Posts from the “Photography” Category

Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem

Posted on May 24, 2016

Photo: Gordon Parks. Untitled (Harlem, New York), 1952. Anonymous gift. © The Gordon Parks Foundation.

“I am an invisible man.  No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe:  Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me,” Ralph Ellison wrote in his 1952 novel, Invisible Man. A classic of twentieth century American literature, Ellison explores the complexity of being a black man living under Jim Crow laws in the United States.

At the same time, one man was making visible previously unpublicized worlds, the world of African American experience. That man was photographer Gordon Parks, and the medium to reach the masses was LIFE magazine. Parks and Ellison were friends as well as comrades in the struggle, using art as a means to raise consciousness.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Donna Ferrato: Tribeca 10013

Posted on May 23, 2016

Southern skyline of Tribeca, Tower 1, 2015.

Sometimes, the light is right and the Manhattan grid finds itself aligned with the rays of the sun as they shine down from the sky above on one tower standing alone. This is New York. Record scratch. Say what? It’s uncanny how absence becomes the presence of the erased. Once there was two. Then there was none. Now there’s one. It’s hard to know what to make of it.

New York is a city that proves the only constant is change, and if you live here long enough, it becomes the height of surreal estate. Take the neighborhood of Tribeca, the triangle below Canal Street. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a bustling commercial center for industrial business. But the 1960s, most businesses had left, and Tribeca emptied out into a gorgeous ghost town. Attracted to light and space, artists soon found themselves with incredible lofts for living and working. As with the path of gentrification, soon thereafter the wealthy capitalized on the developments made, turning Tribeca into downtown’s most exclusive zip code.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Gideon Mendel: Drowning World

Posted on May 22, 2016

hoto: Francisca Chagas dos Santos, Taquari District, Rio Branco, Brazil, March 2015. From Submerged Portraits Series from Drowning World by Gideon Mendel.

Climate change gets real when people bear witness to the facts, when stories are told and consciousness is raised, then and only then, can change take place. With an understanding of this, photographer Gideon Mendel has traveled the world for evidence. From Thailand, Nigeria, and Germany to the United Kingdom, Brazil, and the United States, Mendel has spent the past decade documenting the global magnitude of climate change.

Using photography and video, Mendel travels the world to honor people who survived catastrophic floods. His works reveals what remains when the waters turn on you. With Mendel, survivors return to the deep flood waters that now occupy what once was their home, each one with a look of shock written on their face. So much is erased not only by the spaces, the objects, and the memories—but identity itself is submerged in the trauma of destruction.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Christopher Makos: Portraits of An Era

Posted on May 21, 2016

Photo: Portraits of An Era, Polaroid Collage #1 (1975–1984), ©Christopher Makos, courtesy of Makos Studio, New York and Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.

Back in the early 1970s, Polaroid introduced the SX-70, a revolution in photography. Here was the medium at the height of modernity. Into a camera that snapped open and shut, film cartridges were inserted. Then the camera was aimed: point, click, and shoot—and a square-format image came sliding out. The film developed there, right before your eyes. People couldn’t hold back, they started shaking the print to make the image come in faster.

Suddenly, a revolution was born. It was a party in a camera. It was instant gratification. And the colors—the colors were out of this world. They had nuance and depth, adding a certain touch and creating an instant patina of nostalgia, yet forever au courant.

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

Carl Strüwe: Microcosmos

Posted on May 20, 2016

Photo: Carl Strüwe. Plankton. Upper: Algae colony (Asterionella), lower: 2 Volvox colonies, 1952. Gelatin silver print, printed late 1950s 23 5/8 x 19 11/16 in. Edition 1 of 2; Titled and stamped by photographer verso. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.

Nearly a century ago, in 1926, the electron microscope was a brand new phenomenon that took the world by storm. With a beam of accelerated electrons, it can achieve magnifications up to 10M times in size, illuminating infinite worlds never known before. It was in that same year that German graphic designer Carl Strüwe made his first photograph through a microscope. With the eye of an artist rather than a scientist, Strüwe recorded the formal genius of Nature in all her glory, revealing the glorious rhythms, patterns, and shapes that are both biological in design and captivating in aesthetic.

A self-taught photographer, Strüwe dedicated the next three decades of his life to Formen des Mikrokosmos (Forms of the Microcosmos), which resulted in a set of 280 microphotographs, and in a 1955 book of that name. His intensive study, which concluded in 1959, elevated microphotography to an art. In Strüwe’s work, we see a bridge to abstract art in a space mediated by Nature herself as order emerges from the chaos.

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arl Strüwe. Alga-Freshwater (Alge Spirogyra setiformis), 1928 Gelatin silver print, printed 1960s-1970s. 9 11/24 x 7 1/12 in. Edition 1 of 7; Stamped by photographer verso.

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Henry Horenstein: Tales from the 70s

Posted on May 18, 2016

Photo: “Chammie in Wool,” Newton, MA, 1974, Vintage gelatin silver print. © Henry Horenstein, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City.

Photographer Henry Horenstein remembers the 1970s well: “When we were in our early 20s, we didn’t have that much to do. I’d go out, drink beers with friends, I had girlfriends (or tried to get them), and I had a dog. I had a personal life. I don’t have that anymore. Life is too busy.”

A student of Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White, Horenstein has been making photographs since the early 1970s. He observes, “Over the years I’ve photographed many different types of subjects, even animals and the human form. But I’ve always returned to my roots as a documentary photographer. More than anything, I like a good story. And I try to tell one in a direct way, with humor and a punch line, if possible.”

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

Secret Histories | Pete Brook: Prison Obscura

Posted on May 16, 2016

Photo: Anonymous, courtesy of Steve Davis, Incarcerated girls at Remann Hall, Tacoma, Washington, reenact restraint techniques in a pinhole camera workshop, 2002.

In the United States of America, there is a hidden one percent, the one percent the lives behind bars, incarcerated in the belly of the beast. One any given day, 2.2 million men, women, and children live within one of the more than 5,000 locked facilities located across the nation. Mass incarceration comes with a price tag of $70 billion per year that is thrust upon the taxpayers, while private corporations line their pockets with profits.

The prison industrial complex exploded in 1980, under the auspices of President Ronald Reagan, who reaped what Richard Nixon had sewn a decade before when he created the “War on Drugs” as a cover story to destroy minority communities. Over the past 36 years, the prison system has quadrupled in size, creating a crisis level event that is hidden from public sight.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Kansuke Yamamoto

Posted on May 1, 2016

Photo: Kansuke Yamamoto. Reminiscence, 1953/2015. Platinum and palladium prints on archival paper. Image size: 40.6 x 49.3 cm. Paper size: 50.6 x 60.7 cm

The son of an amateur Pictorialist, Kansuke Yamamoto (1914–1987) developed and interest in poetry as a teenager. After spending a year in Tokyo studying French poetry at the French Literature Department of Meiji University, he dropped out and returned to Nagoya, his hometown, where he acquainted himself with the poetry of Chiru Yamanaka. An important Surrealist artist who published Ciné, a magazine of Surrealist poetry, Yamanaka took Yamamoto as his protégé. Yamamoto embraced photography as a visual means to communicate ideas. He first began taking photographs in 1931 at the age of seventeen, creating an incredible body of work that speaks to the Surrealist impulse.

Yamamoto owed much to his father, Goro Yamamoto, who owned a photo-supply shop in Nagoya and cofounded the Aiyu Photography Club, the largest amateur photo-club in the town. Although Yamamoto did not embrace the Pictorialist trends prevalent in the Club and the salon style exhibitions of the day, the exposure to photography was invaluable.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan, Photography

Arlene Gottfried: Bacalaitos & Fireworks

Posted on March 21, 2016

Photo: Puerto Rican Day Parade. ©Arlene Gottfried, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

Arlene Gottfried is a New York original. Hailing from Brooklyn, Ms. Gottfried moved from Coney Island to Crown Heights when she was just ten years old, living in the area during the 1960s, as white flight and Civil Rights changed the face of the neighborhood. In the 1970s, Gottfried lived in the Village while studying photography at F.I.T. After her father had died, the family moved to the Lower East Side. Back then, it was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, rich in traditions native to the island, which, when combined with local influence, produced its very own style: Nuyorican.

Nuyorican is rhythms, horns, strings, and winds—or it is simply spoken word filling the air. Best exemplified by Miguel Piñero’s Nuyorican Poet’s Café, it is a state of mind in the place to be. Nuyorican is a street vendor selling fried codfish fritters and fireworks on July 4, announcing his wares as he made his way up and down the street shouting: “Bacalaitos y Fireworks!”

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Communion. ©Arlene Gottfried, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

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

Carrie Mae Weems: Considered

Posted on March 16, 2016

A Distant View. Gelatin silver print . 20” x 20” © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

American photographer Carrie Mae Weems got her first camera when she was 21 as a birthday present from her then-boyfriend. She remembers, “At that point politics as my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.”

Over the past four decades, Weems has developed a complex body of art that employs photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation and video to explore the complexities African American life and history in her artwork. It is a mission she has chosen, and to which she has dedicated her life. Weems observes, “Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.”

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Mike Brodie: Tones of Dirt and Blood

Posted on March 14, 2016

Photo: Brontez. San Francisco, California. ©Mike Brodie, courtesy of Twin Palms Publishers

In the afterword of Tones of Dirt and Blood (Twin Palms), photographer Mike Brodie describes a moment so completely, it is easy to forget these are only words: “My first memory was when I was one year old. Imagine that? Lying by a river bed. Arizona is hot in the summer, and even worse when you have an earache. No pants on, screaming and crying like it would help or something, my face bright RED. The blanket I was lying on made of prickly pear green wool. If that cloth was still around it would tell you a story. But it’s long gone, underground somewhere, tired.”

Brodie’s words beautifully conjure an image in the mind’s eye that looks just like his photographs: coarse, vulnerable, and exposed to the elements, full of raw emotion and pure energy. The colors are both sharp and dull, the light bright, the dark murky, evoking a feeling of the undertow. The photographs in Tones of Dirt and Blood were made between 2004 and 2006 while Brodie traveled throughout the United States. They were taken with a Polaroid camera and Time Zero film, using a distinct color palette that evokes memories of late twentieth-century America in all its analog glory.

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Photography