experiences that can take us beyond the limitations of the “known.” It is in this fresh, uninhibited space we may come to discover new, uncharted depths of the soul.

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SOL LEWITT, On the Walls of the Lower East Side, 1979 [detail], Color photographs mounted on board, 18 1/8 x 15 inches (46 x 38.1 cm) 73 pages; 1 page at 15 7/8 x 15 inches

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

Lucian Perkins: Hard Art, DC 1979

Posted on October 4, 2016

Photo: HR, Hard Art Gallery, 9/15/79, from Hard Art, DC 1979, copyright 2013 by Lucian Perkins, used with permission of Akashic Books.

No less than Plato first wrote the words, “A true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention,” acknowledging the fundamental human drive to solve problems. As recent history attests, conditions of lack have provided the most fertile grounds for originality, ingenuity, and innovation.

Consider Washington, D.C. circa 1979. The nation’s capital had not yet recovered from the riots of 1968, which broke out following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For six days, the riots raged in response to the horrific living conditions for the predominantly African American population, with Dr. King’s murder acting as the tipping point.

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

Meryl Meisler & James Panero: Bushwik Chronicle

Posted on October 4, 2016

Artwork: A Garden Grows in Bushwick 1988, 16″ x20″ Acrylic Paint on Cibachrome Print © Meryl Meisler 2016.

On the northern edge of Brooklyn lies Bushwick, the largest Latino community in the borough. Comprised primarily of Americans of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent, the neighborhood has produced leaders like Nydia Velázquez, the first Latina elected to the United States Congress and actress and activist Rosie Perez.

By the early 1970s, it became devastated under the federal policy of “benign neglect,” as well as the Nixon White House’s drug war, which flooded the neighborhood with heroin. By the late 1970s, arson had taken its toll, leaving Bushwick looking like a third world country. Yet, despite it all, the community persevered.

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Categories: 1980s, Art, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Danny Lyon: Journey

Posted on September 27, 2016

Photo: Danny Lyon, Mary, Santa Marta, Colombia, 1972, Gelatin silver enlargement print © Danny Lyon. Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York and Zurich

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding,” Plato wrote in The Republic circa 380 B.C.

Empathy is both an emotional response, as well as a cognitive one. We can both feel what another experiences, as well as perceive it through rational thought. To be empathetic is a challenge some refuse to accept, but for those willing to open themselves, it is a two-fold process. First there is simply the ability to understand that which is not our own, and to refrain from manipulations that would adulterate its truth. Once we are able to do this, the next step comes: to share this truth in a responsible way, one that allows us to use our personal gifts in the service of the cause, while maintaining integrity and authenticity above all.

American photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon (b. 1942) understand this, and has dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth. Working in the style of New Journalism, in which the photographer fully immersed himself in the milieu in which he worked, Lyon uses emotional and cognitive empathy to delve beyond the surface of the world and capture something much deeper and far more profound, something so visceral it goes beyond words and cuts straight to the soul.

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Photo: Danny Lyon, The Haitian Women, Port Au Prince, 1986, Gelatin silver enlargement print © Danny Lyon. Courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York and Zurich

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

See the World with “Hamburger Eyes”

Posted on September 17, 2016

The Hamburger Eyes crew has been on the scene since 2001, when it launched their first issue of 30 xeroxed pamphlets. Over the years, the zine has become on the illest photography magazines in the world, combining the documentary approach of National Geographic and LIFE magazines with the relentless intensity of a graffiti writer bombing the scene.

Dedicated to the pictorial history of both unseen and iconic moments of everyday life, every issue of Hamburger Eyes illustrates its motto perfectly, capturing “The Continuing Story of Life on Earth” to a T. Printed in black and white, and designed with the photographs running full bleed, every page is fresh, crisp, and clean.

Over the years, Hamburger Eyes has expanded to take on publishing photograph books, zines, and magazines, with more than 100 titles to date in its catalog. It includes works by the core members of the collective including Ray Potes, David Potes, Stefan Simikich, Brian David Stevens, Jason Roberts Dobrin, Ted Pushinsky, David Uzzardi, Michael Jang, and Uri Korn. The titles alone are enough to draw the eye, whether Slag Hag (John Oliver Hodges) or Sweat Stains (Mark Murrmann), you might just wonder, “What’s inside?”

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Categories: Art, Crave, Photography

Len Speier: Nearly Everybody

Posted on September 15, 2016

Photo: Nearly Everybody, vintage gelatin silver print. © Len Speier, courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York.

“Lucky Man Speier,” they call him, and this is true. At the tender age of 88, native New Yorker Len Mitchell Speier is receiving his due with his first solo exhibition of photographs, Nearly Everybody, currently on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, now through October 29, 2016. Drawn from an archive that spans six decades, the show features 48 vintage photographs made in New York and Europe between the 1960s and ‘80s.

As with many things in his life, Nearly Everybody came about through the fortunes of fate. Following the success of her recent exhibition Bacalaitos & Fireworks at the gallery, Speier asked photographer Arlene Gottfried if she could introduce him to Daniel Cooney; Gottfried said it was okay to use her name so Speier did just that.

Cooney remembers, “The call came out of the blue. After we spoke, I Googled and not much popped up. I went up to visit him at his apartment and that was it. It was an amazing moment.”

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Photo: Fight Racism, White Street, NYC, 1969, vintage gelatin silver print. © Len Speier, courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Godlis: History is Made at Night

Posted on September 14, 2016

Photo: The Ramones, CBBG, 1977. ©Godlis, courtesy of agnès b. galerie, New York.

“There are no secrets that time does not reveal,” Jean Racine wrote. With the benefit of hindsight, it has become evident that punks are true embodiment of the counterculture movement. They never sold out and they never said die. They just keep on keeping on, D.I.Y.

Photographer David Godlis arrived on the New York scene in 1976, camera in hand, carrying as much film as he could reasonably hold in the pockets of his black jeans without looking indiscreet. He usually shot without a flash, using the techniques of masters like Brassai, who had famously photographed Paris at night forty years prior and inspired Godlis’s masterful eye.

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Photo: Richard Hell, Bowery, 1977. ©Godlis, courtesy of agnès b. galerie, New York.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Crave, Manhattan, Music, Photography