Posts from the “Photography” Category

Devin Allen: New Awakenings, In a New Light

Posted on September 4, 2015

© Devin Allen, courtesy of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/897723-exhibit-devin-allen-awakenings-new-light#HCRoIrR5UIJy23Lw.99

“People don’t understand Baltimore. They only think of ‘The Wire’…it’s worse than that. But we have a strong community. My city is real. There’s no sugar coating. It’s a small city. In twenty, thirty minutes I can be anywhere. You see the issues the people face. That’s why I love it so much. If you’re from Baltimore you can make it anywhere,” says Devin Allen, a 27-year-old amateur photographer whose pictures of the Baltimore uprising following the death of Freddie Gray in April of this year became iconic of the Black Liberation Movement born again.

The photographs, which began as a viral sensation, made it to the cover of Time Magazine, making Allen only the third amateur photographer to do so. Allen, a Baltimore native, grew up just five minutes away from the site of Freddie Gray’s fatal encounter with local police on April 12.

Allen photographed the uprising, which began April 18, and continued over the course of ten days. With an ongoing cycle of protests, arrests, and injuries, the tension increased until it reached the breaking point when the police refused high school students access to public transportation, preventing them from going home. Violence erupted, with police cars destroyed and a CVS Pharmacy burned and looted. A state of emergency was declared and the National Guard was sent in—but when it was all over, it was the people of Baltimore who came together to clean up the streets, maintaining the unity that they had created throughout the month.

In Allen’s eyes, the Baltimore uprising created, “Unity and love. In my city, that’s rare. People have difficulties. But we all united in one goal. We have to keep that up. We united for the protest, and once it stops, what do you do then? We love one another. There are multiple ways to fight. You can’t fix other issues if your home is not straight. I am a true activist for my city.”

Indeed, Allen has partnered with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, for the first solo show of his photographs titled Devin Allen: New Awakenings, In a New Light, now on view through December 7, in a new community space inside the museum called Lewis Now. The exhibition is free to the public, and has been designed to have interactive components. A number of the images have been enlarged to 20-feet wide and have been wheat pasted onto the wall by Allen, in a nod to the street origins of the images. Visitors can also write responses to the prompt, “Where were you?” on a timeline that shows a number of the events Allen captured in the photographs.

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE

© Devin Allen, courtesy of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/897723-exhibit-devin-allen-awakenings-new-light#HCRoIrR5UIJy23Lw.99

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Beauté Congo – 1926-2015 – Congo Kitoko

Posted on September 1, 2015

JP Mika, Kiese na kiese, 2014, Oil and acrylic on fabric, 168.5 x 119 cm, Pas-Chaudoir Collection, Belgique
© JP Mika/Photo © Antoine de Roux

Since 1987, André Magnin, chief curator at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, has had a passion for the Congo which stirred his soul to travel the country and experience the people and their arts firsthand. In response to his thirty-year journey, he has organized Beauté Congo – 1926-2015 – Congo Kitoko, a survey of paintings, photographs, sculpture, comics, music, and films now on view at Fondation Cartier, Paris, through November 15, 2015.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition begins in the 1920s, at the birth of modern painting in the Congo, when the nation was still a colony of Belgium. Having just survived the genocidal regime of King Leopold II, under which 10 million Congolese lost their lives, the art of this era had been in the shadows. Magnin obsessively search for work, drawing together pieces that reveal the way of life in the village, the natural world, the dreams and legends of the times.

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Djilatendo, Sans titre, c. 1930, Gouache and ink on paper, 24.5 x 18 cm, Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale, Tervuren, HO.0.1.3371
© Djilatendo/Photo © MRAC Tervuren

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

Scott Nichols Gallery: It’s Only Rock and Roll

Posted on August 26, 2015

Photo: Baron Wolman, Jimmy Hendrix with Guitar, 1968

Photo: Andy Freeberg, BB King at Montreux, 1980

The late, great B.B. King observed, “Playing the guitar is like telling the truth—you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.”

King lived his life in this truth and gave this truth to the world. He who had said, “I never use that word, retire,” continued to play live performances until just months before his death, earlier this year, at 89 years old. King, one of the greatest blues musicians of our times, showing us that music is not just in your blood, it is in your soul. He understood the power of music to bring people together, to reach them in a way that nothing else could. He sagely advised, “You only live but once, and when your died your done, so let the good times roll,” and he set those words to song.

We feel his joy, long after he is gone, not just in his music but in the photographs taken of him throughout the years. “I want to connect my guitar to human emotions,” King said, and we are reminded of the power of his intention when gazing upon Andy Freeberg’s photograph of BB King at Montreux, 1980, which is currently on view in the group show It’s Only Rock and Roll, on view at Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, now through September 16, 2015.

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

Gordon Parks: Ali

Posted on August 24, 2015

Gordon Parks, “Untitled”. London, England, 1966. Photo © The Gordon Parks Foundation, courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery.

In September 1966, LIFE magazine published, “The Redemption of a Champion,” by Gordon Parks, a profile of Muhammad Ali, who had recently changed his name to embody his newly adopted Islamic faith. An exhibition of photographs from the LIFE essay are currently on view in “Gordon Parks: Ali” at Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, through September 9, 2015.

For most in the United States, Ali’s move to Islam came as a shock. The public knew Cassius Clay as the Undisputed Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World, who was as quick with his wit as he was with his gloves. They were soon to find out that as Muhammad Ali, the champ was a highly politicized leader intent on speaking truth to power, at whatever cost would come.

By joining the Nation of Islam, aligning himself with Malcolm X, and speaking out against the Vietnam War, Ali stood independent of the popular opinion of the day. Resisting the draft, Ali said, “Those Vietcongs are not attacking me. All I know is that they are considered Asiatic black people, and I don’t have no fight with black people.” Many Caucasian Americans were incensed by Ali’s stance, most evidently those in power, who would go on to strip the champ of his title and his passport, deny him a boxing license in every state, and sentence him to prison for refusing to be conscripted. Ali took the case all the way to the US Supreme Court, who, in 1970, overturned his conviction in an unanimous 8-0 ruling, with Thurgood Marshall abstaining.

But the days of reckoning were yet to come. In retrospect, 1966 looks like a more innocent time. Though controversial, Ali was still the champ. In an effort to turn the tides of public opinion in his favor, LIFE assigned Parks to cover Ali, and show a more intimate side of the man who would not back down. Parks, one of the masters of the medium, was the perfect match for Ali.

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE.

Categories: 1960s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

The Lost Tribes of Tierra Del Fuego: Selk’nam, Yamana, Kawésqar

Posted on August 21, 2015

Ulen is a clown-like male spirit, whose role is to entertain the audience of the Hain. © Anthropos Institute, Sankt Augustin, Germany.

Tierra del Fuego, Spanish for “Land of Fire” is an archipelago located off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across from the Strait of Magellan. The nomadic tribes native to the islands, including the Selk’nam, Yamana, and Kawésqar, have lived there for more than 10,000 years, creating cultures and ways of life that have all but disappeared, due to both the endemic infectious diseases carried by Westerners, as well as by the militias paid by Europeans to erase the native population on well-organized human hunts.

It was not uncommon for white men to kidnap tribal natives and bring them to the capitals of Europe (including Paris, Berlin, and Zurich), where they were exhibited in zoos and parks, as well as held in universities to be studied. No less than Charles Darwin described his first meeting with the native Fuegians as being “without exception the most curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld: I could not have believed how wide the difference between savage and civilized man: it is greater than between wild and domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is a greater power of improvement.”

Such extraordinary hubris seems pathological of the race that declared for itself the “white man’s burden” of “civilizing” native populations by employing their long-held foreign policies of genocide, pestilence, and psychological warfare. We are deeply fortunate that Martin Gusinde, a German priest and ethnologist, took an entirely different approach. In 1919, Gusinde was sent as a missionary to Tierra del Fuego, with the aim to convert the natives to Christianity. Instead, the opposite took place: Gusinde was one of the first Westerners to be initiated into the sacred rites of the native people.

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Photography

The Summer of ’68: Photographing the Black Panthers

Posted on August 12, 2015

“Black Panther demonstration, Alameda Co. Court House, Oakland,
CA, during Huey Newton’s trial,” Pirkle Jones; 1968.

It’s been nearly half a century since FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover vilified the Black Panther Party as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” His fear of the Constitution being upheld and justice being served lead Hoover to enact one of the most counterrevolutionary movements of the twentieth century: COINTELPRO.

Directives under COINTELPRO required FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, neutralize or otherwise eliminate” the activities of movements and leaders associated with Civil Rights. Think of the times. It was the summer of 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated on the balcony only months before. The government was on a killing spree, and they aimed their sites on the Black Panther Party.

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, students at Merritt College in Oakland, founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. Since its inception, the BPP’s core practice was armed citizen patrols to monitor the behavior of police officers and to challenge police brutality in Oakland, California. The BPP employed legal means to challenge the police, and the result was a counterrevolutionary operation sponsored by the government that resulted in deaths and arrests, eventually dismantling the BPP’s national reach by 1972.

It was during the summer of 1968 that Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, a husband and wife photography team, decided to photograph the BPP. The idea to photograph the Panthers was originally Baruch’s. She proposed her idea of an exhibition expressing “the feeling of the people” to Jack McGregor, then director of the de Young Museum in San Francisco. McGregor agreed, and the de Young Museum would host the first exhibition of the work in December of that year, to record crowds. The show would later travel across the country. The public was ripe and ready for positive and empowering images of the black power movement.

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE.

“Plate glass window of the Black Panther Party National Headquarters, the morning it was shattered by the bullets of two Oakland policemen, September 10, 1968”, Pirkle Jones; 1968.

Categories: 1960s, Art, Crave, Photography

Flurina Rothenberger: Just as Dandy As You Are

Posted on August 6, 2015

Photograph by
Flurina Rothenberger

I have as yet to meet Flurina Rothenberger in person, but from her photographs I feel as though I know something of her. Through her eye, I have see the way she looks at the world, the way she raises her camera to capture a fraction of a moment in time for us to consider at our leisure. From her photographs, I have a sense of style, grace, and poise alongside a wit that gently enjoys the beauty of life, a sensibility that gives one a feeling of being at home in the world, wherever she may go. When I first received her book, project I love to dress like I am coming from somewhere and I have a place to go (Edition Patrick Frey), I was absolutely beside myself. What better than a pocket paperback of Africa to gaze at all day? The people, the landscape, the streets, the style, the feeling of art, culture, and life. Flurina’s photographs are about a sense of being as just as dandy as you are.

Miss Rosen: Can you please speak about your early experience in art, and some of the early influences that inspired you to create art ? How did growing up in Africa influence your aesthetic sensibilities?

Flurina Rothenberger: I grew up in Côte d’Ivoire, in an hybridized environment driven by the genuine remix of tradition and contemporary. The skills, crafts and creative inventions I was exposed to weren’t of self-fulfilling beauty, they beared witness to a specific art of life. Nothing was meaningless and in spite of the high aesthetic value served a practical benefit. Be it the toys my friends fabricated from scratch or the enigmatic result of a specific weaving technique, the beauty always emerged from a thought materialized in a unique practical shape of expression. It may be a coincidence but my sisters and I all ended up in similar fields of activity and each one of us has remained strongly influenced in her design by references from West Africa. Most likely our visual perception was sensitized by growing up in a surrounding infiltrated by the genuine presence of someone always inventing and crafting something. I don’t consider myself an artist. I’m simply a photographer attracted to places where people don’t operate within a single, but a quadruple consciousness.

Was there a point where you realized that making art would be your life’s calling? We love to know the moment when artists realized there was no turning back, and they were committed to pursuing art.

I never had a sudden strike of insight but there was a sort of turning point. After moving back to Switzerland I had trouble settling in. I felt lost and disconnected. A short introduction to the photo lab triggered something. The particular atmosphere shook my senses wide awake. It became a place of comfort, wild experiments and most importantly of crucial awareness that a certain image is one choice among endless other options. I guess in a sense the darkroom sparked both: my first real commitment to visual expression and the belief that images can challenge thoughts.

Can you speak about your work in Africa: how does working as a photographer give you access to people, places, and perspectives you might not otherwise reach as a “civilian” (so to speak)? What do you find to be the most rewarding aspect of traveling with a camera?

As a photographer I have my individual way of looking into things. This naturally also determines the nature of access I reach out for. I tend to seek and find a welcoming door if people understand my motif and commitment to sharing life. In my experience every photograph and every project begins with trust, insight and integrity. As for what I love about traveling with a camera in Africa, is that my ideas aren’t triggered by life in theory. They wash up almost physically in the bus, on the street, in a conversation, handed out like a palpable invitation. In most places people have a strong opinion about images and it’s far from uncommon to communicate issues visually. Considering this background both is true: approaching people and situations as a photographer often results in opportunities of close proximity, the camera though also exposes my incentive to critical questioning. I appreciate both of these aspects in Africa very much. If the former is the palpable invitation, the latter is the reality check of my intention and approach.

Can you speak about the challenges of photographing in various nations?

I see two main challenges when I photograph in other nations than my own: One, the fear that my pictures could create a simplistic distorted reflection of the place, the situation or the individual. Second, finding the appropriate balance between familiar and exotic, a visual language which stirs something inside the viewer all the while remaining unpretentious. I keep those two aspects in mind as a guideline while I choose work, photograph and edit. It’s a high set bar and in some terms idealistic. Another thing I’ve learned from portraying the fates of very different people : no matter how committed I remain to the task of showing lives and subjects in their legitimate complexity, it’ll always result in a perspective tainted by my own cultural mentality and story, be this conscious or not.

Photograph by
Flurina Rothenberger

How do you, as a photographer, work to avoid the more obvious visual tropes and reductive narratives that the Western media often associates with third world nations?

I wish my work was fully free of the kind of images Binyavanga Wainana labeled as “poverty pornography”. It certainly isn’t. I’ve fallen into that trap just like most Western photographers. Mass media operates in terms of which message sells fastest and cheapest to the widest audience possible. Obviously this isn’t the best equipped vessel to explain a context from a place with great diversity and complexity. Yet it is mass media which has significantly shaped our collective and increasingly global visual memory. A a photographer I’m aware that the viewer assigns a certain message to a descriptive clue and will prioritize this one from the overall picture. The devastating aspect though is that the audience grows bored and sated by topics due to the way they’re pictured, when just these should urgently stir us to take action.

I try to follow a working style and ethics which considers this fait acompli. If I get carried away in the excitement of the moment, I’ll censor those images later in the edit. At times it’s frustrating since I submit the actual content in which the photograph was created to precisely those very rules I question in their legitimacy to condition how we perceive things.

There is a photograph in my recent book showing a four year-old girl in Moçambique. Sent to help her sisters fetch water from the well, she marches down a long empty road. In my consciousness this image elicits a chuckle and reflects the amazing maturity, singular determination, flexibility and courage I’ve experienced countless times with children deprived of certain opportunities. On the counterpart this image belongs to the risky ones. It embeds several of the earlier mentioned indications, a large audience is conditioned to associate with poverty, struggle and vulnerability. It’s not an easy decision which one to give in to: the origin context of the image or the general public’s eye.

I solve the struggle by getting advise from someone who understands my motive but doesn’t share the specific story of the pictures origin. For my latest project I love to dress like I am coming from somewhere and I have a place to go, I chose a tight collaboration with Hammer, a graphic design studio founded by my sister Sereina Rothenberger and David Schatz. I handed them a large chunk of my archive and they curated the final selection along with the edit and illustrations of quotes. Sometimes it’s best to let others kill a few darlings in the benefit of a fresh and fair view.

What do you think that the photograph does that no other medium can do? How do you find people respond to your interest in photographing them?

Photography is a medium of great generosity. It can easily stretch it’s boundaries between dream and reality giving up neither one nor the other. It suggest optional views on a complex, yet unpretentious level. It is both, humble and powerful. A photograph sets our thoughts into motion by taming life to stand still. Most cultures and societies have their own popular imagery which also influences how people respond to the medium. In a way by taking a picture of someone in this context, the portrait is reciprocal, tainted by both backgrounds. Mine and the subjects. I enjoy that for my deep belief that how we want to be seen, points out the reality we’re shaped by. I make my presence and intentions obvious and in exchange, with few exceptions, people respond with positive and active complicity. I love the intimate moment of unspoken consent, when the other suggests a pose, changes the setting with small arrangements or simply agrees by addressing the camera with an assertive presence.

What did you find to be the most inspiring aspects of photographing the people and places of Africa ?

The diversity of scenarios and the relationship people generally entertain with the medium, exhausts the whole range of photography’s pliable and enigmatic nature. It’s all there woven into the pattern of every day life: the flickering of value and meaning, the shift of visual boundaries, the remix of traditional and contemporary, the fusion of carefully arranged and incredibly improvised. In Africa, my wrestling thoughts are put at ease, my fears untangled and my senses wide awake. This alone is very inspiring!

I like that in most areas and African countries I’ve been to, images act in a different and in a way stronger narrative context than I experience in Europe. A response to this is the individual ownership people tend to take on, when being portrayed. Even now in times of social media there is a particular poised nature of self-perception most Africans I meet from very different backgrounds seem to share. I rarely experience fidgeting, restlessness or any other lack of confidence. If someone agrees to be photographed, regardless the scenario, they will meet me and the camera with doubtless presence. Intuitively or consciously adding their intention and vision to mine. It’s one of the many stimulating aspects I love, admire and at times envy a bit.

Visit FLURINA ROTHENBERGER

Photograph by
Flurina Rothenberger

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Fashion, Photography

Meryl Meisler: Purgatory & Paradise

Posted on August 1, 2015

Plaid Suit and Cadillac in Chelsea, NY, NY, May 1978.

The 1970s was an age of innocent decadence, the time before the fall, a time where the country cracked open and out of it came creatures with big hair and vibrant personality, the kind of characters that have that old school je ne sais quoi that makes their shenanigans a delight to watch.

Take Judi Jupiter as she weighs the situation in the new book by Meryl Meisler, Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY ‘70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre Publishing). It was July 1977, Westhampton, NY, and Miss Jupiter was taking her top off as she weighed big nuggets of weed on a triple beam balance scale. She looks at the camera through a thicket of bangs all but obscuring her eyes. She’s but one of hundreds of subjects Meisler came upon in her travels across Long Island and NYC, subjects that were outrageously stylish and sexy.

As Meisler writes in the introduction, “This book encapsulates my coming of age: The Bronx, suburbia, The Mystery Club, dance lessons, Girl Scouts, the Rockettes, the circus, school, mitzvahs, proms, feminism, Disco, Go-Go, Jewish and LGBT Pride, the New York streets, friendship, family and love. I had to photograph it to make sense of it all. To hold onto the time, to release and share it, to put it in perspective and move on. It was sassy, but also sweet, and so was I.”

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE

Judi Jupiter Weighs the Situation, Westhampton, NY, July 1977.

Street Ventriloquist, NY, NY, July 1979.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Christopher Makos: White Trash Uncut

Posted on July 30, 2015

Debbie Harry. Photo by Christopher Makos

New York, 1977. It began with a book, a paperback with black and white photographs of the punk scene. The book was titled White Trash and it featured the boldest of the boldface names: Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, Halston, Andy Warhol, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Divine, and John Waters. Add to that a splash of Man Ray, Tennessee Williams, and Marilyn Chambers, and you’ve nailed it. White Trash, Christopher Makos’ photography book, is the place where pop meets pulp, perfectly defining the D.I.Y. ethos of the times. The book has become a seminal volume of the times and now sells for upwards of $500.

However, the original edition is a paperback, and paperbacks are not designed to last. They’re disposable (like, say, white trash). And if you crack the spine too wide, the entire thing might fall apart in your hands. We are fortunate, then, that Glitterati Incorporated has released a revised and expanded edition in hardcover.

White Trash Uncut, Makos’ updated monograph, is a lavish affair. This tall, slim volume features the photographs uncropped (unlike the 1977 edition). It also features a selection of never-before-published photographs of Grace Jones, among others. Included throughout the book is the use of silver, making the pages come alive. Everything about the book is luxurious, and in that way it becomes a statement of the times. Punk has passed; that New York is long gone. But what lives in its place are photographs, memories, and stories.

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David Croland and Grace Jones wearing a Le Jardin shirt. New York. Photo by Chrostopher Makos

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

Danny Clinch: Still Moving

Posted on July 17, 2015

Photograph: Bruce Springsteen, 2007 (©Danny Clinch).

“Still is still moving to me,” Willie Nelson said, a beautiful sentiment befitting the photograph itself. A fraction of a second frozen in time, forevermore, is the ephemeral made eternal. This is a kind of magic, something more than art. It is an artifact, a document, witness to history as it unfolds. The photograph must stand the test of time; it must endure so that it can speak to future generations.

Music photography is a beautiful paradox: the silence is deafening, yet enveloping. That which is sound is now purely visual, distilled in a single moment that delivers all the highs and lows, all the rhythm and blues, as the crowd goes wild and we becomes one. It is this intensity that the photographer seeks, this moment when we are lost and found that we are truly present.

Danny Clinch is a master of the form, seamlessly moving on and off stage with his instrument, the camera guiding his way. More than 200 of his seminal photographs are collected in Still Moving (Abrams Books), along with an essay by Bruce Springsteen, who explains, “When Danny Clinch and I clicked as photographer/subject, it was because somewhere deep inside we had he same points of reference—the same songs and movies dancing in our heads. With each click of the shutter he was scrolling through my record collection, referencing my influences, searching for the same magic. I could feel he’d been mesmerized by the same images of our heroes that made me want to be a musician and that made me, during our shoots, tilt my head down a little (like Elvis), or move to the left into a half shadow (like Dylan) or out into light (like, like…?).”

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE.

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

Arlene Gottfried: Mommie

Posted on July 3, 2015

Photograph by Arlene Gottfried

Photographs by Arlene Gottfried

Last summer I had the great pleasure of speaking with Arlene Gottfried at length, well, listening mostly, listening and asking questions and then listening again as Arlene spoke of her life behind the camera. A second generation New Yorker, Arlene has born witness to the people that have made this city one of the greatest places on earth. Her photographs never fail to delight and astound with their distinctive blend of compassion, style, and grace, with a knowing nod, a giggle, and a wink. This is New York, after all.

Arlene is unassuming yet powerful. The intensity of her presence can best be felt when looking at her photograph or listening to her sing gospel. I remember hearing her in church on several occasions, overwhelmed and overjoyed by the spirit she channels. It is this spirit, this very soul, that makes Arlene one of the most compelling artists I know. And so it was with great honor that last summer I interviewed Arlene about her life, her family, and her work for her forthcoming book, Mommie (powerHouse Books).

I remember seeing the mock up for Mommie at powerHouse years ago, once again overwhelmed by the depth and profundity of her work. To be honest, I was not ready for this level of truth, this intense bond between generations of women, all flowers from the same root. Mommie is Arlene’s fourth book with powerHouse, and perhaps the most personal of an incredibly intimate body of work.

As I listened to Arlene speak, I realized she was a woman who has kept a great many private matters just so, and with Mommie she was sharing more than her memories, she was baring witness as the family historian. As time passes, we come to terms with the eternal circle of life and death and birth once more. With Mommie, we quietly observe, we feel, and we think; Arlene’s photographs have the cumulative effect of softly sinking into your body and changing the very nature of your being.

In that same way, the book is an object unto itself, an object to be held, much like a family album. powerHouse would like to use real upholstery fabric to wrap the book’s boards (the front cover, spine, and back cover) and has decided to create a Indie GoGo account to support the production costs. In order to share Arlene’s story, they asked me to interview her a couple of months ago, and this time, Arlene sang “Amazing Grace,” a moment that be stilled my soul.

The video is now live, and the Indie GoGo campaign has begun. We invite you to visit the campaign at MOMMIE, and support the project. Among the rewards offered are Arlene’s first three powerHouse Books: Bacalaitos & Fireworks, Midnight, and Sometimes Overwhelming, each one a treasury of New York City history, street photography, and style, each one a love letter from the bottom of her heart.

Photograph by Arlene Gottfried

Photograph by Arlene Gottfried

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography, Women