Posts from the “Photography” Category

In the Gallery with: Brian Clamp

Posted on June 4, 2021

*© Peter Berlin, “Self Portrait as Urban Cowboy, “ c. 1970s, Hand-painted vintage gelatin silver print.*

The year 2000 marked a turning point for New York-based gallerist Brian Clamp. After turning 30 and receiving his MA in Critical Studies in Modern Art from Columbia University, he had reached a crossroads. “I had been working as director of Owen Gallery on the Upper East Side, and wanted to get more involved with contemporary art, photography, and working with living artists,” says Clamp. “I decided to take the plunge and start my own gallery, not fully realising what I was getting into.”

That fall, he opened ClampArt, and worked as a private dealer from his West 27th Street loft. An avid practitioner of photography, Clamp also spent time at The Camera Club of New York (now known as Baxter St), getting to know a number of photographers whose work he admired. Through these relationships, Clamp developed the foundations for the gallery program.

In early 2003, Clamp signed a lease for a commercial space on West 25th Street, just as Chelsea was becoming the center of the downtown art world. “I was able to get a ground floor space in Chelsea for my first gallery without any backing,” he says.

Read the Full Story at British Journal of Photography

*© The Estate of Peter Hujar, “Scrumbly Koldewyn and Tom Nieze, The Cockettes,” 1971, Vintage gelatin silver print, Courtesy Peter Hujar Archive.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, British Journal of Photography, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Meryl Meisler: New York PARADISE LOST: Bushwick Era Disco

Posted on June 3, 2021

*Meryl Meisler. Potassa de la Fayette Poised at COYOTE Hookers Ball The Copacabana, NY, NY 1977.*

In 1975, at the tender age of 23, Meryl Meisler arrived in New York City to study with legendary photographer Lisette Model. The Long Island native quickly found herself at home living amid the dazzling display of a city that evoked the refrains of Paradise Lost, John Milton’s 1667 epic poem chronicling the fall of man. Everywhere she turned, scenes of ecstasy, pandemonium and redemption unfolded with cinematic flair, beckoning her to photograph its rapturous days and nights.

In a new book and exhibition, New York PARADISE LOST: Bushwick Era Disco, Meryl chronicles the hedonistic nightlife scene of the late 1970s and pairs it with images of Bushwick in the 1980s as it struggled to recover from the plague of “benign neglect“, wherein the Federal government systemically denied financial support to Black and Brown communities nationwide.

andlords hired arsonists to torch their buildings to collect insurance payouts, prompting Howard Cosell to allegedly proclaim, “There it is ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” during Game 2 of the 1977 World Series. Entire city blocks were reduced to rubble while abandoned buildings were boarded up. The city was cheap, run-down and dangerous — attracting the kind of fearless devotee that defines the heroic spirit of New York. Teetering along the edge of bankruptcy, $453 million in debt, the city became a cauldron of creativity, unleashing hip hop, punk, and disco before the decade ended.

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” Satan proclaims in Paradise Lost, a sentiment befitting the city’s gritty glory. In the wake of the sexual revolution and the civil rights, women’s and gay liberation movements, a new generation came of age revelling in the libertine pleasures. Clubs like Studio 54, Copacabana, GG’s Barnum Room, and Les Mouches offered the ultimate escape: a night of freedom, fantasy, and decadence.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Meryl Meisler. Magnolia Tree, Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY 1983.*

*Meryl Meisler. Meryl’s Hand Prints on JudiJupiter on Man Wearing White, Studio 54, 1977.*

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

Revisiting “Minamata,” W. Eugene Smith’s Final Photo Series

Posted on June 3, 2021

*Photo: W. Eugene Smith. © Aileen Mioko Smith*

By 1971, American photographer W. Eugene Smith (1918–1978) had become a shadow of his former self, a shell-shocked recluse with a drinking problem who had retreated into the seclusion of his New York studio and home. Smith was alone, surrounded only by the remnants of his career as a world-renowned photojournalist.

Under the red light of the darkroom bulb Smith’s photographs hung, mementos of the best and worst of humanity. After getting his start in 1939 for Newsweek, Smith began shooting for Life the following year, compiling a compendium of work that made him one of the most influential photojournalist of the twentieth-century. A master of the photo essay, Smith, who became a member of Magnum Photos in 1955, documented war and peace, poverty and beauty in equal part.

In the 1960s, while Smith risked his life to bear witness to the destruction and salvation of humanity, halfway around the world the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory was poisoning the fishing village of Minamata, Japan. Between 1932 and 1968, the factory released wastewater contaminated with toxic methylmercury, poisoning the water and sea life consumed by locals. As of 2001, 2,265 people were afflicted with Minamata disease, a neurological disorder that causes muscle weakness, damage to hearing, vision, and speech, as well as insanity, paralysis, coma, and death. The first case was reported in 1956; since then 1,784 have died as a result.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Photo: W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Mioko Smith. © Watanabe Elichi*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Japan, Photography

Thomas Holton: The Lams of Ludlow Street

Posted on June 3, 2021

As the son of travel photographer George Holton, who studied under Ansel Adams, Thomas Holton grew up surrounded by images of distant lands capturing people from New Guinea to Guatemala.

“I began to realise the magic photography has to transport the viewer elsewhere and tell new stories and share experiences,” Holton says. George Holton passed away in 1979 during his time working in the town of Lushan on the Yangtze River, while making a book about China, his wife’s native land.

Two decades later, Thomas Holton embarked on a journey of his own: an 18-year odyssey into the life of a Chinese-American family, the Lams. He first encountered the family in 2003 while pursuing his MFA at The School of Visual Arts in his hometown of New York.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Emily Sujay Sanchez: Stories of Trauma, Survival and Healing

Posted on May 31, 2021

“My story is no different from women who look like me,” says Emily Sujay Sanchez, a Bronx-based photographer of Dominican heritage, who recounts a story of trauma, survival, and healing that first took root when she picked up the camera at the age of 23.

“I had just moved back to Providence, Rhode Island, after having my son. It was a really rough time,” Sanchez says. “ I had this baby and separated from my son’s father, right away. I was suffering from postpartum depression, though at the time I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t find work, and then when I did it was an overnight job one hour away from home, working in the coat checkroom at a casino. I was going through it.”

But providence, as it were, intervened and Sanchez enrolled in a photography course being taught at a local school. “I took into to film and darkroom and I will never forget the feeling because I was able to quiet everything that was going on at the time,” Sanchez says, then stills herself, holding back the tears.

“I still remember the first photographs I took. My instructor sent me out and said, ‘Take pictures of what attracts you and look at the lines’ — whatever the hell that meant!” Sanchez laughs. “The city is deserted, there’s nothing really going on. I was walking around this area and there was a diner. I saw a waitress outside smoking a cigarette on her break. Her eyes were glazed and she was completely in her own world. I asked if I could take her picture and she said, ‘Sure.’”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Art, Blind, Bronx, Latin America, Photography, Women

Miles Aldridge: Virgin Mary. Supermarkets. Popcorn. Photographs 1999 to 2020

Posted on May 30, 2021

*Donatella Versace, 2007 © Miles Aldridge*

Hailing from North London, photographer Miles Aldridge lived a charmed life as a young boy, his formative years spent within the inner circle that made the 1960s swing. His father, Alan Aldridge was an illustrator who got his start doing covers for Penguin Books before opening his own graphic design firm, INK, in the heart of Soho, where he worked with the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Who, and Elton John. “I grew up around my father’s psychedelic images and the rock and roll lifestyle ofSwinging London,” Aldridge says. “My sister Saffron and I would go backstage at Elton John concerts and see the incredible pageantry from behind the scenes.”

But things fell apart when his parents divorced. “The family imploded,” he says. “I tried to put the pieces back together and of course they never do.” From the age of 10 until he went to art school in his 20s, Aldridge struggled to adapt as his mother fell into a depression and their once vibrant psychedelic home fell apart. When he found punk music in the 1970s, he discovered an outlet to release his pent up rage through music. He then formed a band called the X Men and played psychedelic-garage-punk music.

Realizing his true talent laid in art, Miles Aldridge left the band to study illustration at Central St. Martins. After school, he worked in publishing doing book covers that stand up to this day but found this line of work was too solitary for his liking. “I wanted to do something more energized, collaborative, bigger, bolder and sexier,” he says. “Being a film director or a photographer were the two career options I toyed with. For a while I did both.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography

Joel Meyerowitz: Wild Flowers

Posted on May 28, 2021

Bronx-born photographer Joel Meyerowitz is no stranger to risk. At the age of 24, he put it all on the line when he quit his job at a New York-based advertising company to become a photographer after watching Robert Frank at a photoshoot. “I didn’t know who he was, what he stood for, or anything about photography,” Meyerowitz, now 83, recalled of that fateful day in 1962.

“I stood behind him so I could watch the way he was handling the different subjects. I could see it over his shoulder this little action was unfolding. He barely spoke to the preteen girls in front of the camera, he just grunted or made little body gestures. Each time their actions seemed to peak into something that had a fragmentary image of beauty I heard the click of his Leica.”

After the shoot, Meyerowitz went back on the street, and began to see extraordinary moments reveal themselves among the mundane. He remembers, “I walked through New York City, from 23rd Street to 53rd Street, just looking at everything. I had so many minor epiphanies along the way that by the time I got to the office I was filled with of desire to be on the street taking photographs. When I got upstairs, my boss asked me how it went and I said it was, ‘Fantastic, the shoot was great but I’m quitting on Friday. I have to become a photographer.’”

Joel Meyerowitz describes the scene in vivid detail, the way his boss stood silently with a small cigar clenched between his teeth, a little trickle of smoke going up and making his eye wink. “He was appraising me,” Meyerowitz says. “He was an artist himself so he understood that some transformative thing had happened to me. Then he loaned me his camera and out I went on Friday into the world.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Blind, Books, Photography

Guzman: 90s Girls

Posted on May 27, 2021

On his first day at the studio in 1983, Constance Hansen remembers asking Russell Peacock to clean the stove. She laughs at the reversal of gender roles and then adds, “It was for a photo shoot. I remember asking Russell what photographers he liked and what he wanted to do and he started talking about riding his bicycle through Europe for six months and sculpture. Meanwhile I was in full commercial mode, working around the clock.”

A bustling still life photographer, Hansen’s posh client roster included Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor, and Balducci’s – but things began to change when Peacock began collaborating with her. Paging through the luxurious art book style catalogues for Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons, inspiration struck. “We thought fashion photography looked like fun, not knowing how difficult it was,” Peacock says.

After business hours ended, they opened studio to the downtown scene, inviting club icons like Dianne Brill and Marilyn for portraits, styling them in clothes by emerging designers like Marc Jacobs and Isabel Toledo, and publishing in the Village Voice, aRude, Taxi, and Interview. To establish a distinct identity, they adopted the name Guzman.

“There were no doubles in photography at that time and everyone was against it except Paula Greif,” Hansen says. As creative director at Barney’s, Greif got Guzman its first big music gig – shooting the cover of Rockbird, Debbie Harry’s 1986 solo album. “We worked with Stephen Sprouse, Andy Warhol, and Linda Mason. We were trying not to act blown away but we were,” Hansen says.

By 1990, Guzman had opened a 3,000 square foot studio on 31st Street in Manhattan. They also secured a Los Angeles photo agent, who get them gigs in the music industry, bringing in an extraordinary line up of artists including Sting, the Neville Brothers, Digable Planets, Luther Vandross, and Dru Hill. “It was a golden era,” Hansen says. “Someone would call us up to do whatever we wanted.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

*Guzma. SWV, Release Some Tension, 1997.*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Dazed, Fashion, Music, Photography, Women

Alex Christopher Williams: Black Like Paul

Posted on May 27, 2021

“My father became ‘Black’ when I was in sixth grade,” American photographer Alex Christopher Williams remembers. Born to a white mother and a Black father, Williams, who presents as white, was raised by his mother in predominantly white suburban neighborhoods in Ohio. His father, Paul, who was 21 when Williams was born, chaperoned his sixth-grade class on a field trip to Washington D.C. “My father was much younger than many of the other kids’ parents so he was much cooler and more relatable to us,” Williams says. “I got to see my friends and everyone in my class communicate with my father and suddenly I became cooler because my father was Black — as though he were an accessory like a Gucci bag.”

After Williams’ mother remarried, the family moved to Mississippi when he was 13. “I was fortunate to have my maternal grandfather take me aside and say, ‘Just get ready. Prepare yourself.’ I had no idea what he was talking about,” he remembers. Raised in a “white normative culture,” Williams learned to code switch, moving effortlessly between various white friend groups. He rarely mentioned his father’s identity among his friends, for when he did, it was met with stereotypes of race.

“When I was in Mississippi, my friends never met my father but would identify certain characteristics about what they knew about Black culture in me and point that out,” Williams recalls. “We were in a band together and there was a moment when we would click. I’d be excited, jumping up and down yelling, and they would call it ‘Black Man Freak Outs.’ Or they wouldn’t even believe it, saying things like, ‘There’s no way Alex could be Black.’”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Allen Frame: NYC 1981

Posted on May 26, 2021

*John West and Charlie Boone, NYC, 1981 © Allen Frame, courtesy Gitterman Gallery and Matte Editions*

In the Deep South lies Greenville, Mississippi, a distinctly progressive town set amid a conservative landscape that gave birth to writers, musicians, and artists including photographer and filmmaker Allen Frame. Being LGBTQ was an unspoken fact of life; few like sculptor Leon Koury had the courage to come out. In the early 1970s, while on break from Harvard University and later Imageworks, Frame spent time at Koury’s studio, finding a source of connection that kept him from feeling like a complete outsider in hypermasculine world.

Dying to escape, Frame moved first to Boston before arriving in New York in 1977 just as the Gay Liberation Movement was in full swing. In 1981, he got a place on Perry Street just blocks from the Stonewall Inn, the site of the historic uprising in the fight for LGBTQ rights. At a time when one could easily afford to live, work, and party in New York, Frame took a job cleaning apartments, which left him with plenty of time to revel in the city’s burgeoning downtown art scene. Frame hung out in the East Village amid a new crop of artists and photographers including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Kenny Scharf, Dan Mahoney, Peter Hujar, and Alvin Baltrop.

At the same time, Frame was making his own body of work, which French critic Gilles Mora and photographer Claude Nori described as “photobiography.” Like Goldin and Armstrong, Frame created a journal of his personal life, one that evokes the warm intimacy of a family photo album. No longer an outsider, Frame was fully immersed among the avant garde but a penchant for mystery and suspense remained in his work, one that becomes all the more poignant in light of the catastrophe that would soon destroy the fragile world he loved.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Nan Goldin on her birthday, Allen Frame in the reflection, Nan’s loft on the Bowery. Courtesy of the artist and Gitterman Gallery © Allen Frame*

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

Megan Doherty: Stoned in Melanchol

Posted on May 24, 2021

Growing up in Derry, Ireland, artist Megan Doherty first picked up the camera as a teen to make reference photos for paintings. Soon after, she became enthralled with the possibility of using photography to bring to life images that fueled her imagination.

Young and ambitious, Doherty felt confined by small-town life. “I was feeling trapped, unfulfilled, and seeking escape from reality by any means necessary,” she says. “I got lost in films that gave me a glimpse into the possibilities outside of what I knew and also allowed me to observe how captivating mundanity could be if viewed through a new perspective.”

Gradually, Doherty realised that she could turn the camera onto her world to transcend the limits of her environment. She began photographing intimate moments with friends, both staged and unfolding in real-time. The result is a collection of photographs titled Stoned in Melanchol (Setanta Books), a Rizla style box of 50 prints.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Huck, Photography, Women