Dawoud Bey, based in Chicago, was born in 1953 in Queens, New York. Celebrated for his rich, psychologically compelling portraits, Bey explores in his work a range of formal and material methodologies to create images and projects that connect deeply with the communities he photographs.
Bey came to attention with Harlem, U.S.A. (1975-1979) a visual journey through the iconic neighborhood that, in 1979, also comprised his first solo exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Since then, Bey’s photographic and social practice—he is highly regarded as an educator as well as a photographer—has been defined by the empathy he brings to his subjects and the complexity with which he depicts them. In succeeding decades and successive bodies of work, Bey has moved from working “in the streets” with a small, hand-held 35mm camera to creating more formally structured portraits using a tripod mounted 4 x 5 camera and the monumental 20 x 24 Polaroid view camera.
Bey’s conceptual and material evolution is, in part, a desire to find other ways of making his work within the context of his community and museum-based projects. Bey has pioneered programs that redefine how artists engage with institutions, while striving to make those spaces more accessible to the communities they serve. Class Pictures (2002-2006) expands upon a series of portraits the artist first created during a residency in 1992 at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Andover. In this series Bey collaborated with young people and institutions throughout the United States. These striking, large-scale color portraits of students depict teenagers from a range of economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds, creating a diverse collection of portraits of a generation that challenge teenage stereotypes.
Recent bodies of work focus on the construction of history and memory. The Birmingham Project (2013) memorializes the lives of six young African American children killed in the bombing of the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and its aftermath; for Harlem Redux (2014–2017), Bey revisited the neighborhood to witness an urban landscape dramatically transformed by gentrification; and in Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017 Bey focused on architecture and landscape to visualize the historical subject of the Underground Railroad. Bey continues his visualization of collective experience and history, using photography as a vehicle to make them resonant in the contemporary moment.
Dawoud Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently Professor of Art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. In 2017 Bey was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. He is also the recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, amongst other honors. In 2020, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a major retrospective exhibition of Bey’s work that will also travel to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Bey’s work is featured in numerous publications, and is the subject of numerous monographs and publications, including Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Harlem, USA (Yale University Press, 2012), Picturing People (Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2012), and Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project (Birmingham Museum of Art, 2013). In 2018 a major forty-year retrospective publication, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, was published by the University of Texas Press and in 2020, Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects will be published by Yale University Press and SFMOMA.
Dawoud Bey’s work has been included in important solo and group exhibitions worldwide and is included in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums internationally.
© Dawoud Bey / Sean Kelly
]]>Zoltan Nagy was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1943. He left his country in 1966. From 1967 to 1972 he attended the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung in Essen, Germany, and specialized in photojournalism with Otto Steinert. Shortly afterwards he started to work as freelance press-photographer. Since 1974 he has been living and working in Italy. He is a member of the Foreign Press Association in Italy and contributed to many important journals in German, Swedish and Danish, such as Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, Geo, Essen und Trinken, Tages Anzeiger, Dagens Nyheter, Politiken. In 1984 he acquired the Italian citizenship. He published several books and took part in many collective and personal exhibitions in Italy and abroad.
Some of his photographs belong to private or museum permanent collections in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, USA and Hungary. He lives between Rome and Turin.
Gary Krueger's City of Angels, 1971-1980, a collection of sometimes frenetic and often bizarre photographs of Los Angeles, California. Krueger's curiosity and instincts helped to create a remarkable body of street photography that he describes as "split-second juxtapositions in life." After graduating High School in 1963, Gary Krueger (1945 - ) drove his 1954 Ford west from Cleveland, Ohio, to study graphic design and photography at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1964 to 1967. Later Cal Arts, Chouinard was a professional art school founded in 1921 by Nelbert Murphy Chouinard. In 1961, Walt and Roy Disney guided the merger of Chouinard and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to establish the California Institute of the Arts. Notable alumni include Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Joe Goode, and Allen Ruppersberg, with whom Krueger collaborated on Ruppersberg's narrative photo works, including 23 Pieces (1969) and 24 Pieces (1970). Upon graduation from Chouinard, Krueger was hired by WED, Disney's "Imagineering" Division. to photograph the Park and its events. He eventually left WED to pursue a successful career as a commercial and editorial photographer.
“Gary Krueger’s plain ol’ photographs (unless I’m missing a point)—small, tough, and sharp—are good, granite reportage. Baldessari’s “Fables” and Krueger’s no-nonsense photos cut like a hot ripsaw through the cool, marshmallow quality of both exhibitions.” - Peter Plagens, from a 1973 ARTFORUM review of the exhibition, Southern California: Attitudes 1972, at the Pasadena Art Museum.
Gary Krueger's work is represented in The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
]]>
Romano Cagnoni is an international, award-winning photographer, known as one of the foremost photographers of the 20th century. His photographs have been featured on the cover and front page of nearly every significant news magazine and paper in Europe and the United States. He is most known for his documentary work of the wars and conflicts around the globe. Throughout his career he has delineated intellectually stimulating images of ourselves, the conditions that define our existence and our very hopes of transforming it.The first time he picked up a camera was in the early days after the war, assisting a local photographer to carry heavy equipment into the many sculptor studios of Pietrasanta. Never having opened a book of photography, he took photos of what he liked and began to sell portraits of beach-goers along the Tuscan seaside.
His professional career began when he moved to London in 1958. Not long thereafter, he met Simon Guttmann (who initiated Robert Capa into photography) and they began to work together to cover cultural subjects for quality papers. After having success with the campaign for the Labour Party when Harold Wilson became Prime Minister, Cagnoni along with James Cameron, were the first western non-communist journalist allowed into North Vietnam during the tumultuous years of the war and Life Magazine published, on the cover, the President Ho Chi Minh.
Cagnoni started to plan and produce world wide stories on his own. He covered Biafra, the civil war in Nigeria, which was published in large spreads on different issues in Life Magazine and earned him the USA Overseas Press Award, the Chile of Allende, with writer Graham Greene, the return of Peron in Argentina, The Yom Kippur war in Israel, the war in Cambodia, the war in Yugoslavia shot with a large format camera, The Chechen War, where he set up a studio during the fighting to photograph the warriors. And numerous other stories.
After living and working in London for thirty years, he returned to his home town of Pietrasanta, surrounded by the landscapes that shaped his youth. Finding the environment so changed, he began to photograph in and around the place of his birth. The series that resulted, “Upside Down Memories” is technically intriguing due to surfaces that seem to have been painted with multiple layers of colors and a certain rhythm of shapes that lead the viewer to believe Photoshop was used. However, the only help he needed in order to photograph these memories was the “phantom of painting”.
Most recently, Cagnoni is broadening the very concept of how one views photography. He is developing photographic structures, which he calls: Electroluminescent bas-reliefs where the perception of reality is reconfigured, in an attempt to rearticulate traditional aesthetics and thereby establish an aesthetic that can respond to contemporary issues and circumstances.
Cagnoni has had more than 45 solo shows world wide, won many awards and published 16 books. He, along with Henry Cartier- Bresson, Bill Brandt, Don McCullin and Eugene Smith, was recently credited in the book, Pictures on a Page by the former Sunday Times editor, Harold Evans as being one of the most famous photographers in the world.
]]>Mark Seliger, born in in Texas in 1959. Having moved to New York City in the middle of the 1980s, he has since then become one of the most renowned press photographers. His work is presented in famous museums and galleries all over the world. Mark Seliger became interested in photography at an early age, having won his brother’s camera in a bet. He immediately dedicated his life to photography, experimenting and working with images, trying out different perspectives and various processes to develop his own films in his dark room at home. Seliger entered the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, and later on continued his training at the East Texas State University where he showed great interest in the history of documentary photographs. In 1984, he moved to New York City. Three years later, he started to work for the Rolling Stone Magazine. He was soon to become the star photographer of this famous magazine and produced over 125 cover photos from 1992 to 2002. Through his photos, the life of actors and singers of the 20th century became a legend. During his ‘’Rolling Stone years’’, Mark Seliger befriended the art director Fred Woodward. Together, they directed several music videos, among them You Belong to Me by Candy Butchers, Maria by Willie Nelson, Stillness of Heart by Lenny Kravitz and She by Elvis Costello. Be it photography, movies or music, everyone in the photography world asks for Mark Seliger’s portraits. His pictures are on the cover of music albums by Aerosmith, Lenny Kravitz, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Santana, Sheryl Crow, Tony Bennett etc. Production companies such as Universal Pictures, MTV, Miramax or Sony hire Seliger for their most prestigious campaigns. In 2002, Seliger quits Rolling Stone to work for the Condé Nast Group. He pursues his collaboration with magazines like Vanity Fair, GQ and the Italian edition of Vogue. In 2006, Mark Seliger creates 401 Projects with Bret Langton. This non-profit gallery is entirely dedicated to photography. Located just next door to Seliger’s studio in Greenwich Village, this gallery displays the work of young photographers –not the most fashionable or bestselling ones, but those whose photos matter in Seliger’s opinion. Mark Seliger currently lives in New York and is still working for Vogue and GQ.
]]>
Robert Yager was born and grew up in London, England. Fluent in Spanish, he lived in Mexico City for a year and then at 21 years of age, he moved to Los Angeles to study photography. In January 1992, the year of the Rodney King LA Riots and the highest murder rate, Yager began his intimate photography with the WestSide Playboys 13 Gang. Yager explored the cultural and human side of gang members, which he hadn’t previously seen in mainstream media at that time.
Yager became a freelance editorial photographer in 1993, starting off with a Newsweek cover and he began working for the LA Weekly and the U.K.’s Observer Magazine. Soon afterwards he was working for: The New York Times Magazine, The Independent Magazine (U.K.) The Face, The Telegraph Magazine, Marie Claire, TIME, Fortune, Fader and on occasion: Rolling Stone and Esquire. He shot covers, reportage features and portraits.
In 1996, Yager was awarded a fellowship by the Aaron Siskind Foundation for his photography with gangs. He also became a finalist in the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography in 1994 and 2012. Some of his gang series was shown at Perpignan’s Visa Pour L’Image in 1997, and in 2005 he won Best Photo Essay in the International Photography Awards. In 2007, Yager created a modest book titled “a.k.a. BOOBOO”. The images spanned 14 years in the life of BooBoo. David Lee Roth saw the exhibition that accompanied it. He contracted Yager to document Roth’s return to touring in Van Halen and subsequently spent several months on the road with Van Halen in 2007, 2008, and 2012, sharing a tour bus with Roth. In 2018, Yager was chosen by the fashion house Balenciaga to shoot their Summer 2019 global campaign, which won him photography awards in fashion and advertising. His work has been shown in various galleries, including the “Pulp Fact” exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London (1995) and the “Ink” exhibition at the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California (2018-19).
Steve Schapiro discovered photography at the age of nine at summer camp. Excited by the camera’s potential, Schapiro spent the next decades prowling the streets of his native New York City trying to emulate the work of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he greatly admired. His first formal education in photography came when he studied under the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith. Smith’s influence on Schapiro was far-reaching. He taught him the technical skills he needed to succeed as a photographer but also informed his personal outlook and worldview. Schapiro’s lifelong interest in social documentary and his consistently empathetic portrayal of his subjects is an outgrowth of his days spent with Smith and the development of a concerned humanistic approach to photography. Beginning in 1961, Schapiro worked as a freelance photojournalist. His photographs appeared internationally in the pages and on the covers of magazines, including Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, People, and Paris Match. During the decade of the 1960s in America, called the “golden age in photojournalism,” Schapiro produced photo-essays on subjects as varied as narcotics addiction, Easter in Harlem, the Apollo Theater, Haight-Ashbury, political protest, the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy, poodles, and presidents. A particularly poignant story about the lives of migrant workers in Arkansas, produced in 1961 for Jubilee and picked up by The New York Times Magazine, both informed readers about the migrant workers’ difficult living conditions and brought about tangible change—the installation of electricity in their camps.
An activist as well as documentarian, Schapiro covered many stories related to the Civil Rights Movement, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the push for voter registration, and the Selma to Montgomery march. Called by Life to Memphis after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Schapiro produced some of the most iconic images of that tragic event.
In the 1970s, as picture magazines like Look folded, Schapiro shifted attention to film. With major motion picture companies as his clients, Schapiro produced advertising materials, publicity stills, and posters for such notable films asThe Godfather, Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, and Chinatown. He also collaborated on projects with musicians, such as Barbra Streisand and David Bowie, for record covers and related art.
Schapiro’s photographs have been widely reproduced in magazines and books related to civil rights, motion picture film, and American cultural history from the 1960s forward. Monographs of Schapiro’s work include the award-winning American Edge (2000), a book about the spirit of the turbulent decade of the 1960s in America; and Schapiro’s Heroes (2007), which offers long intimate profiles of ten iconic figures: Muhammad Ali, Andy Warhol, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Ray Charles, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Barbra Streisand, and Truman Capote. Schapiro’s Heroes was the winner of an Art Directors Club Cube Award. Taschen released The Godfather Family Album: Photographs by Steve Schapiro in 2008, followed by Taxi Driver (2010), both initially in signed limited editions. This was followed by Then And Now (2012), Barbra (2014) featuring Schapiro and Lawrence Schiller's photos of Streisand, Bliss about the changing hippie generation (2015), BOWIE (2016), Misericordia (2016) about a facility for people with developmental problems, and—in 2017—a book about Muhammad Ali and Taschen’s Lucie award-winning The Fire Next Time with James Baldwin’s text and Schapiro’s civil rights photos from 1963 to 1968.
Schapiro passed away on January 15, 2022. At the time of his death, Schapiro had two photography books prepared to be published in 2022: Andy Warhol and Friends 1965–1966 (Taschen) and seventy thirty (Damiani) pairing 70 of his photographs alongside 30 of his son Theophilus's. He also had books on photojournalism, New York City, Riverside Records, and celebrities prepared for future publication. With the help of David Fahey, Schapiro had additionally been working on a retrospective project which combined all of his iconic images.
Since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s seminal 1969 exhibition, Harlem on My Mind, which included a number of his images, Schapiro’s photographs have appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide. The High Museum of Art’s Road to Freedom, which traveled widely in the United States, includes numerous of his photographs from the Civil Rights Movement and of Martin Luther King Jr. Recent one-man shows have been mounted in Los Angeles, London, Santa Fe, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. Steve has had large museum retrospective exhibitions in the United States, Spain, Russia, and Germany.
Schapiro continued to work in a documentary vein until shortly before his passing. His most recent series of photographs were about India, music festivals, the Christian social activist Shane Claiborne, and Black Lives Matter.
In 2017, Schapiro won the Lucie Award for Achievement in Photojournalism. Schapiro’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Museum, the High Museum of Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum, and the Getty Museum.
© Steve Shapiro
Eugene Richards, photographer, writer, and filmmaker, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1944. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English, he studied photography with Minor White. In 1968, he joined VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, a government program established as an arm of the so-called” War on Poverty.” Following a year and a half in eastern Arkansas, Richards helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many Voices, which reported on black political action as well as the Ku Klux Klan. Photographs he made during these four years were published in his first monograph, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta.
Upon returning to Dorchester, Richards began to document the changing, racially diverse neighborhood where he was born. After being invited to join Magnum Photos in 1978, he worked increasingly as a freelance magazine photographer, undertaking assignments on such diverse topics as the American family, drug addiction, emergency medicine, pediatric AIDS, aging and death in America. In 1992, he directed and shot Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, the first of seven short films he would eventually make.
Eugene Richards has authored sixteen books and his photographs have been collected into three comprehensive monographs. Exploding Into Life, which chronicles his first wife Dorothea Lynch’s struggle with breast cancer, received Nikon's Book of the Year award. For Below The Line: Living Poor in America, his documentation of urban and rural poverty, Richards received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. The Knife & Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room received an Award of Excellence from the American College of Emergency Physicians. Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, an extensive reportorial on the effects of hardcore drug usage, received the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Photographic Innovation in Books. That same year, Americans We was the recipient of the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Best Photographic Book. In 2005, Pictures of the Year International chose The Fat Baby, an anthology of fifteen photographic essays, Best Book of the year. Richards’s most recent books include The Blue Room, a study of abandoned houses in rural America; War Is Personal, an assessment in words and pictures of the human consequences of the Iraq war; and Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, a remembrance of life on the Arkansas Delta.
Born 1913 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, American photographer Helen Levitt became intrigued with the transitory chalk drawings that were part of the New York children's street culture of the time while teaching art classes to children in the mid-1930s. She purchased a Leica camera (with a right-angle viewfinder) and began to photograph these chalk drawings, as well as the children who made them. The resulting photographs were ultimately published in 1987 as In The Street: Chalk drawings and messages, New York City 1938–1948. Levitt continued taking more street photographs mainly in East Harlem but also in the Garment District and on the Lower East Side, all in Manhattan. Her work was first published in the Fortune magazine's July 1939 issue.
In 1965, Levitt published her first major collection, A Way of Seeing. Much of her work in color from 1959 to 1960 was stolen in a 1970 burglary of her East 12th Street apartment. The remaining photos, and others taken in the following years, can be seen in the 2005 book Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt. However, she felt equally comfortable working with black and white, as she did both in the 1980s.
Levitt lived in New York City and remained active as a photographer for nearly 70 years. She has been called “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.” She never married, living alone with her yellow tabby Blinky until, at the age of 95, she died in her sleep in 2009.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Wynn Miller first visited the city’s Eastside in the 1970s, after an invitation from his brother-in-law to meet members of the Arizona Maravilla gang. “It was a foreign world to me; I was a surfer,” Miller remembers. “I didn’t know anything about the gangs.”
“I took a few pictures and when I got home I made a few prints in my own darkroom. I thought they were really cool so I decided to take a chance. I took pictures of their kids and that was my way into the gang life.”
Over the next year, Miller would spend his weekends in the area, creating a series of black and white environmental portraits. Recently on view in the exhibition On the Edge of Society, his photographs are an intimate look at the brotherhood in a disenfranchised community living on the margins of society.
“The guys were really close to one another,” Miller says. “It wasn’t something I had experienced. I had close friends, but not like this. Most didn’t have jobs. There were a lot of abandoned lots in the area and we would gather around a couple of cars.”
After his first few visits, a couple of members named Lyle and Squire took Miller under their wing and vouched for him: “Some of the guys got serious about harassing me. Fortunately, Squire and Lyle watched over me and got what I was trying to do.”
“When I first started, I got some pictures printed in the LA Weekly. The first night they were published, they drove around the Eastside and broke all the vending machines for the newspapers, and took all the papers.”
Although the danger was ever-present, Miller says he was largely kept out of the mix: “They didn’t always want me around. They’d run out every now and then to do some mischief but they never let me go along with them.”
“I stopped going because one of the guys that I had gotten close to was shot and killed on a weekend when I wasn’t there. When I went back, they told me what had happened. I had an epiphany: ‘Okay I am done. I am not coming back here anymore’. I didn’t go back for 40 years.”
When Miller finally returned, the neighbourhood had changed so much that he no longer recognised it. “I asked around and nobody was willing to talk to me, but I had an old phone number for a guy named Ruben so I called him,” Miller recalls. “We met up and he said, ‘oh yeah, I remember you. You were scared the whole time you were there.’ He was right.”
“People always ask how I got these photographs. I worked my way in. I wasn’t the enemy. There were 50 gangs in East LA at that time, they had their hands full. I was just a scared guy from West LA.”
– Miss Rosen [© Huck]
Arlene Harriet Gottfried (August 26, 1950 - August 8, 2017) was a New York City street photographer who recorded scenes of ordinary daily life in some of the city's less well-to-do neighborhoods. Her work was not widely known until she was in her 50s. Although Jewish by birth, later in her life she embarked on a career as a gospel singer.
Gottfried published five books of her work: The Eternal Light (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1999), Midnight (powerHouse 2003), Sometimes Overwhelming (2008); One of her series, Bacalaitos and Fireworks (powerHouse 2011), focused on Puerto Ricans in the 1970s; Mommie (powerHouse 2015) was a portrait of three generations of women in her family: her immigrant grandmother, her mother, and her sister. Mommie : Three Genereations of Women received Time Magazine Best Photobook Award in 2016. Her photographs and archives are in the collections of the European House of Photography (MEP), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library.Born in Brooklyn, she moved with her Jewish immigrant family to the neighborhoods of Alphabet City. Gottfried was the older sister of comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried. When Arlene was a teenager, her father Max gave her an old 35mm camera, which she eventually took to Woodstock, even though she said, "I had no clue what I was doingâ€. She credited her upbringing for giving her the ability to get intimate photographs of strangers: “We lived in Coney Island, and that was always an exposure to all kinds of people, so I never had trouble walking up to people and asking them to take their picture.â€
She graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She worked as a photographer for an advertising agency before freelancing for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Life, the Village Voice, and The Independent (London (UK)).
She was an habitue of Nuyorican Poets Café, a friend of Miguel Piñero, and on the Lower East Side sang gospel with the Eternal Light Community Singers. Her photography dealer was the owner of the Daniel Cooney Fine Art Gallery.
She died August 8, 2017 from complications of breast cancer at her home in Manhattan at the age of 66 surrounded by friends and family
Deanna Templeton (born in 1969, Huntington Beach, California) is an American artist working primarily in photography. Templeton lives and works in Huntington Beach, California.
Deanna Templeton was born and raised in Huntington Beach, California. As a teenager, Templeton discovered and was inspired by punk rock. At the age of 15, she started to photograph the Los Angeles punk scene.
Deanna met Ed Templeton at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert when he was 15 and she was 18. She recalls, "He looked older and I looked younger so we met somewhere in the middle." Two weeks later, they went on a date, and two weeks after that, they were girlfriend and boyfriend. The two were married three years later in 1991. They both became vegetarian in 1990, vegan in 1991, and have not consumed meat or dairy products since.
Templeton started to pursue photography at the age of 15 when her mother gifted her a camera. She used the camera to explore and document the local Los Angeles punk scene.
Vinca Petersen is best known for her seminal photo essay No System. Published to great acclaim in 1999, it tells the story of a10-year personal journey travelling between the UK and Europe, staging illegal raves and festivals. Her imagery offer a window onto what was an otherwise highly secretive and closed tribe. Living within the rave community, rather than simply documentingtheir activities, legal or otherwise. Her diaristic imagery of the parties and the communities on both sides of the Channel are rawand intimate, but often sublime. It is an utterly singular coming of age story created amidst a moment of huge political upheaval. For anyone feeling a little nostalgic for the base heavy throb when approaching a live music venue or a packed dance floor, herimagery will help to soothe.
“Vinca Petersen is a photographer, installation, multimedia, and performance artist who works in the area of social practice. All of her works, including her photography, emerge from her deep social and political engagement with underrepresented communities in order to give them a voice and recognition”.
– Dr Mark Bartlett
No System was made with Steidl in 1999: Petersen remains the youngest female artist ever to work with the legendary publisher Gerhard Steidl – and certainly the only artist to persuade him to release their book below cost price, so that the subjects of her photographs could afford it. Such stories are entirely characteristic of Petersen’s project: of enabling the improbable, or seemingly impossible to take place, through inspiring faith in her singular talent, and her exceptional good grace in the world. No System is to be re-released in a new edition. In 2019 it was included in one of the first ever displays of photobooks at Tate Modern; Petersen was one of only five UK artists to feature in the entire Tate Modern displays at that time. It is a landmark publication, work from which was immediately acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum for the UK National Collection of Photography, and which has subsequently been acquired by Martin Parr Foundation.
During the early years of his career, Stanley Greene (USA, 1949-2017) produced The Western Front, a unique documentation of the San Francisco’s punk scene in the 1970s and 80s...
]]>During the early years of his career, Stanley Greene (USA, 1949-2017) produced The Western Front, a unique documentation of the San Francisco’s punk scene in the 1970s and 80s. An encounter with W. Eugene Smith turned his energies to photojournalism. Stanley began photographing for magazines, and worked as temporary staff photographer for the New York Newsday.
In 1986, he moved to Paris and began covering events across the globe. By chance, he was on hand to record the fall of the Berlin Wall. The changing political winds in Eastern Europe and Russia brought Greene to a different kind of photojournalism. He soon found himself photographing the myriad aspects of the decline of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Stanley was a member of the Paris-based photo agency Agence VU from 1991 to 2007. Beginning in 1993, he was based in Moscow working for Liberation, Paris Match, Time, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Le Nouvel Observateur, as well as other international news magazines. In October 1993, Stanley was trapped and almost killed in the White House in Moscow during a coup attempt against Boris Yeltsin. He was the only western journalist inside to cover it. Two of his resulting pictures won World Press Photo awards.
In the early 1990s, Stanley went to Southern Sudan to document the war and famine there for Globe Hebdo (France). He traveled to Bhopal, India, again for Globe Hebdo, to report on the aftermath of the Union Carbide gas poisoning. From 1994 to 2001, Stanley covered the conflict in Chechnya between rebels and Russian armed forces. His in-depth coverage was published in the monograph Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003 (Trolley 2003) and in the 1995 publication Dans Les Montagnes Où Vivent Les Aigles (Actes Sud). The work also appeared in Anna Politkovskaya’s book, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (2001). In 1994, Stanley was invited by Médecins sans Frontières to document their emergency relief operations during the cholera epidemic in Rwanda and Zaire. He has covered conflict and aftermath in Nagorno-Karabakh, Iraq, Sudan, Darfur, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Lebanon.
Stanley was awarded a Katrina Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute in 2006. In 2010, to mark the fifth commemoration of Hurricane Katrina - together with Dutch photographer Kadir van Lohuizen - Stanley made “Those who fell through the cracks”, a collaborative project documenting Katrina's effects on Gulf coast residents. The same year, Stanley’s book Black Passport was published (Schilt). In 2012, Stanley was the guest of honor of Tbilisi Photo Festival and began his project on e-waste traveling to Nigeria, India, China and Pakistan.
Stanley has received numerous grants and recognitions including - the Lifetime Achievement Visa d’Or Award (2016), the Aftermath Project Grant (2013), the Prix International Planète Albert Kahn (2011), W. Eugene Smith Award (2004), the Alicia Patterson Fellowship (1998) and five World Press Photo awards. Stanley presented the Sem Presser keynote lecture at the 2017 World Press Photo Award Festival.
Stanley Greene is a founding member of NOOR. Stanley passed away in Paris, France on May 19th, 2017.
Sergey Bratkov was born in 1960 in Kharkov (Ukraine). In 1978 he graduated from the Repin Art College and Polytechnical Academy in 1983. From 70’s he became interested in photography, in the 80s he began experimenting with the shooting making collages and objects. From 1988 to 1993 he was in a group of artists called “Litera A”: creating semifigurative painting, he participated in group exhibitions in Ukraine and Germany. From 1994 to 1997 he was a member of the Fast Reaction Group («Rapid Response Group”) together with the photographer Boris Mikhailov, Viktoria Mikhailova and Sergey Solonsky. They created a provocative campaigns, objects and photo series. In 1993 in his Kharkov studio Bratkov founded the gallery “Apdaun”, it lasted until 1997.
Since 2000 he lives and works in Moscow, collaborating with Regina Gallery. He creates photo series (reportage, staging), video, installations and performances. In his works he reflects the social reality of Russia and Ukraine, focusing on the life of homeless, poor and middle-class people. He addresses the society’s problems and fixes the “peoples kitsch – an absurd collage of everyday life, typical of the post-Soviet space” (S. Bratkov). His author’s signature is best known by his brutal frankness and irony: “In order to reach out to the audience the provocation is necessary”, – says the artist.
Charles H. Traub was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1945. He studied English literature at the University of Illinois, and joined the Peace Corps after graduation in 1967. An accident in Ethiopia forced him home to Kentucky where he met Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who became an important inspiration and friend. After service in the United States Army in 1969, he decided to pursue photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago. There he studied with Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel and Garry Winogrand. His thesis of abstracted black-and-white landscapes "Edge to Edge" was widely exhibited, and featured in a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago. Following his landscape work he made three well-known series of black-and-white photographs: Street and Parties (from The Chicago Period), and his first monograph, Beach, all used an innovative vignette on a Rolleiflex SL66.
In 1971 Traub began teaching full time at Columbia College, Chicago, and was responsible of developing new curriculum for the growing public interest in the medium. Traub was instrumental in developing the school’s Contemporary Trends Lecture Series that celebrated renowned international photographers and image-makers. Subsequently, he became chairperson of the department and founded the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography, which became the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MOCP). In 1973, along with his colleague Douglas Baz, Traub went on a sabbatical to make the Cajun Document, extensive look at the culture of the Louisiana bayous.
Traub’s first major body of work in color, Street Portraits, began in 1976, continued after his move to New York City shortly thereafter, and culminated in the book Lunchtime. His move to New York was followed by his first solo exhibition of photographs at the Light Gallery. Its owner, Tennyson Schad, then hired Traub to become director of this prestigious gallery. Traub curated numerous exhibitions there, including The New Vision: Forty Years of Photography at the Institute of Design; Aaron Siskind’s Harlem Document; Designed for Photography; and The Color Work of the FSA. Traub also showcased major photographers new to the gallery: William Klein, Luigi Ghirri, Ray Metzker, Mario Giacomelli and Louis Faurer among others.
After leaving the gallery in 1980 Traub continued his personal work and formed the Wayfarer partnership with Jerry Gordon—a specialized editorial and corporate photography agency. Their work was featured in many magazines, including Life, Time, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, New York and Avenue as well as annual reports for Fortune 500 companies. Throughout the 1980s Traub traveled to Italy, Brazil, Haiti, Morocco and the Far East for his personal work. Dolce Via and In the Still Life are compendiums of photographs from that period.
In 1987 Traub was asked to design a graduate studies program for the School of Visual Arts, which became the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department. Since its inception, the program has been distinguished for its innovative use of digital technology, the inclusion of all aspects of the lens and screen arts and its internationally celebrated faculty. As an early advocate of the power of digital photography, Traub adapted it to his own practice. His philosophy about the importance of digital thinking is reflected in the manifesto "Creative Interlocutor" and the textbook In the Realm of the Circuit. Creative projects that highlight Traub's integration of new technologies include the interactive website Still Life in America and the iBook No Perfect Heroes: Photographing Grant.
here is new york: a democracy of photographs was co-founded by Traub. This living memorial to the tragedy of 9/11 received the Brendan Gill Award as well as the ICP Cornell Capa Infinity Award. It is considered one of the seminal examples of crowdsourcing, digital production and online distribution of universally produced imagery. The exhibition traveled to 42 venues worldwide, and with its Web presence is considered to be one of the most widely viewed exhibitions of all time.
Traub has dedicated himself to photographic education, and has been a chairperson at the School of Visual Arts for 30 years. He has served on a number of non-profit educational boards, and is the president of the Aaron Siskind Foundation. He has had more than 60 major exhibitions in in galleries and museums throughout the world, including one-person shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Speed Museum, Hudson River Museum and Historic New Orleans Collection. Traub's work is in the permanent collections of more than two dozen major museums worldwide.
]]>Donna Ferrato is an internationally acclaimed photojournalist known for her groundbreaking documentation of the hidden world of domestic violence. Her seminal book Living With the Enemy (Aperture, 1991) went into four printings and, alongside exhibitions and lectures across the globe, sparked a national discussion on sexual violence and women’s rights. In 2014, Ferrato launched the I Am Unbeatable campaign to expose, document, and prevent domestic violence against women and children through real stories of real people.
Ferrato has contributed to almost every major news publication in the country, and her photographs have appeared in nearly five hundred solo exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. She has been a member of the Executive Board of Directors for the W. Eugene Smith Fund and was president and founder of the non-profit Domestic Abuse Awareness Project (501-c3). She has been a recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant, the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Outstanding Coverage of the Plight of the Disadvantaged, the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award, the Missouri Medal of Honor for Distinguished Service in Journalism, Artist of the Year at the Tribeca Film Festival, and the Look3 Insightful Artist of the Year. In 2008, the City of New York proclaimed October 30 “Donna Ferrato Appreciation Day,” and in 2009, she was honored by the judges of the New York State Supreme Court for her work advancing gender equality. In 2020, Ferrato was chosen as one of the Hundred Heroines by the British Arts foundation, Hundred Heroines.
Mike Schreiber is a self-taught New York Photographer with a degree in anthropology from the University of Connecticut. His work has been featured in Esquire Magazine, Rolling Stone, Trace, New York Magazine, Lurve, Vibe, XXL, Slam, Spin and Arise. Schreiber has also shot ad campaigns for Mountain Dew, AND-1, City Year and Partnership For A Drug-free America. Other clients include Atlantic Records, Epic Records, Sony, Universal Records and Koch records. Schreiber’s work captures varied subjects including entertainers, prisoners in Angola State Prison and kids on the streets of Cuba. His humanistic approach to life is reflected in the full gallery of mostly black and white photographs, providing an unparalleled aesthetic viewpoint. His photos capture the true essence of cultural life and perspective with an end result that is refined yet undeniably honest in its raw and gritty tone. His first book, "True Hip-Hop" was released in November 2010 with Mark Batty Publishing. He's had solo shows in N.Y., London, Atlanta, Chicago and Miami.
Paolo Woods was born of Canadian and Dutch parentage. He grew up in Florence, Italy and has lived in Paris and Haiti. He is devoted to long-term projects that blend photography with text. He is the author of six books, including “Chinafrica” (with Serge Michel), which deals with the spectacular rise of the Chinese in Africa, “STATE” (with Arnaud Robert) on the uniqueness and universality of Haiti and “The Heavens” (with Gabriele Galimberti) that for the first time investigates tax havens photographically. His books have been published in eleven different countries and acclaimed as an exemplary melding of art and documentary photography. He is one of the founders of RIVERBOOM and deeply believes in collaborative projects. His work is regularly featured in major international publications. He has had solo exhibitions in more than a dozen countries and his pictures are in private and public collections. He has received a number of prizes, including two World Press Photo Awards. Currently he is working on his first film.
Port au Prince’s Fifth Avenue is a waterfront road, just off the harbor, where mountains of second hand clothes bake in the tropical sun. The market, Croix-des-Bossales, is where the slaves used to be sold. Now it is not strong men from Africa that the merchants receive, but containers loaded with skirts, pants and shirts from the US. These second-hand garments are called “Pèpè” and it is increasingly difficult to see a Haitian wearing something that has not been previously worn by an American.
A t-shirt produced for Wal-Mart in the sweatshops of Port au Prince will be sported by a Texan and then returned to the sender, who, at last, will be able to wear it. This back and forth gives us a peek into the workings of the globalization of the textile industry.
The majority of “Pèpè” that arrive on the island have been donated by Americans to charities and collection centers, rejected by Thrift shops, and have gone through the sorting warehouses run by Haitians in Miami that discard the winter clothes and other unmarketable items from the lot. But the worst T-shirts, those that would barely be sold in the cheap gift shops of Times Square, those with the dumbest slogans, reappear, thanks to a free-market miracle, in remote provinces of Haiti where nobody has taken the effort of translating such poetry into Creole. It is said that the T-shirt, along with the bumper sticker, is America’s favorite place for self-expression, a kind of personal billboard, where political, philosophical and religious beliefs are condensed. While living in Haiti I went on the hunt for the perfect T-shirt. All of this would be amusing and ironic if the “Pèpè” trade had not put out of business thousands of Haitian tailors. “Pèpè”, or how lousy T-shirts exemplify fifty years of a North-South relationship.
Some of the images have been taken by http://www.bendepp.com and other generous Pèpè hunters.
"Rome is above all an atmosphere, a light, a climate: a heavy air, heavy with arrogance and sloth, clear as much as is necessary to mature up to the psychological detail a form or action that rationally leads to a particular, Roman satisfaction of the spirit of the senses, diffused air of a pink powder that details the forms and actions and confuses in a unity that of history has the blood, the mud and the gold ". Nobody could say it better than Ludovico Quaroni. He, Roman by birth, urban planner and architect born in 1911, put his hands on Rome just when the city was in need of a post-war reconstruction. And after reading Immaginare Roma (1969), his book dedicated to the city of the heart, between words and photographs, today Rome 1968 arrives - a journey through the streets of the capital, to "grasp the southern mix of instances and perhaps of cultures different, in their age-old ability to tamper with dirt and carelessly erode the Beautiful and the Ancient as to know them in Rome ".
In 1968, in Rome, a shoemaker had his shop in the ravine; in front of the Trevi Fountain there was nothing of Fellini's style, but only two nuns arm in arm who watched eternity; at Vicolo dell'Acquedotto Felice, a ruin allowed the sky to be glimpsed while the Tiber rippled on its surface without waves. The Roman profile drawn by Quaroni's eyes is soft, nuanced, contradictory. The photography of Ludovico and Livio (nephew) dissolves in a contrast that does not dare to define itself: it leaves room for loneliness and imperfection and collides with the eternal and the Beautiful. Around this humble Roman table but in perennial dialogue, the city of Quaroni is a theater that does not forget to show its monumentality. The advertising strategies crash like modern screams on the cracked buildings of everyday life, while the FIAT logo is a reflection among the blasé shop windows facing the buildings. And then there is time. "In many shots you can feel the arrow of time", writes Pecoraro, "in what you see it is already clearly written how the contradiction that Quaroni's eye intentionally captures will be resolved - such as the provisional barracks along the railway line near of the Tiburtina station and immediately beyond, in the background, the limpid finish of the towers by Mario Ridolfi (of which Quaroni himself did not know whether to be admired or not, given the minimal vernacular elements they contain) - and almost pleased with the confirmation, inherent in the image, of his own porous conception of the city in general and of Rome in particular ". Between Franco Albini's Rinascente and EUR, in the middle, there is a people only apparently capable of remaining indifferent to the signs of the time.
]]>
The focus of the german photographer Michael Wolf’s work is life in mega cities. many of his projects document the architecture and the vernacular culture of metropolises. Wolf grew up in Canada, Europe and the United States, studying at UC Berkeley and at the Folkwang school with Otto Steinert in Essen, Germany. He moved to Hong Kong in 1994 where he worked for 8 years as contract photographer for Stern magazine. since 2001, Wolf has been focusing on his own projects, many of which have been published as books.
Wolf’s work has been exhibited in numerous locations, including the Venice Bienniale for Architecture, Aperture Gallery, New York; Museum Centre Vapriikki, Tampere, Finland, museum for work in Hamburg, Germany, Hong Kong Shenzhen Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. his work is held in many permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, California; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum Folkwang, Essen and the German Museum for architecture, Frankfurt. He has won first prize in the World Press Photo award competition on two occasions (2005 & 2010) and an honorable mention (2011.) in 2010, Wolf was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Photography Prize. He has published more than 13 photo books including Bottrop Ebel 1976 (Peperoni Press 2012) Tokyo Compression Three (Peperoni Press/Asia One 2012,) Architecture of Density (Peperoni Press/Asia One 2012,) Hong Kong Corner Houses (Hong Kong University Press, 2011) Portraits (Superlabo, Japan,2011) Tokyo compression revisited (Peperoni Press/Asia One 2011,) Real Fake Art (Peperoni Press /Asia One 2011,) Fy (Peperoni Press, 2010,) a series of unfortunate events. (Peperoni Press, 2010,) Tokyo Compression (Peperoni Press /Asia One 2010,) Hong Kong Inside Outside (Asia One/Peperoni Press 2009,) The Transparent City (Aperture 2008) and Sitting in China (Steidl 2002).
Gregoire Alessandrini was only supposed to spend one year in New York. When the French film student and writer arrived in the early 1990s, however, he fell in love with the city. He would go on to spend eight "amazing" years in New York, working as a correspondent for different French magazines.
He also photographed the city from 1991 to 1998. "At the time, I didn’t pretend to be a professional photographer, but I guess I had the intuition of being the witness of a vanishing world," Alessandrini told HuffPost. "Here and there, one could see the remains of a golden era, of a certain idea of New York. A mythical time, where one could stumble into Basquiat, Patti Smith or Debbie Harry at the corner deli. A period where everything seemed possible, cheap, simple and wild!" "The city had obviously tremendously changed since the 70’s and 80’s but you just had to walk around the corner, enter any downtown dive bar to find the signs and remains of this legendary NY. Just like if the city was waking up with a bad hangover from all the past parties and eccentricity. You could just point your camera and here you went… old Keith Haring murals, empty lots, graffiti and RIP murals, crazy people and wild parties, cinematic atmospheres in the desolate Meat Packing District, 42nd Street sleaze still alive, old signs and store fronts, 'old' New York atmosphere in general." These days, Alessandrini lives in Paris and occasionally visits New York. The city, of course, has changed dramatically since he left, particularly in downtown Manhattan where Alessandrini used to hang out. "Last September, I was literally shocked to see how much the Lower East Side (the 'bad boys playground' at the time) had changed," he wrote in an email. "In late 2012, I remember being dropped off by a yellow cab on Bowery and looking for Bowery! This sudden transformation of downtown Manhattan had started before the twin towers went down but it seems to have accelerated at an incredible pace." As Alessandrini points out, his photos were actually taken in the not-so-distant past. They feel, however, like they're from a completely different New York.
]]>
Ricky Powell (November 20, 1961 – February 1, 2021) was an American photographer who documented popular culture including hip hop, punk rock, graffiti, and pop art. His photographs have been featured in The New York Times, the New York Post, the Daily News, The Village Voice, TIME, Newsweek, VIBE, The Source, Rolling Stone, among other publications.
Born Ricky Abraham Cordero on Nov. 20, 1961, in Brooklyn, Ricky never knew his father and was raised an only child by single mother Ruth Powell, who survives him and who gave him an eccentric New York childhood. In 1968, the two Powells moved to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where grade-schooler Ricky grew up little supervised and immersed in rhythms of the street and nightlife. A schoolteacher by day and nightclub habitué by night, Ruth would occasionally bring her son along to heady nightspots like the bar at Max’s Kansas City, where Powell recalls in “The Individualist,” “She would sit me by the jukebox as she hung out with all these kooks. I grew up quick, dude.”
In the mid-'70s, Powell lived two blocks from Washington Square Park, a self-described “normal regular playground rat.” By his late teens he was an outsized street character known for his swagger on the basketball court and his easy magnetism in clubs like Roxy, Fun Gallery and Danceteria, where hip-hop was coming into being. While studying physical education at Hunter College, he met key figures like Fab 5 Freddy, hip-hop graffiti legends Seen and Futura, artists such as Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, young actors like Fishburne and Mazar, and an NYU art student named Amie Hertzig, whose point-and-shoot Minolta camera he borrowed one night to photograph striking couples inside the Roxy. “I’m a fan of interesting people,” Powell explained at a Tribeca Film Festival Q&A on Zoom last year.
Powell dated Hertzig for two years before she dumped him, leaving her Minolta behind in a bag of clothes. When Powell discovered it, he vowed to use the camera to avenge his rejection by gaining some form of fame. Through an East Village softball team that included Matt Dillon and graffiti star Futura, Powell met the editor of downtown magazine Paper, who set him loose on South Bronx hip-hop parties, skateboard parks and downtown art openings for photos in its nightlife section. Soon, he was shooting for Ego Trip, Mass Appeal and other scene mags, as well as the Village Voice and Rolling Stone.
In 1985, he went to a local show by his schoolmate Adam Horowitz’s new band the Beastie Boys, becoming an instant fan and forging a relationship that landed two of his photos on the album sleeve of their smash debut “Licensed to Ill” within his first year as a photographer. Powell stuck around as the group got into skateboard culture, jazz instrumentation and spiritual practices far removed from the early ‘80s New York that brought them together.
Questlove noticed the change when his group The Roots joined a 1994 Beastie Boys tour. As he put it in a Powell memorial Instagram post, “94 Beasties were not the 84 Beasties I grew up on. They were responsible family cats doing meditation & exercising & the wildest [s—] we did was rent out a go-cart race track in Utah.” Unrecovered and unrepentant Powell never found his groove in the new setting.
Powell spent the Eighties and Nineties documenting New York City’s vibrant downtown music and arts scenes. While he worked with the likes of Madonna, Andy Warhol, Sofia Coppola, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, he was best known for his work with the stars of hip-hop’s golden age. Born and raised in New York City, Powell began taking photos in 1985, and the following year he was invited to go on tour with Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C. The tour helped Powell secure work photographing hip-hop luminaries like LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and Eric B and Rakim, although he was always most closely associated with Beastie Boys: He earned unofficial “fourth member” status and even got a famous a shout-out on their song “Car Thief.”
His photographs included candid portraits of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Madonna, in addition to many other popular culture artists and other common people. His photographs were included in the books The Rap Photography of Ricky Powell! (1998), The Rickford Files: Classic New York Photographs (2000), Frozade Moments: Classic Street Photography of Ricky Powell (2004), and Public Access: Ricky Powell Photographs (2005) and were exhibited both domestically and internationally.
With the loose-limbed baller charm of a New York street kid, Powell moved easily between Black and white New York, his photography style recognizably a product of hip-hop itself: a loose, spontaneous means of seizing the moment with available tech. This point-and-shoot sprezzatura chronicled a moment when modern artists, actors, musicians and intellectuals mingled, chatted and danced together in the same nonstop, borough-wide after party. “He had a serious presence all over the city,” actor Laurence Fishburne recalls in Josh Swade’s forthcoming documentary “Ricky Powell: The Individualist.” “He was not an outsider looking in, he wasn’t some anthropological thief, he was a part of it.”
His candid street shots from this time, many taken while working various day gigs, froze the likes of Madonna, Cindy Crawford, Mike Tyson and other boldfaced New Yorkers in their off-hours. He shot one black-and-white portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat when the artist was a customer at Powell’s sidewalk Frozade stand, and another of Basquiat with Andy Warhol when he spotted them arriving at the Soho opening of their collaborative 1985 show.
“Ricky’s work was a collaboration on both sides of the camera,” says Jesse Cory, co-founder of 1xRun, who published the new anthology of Powell’s work, “The Individualist.” “What makes his work art and not commercial photography is that it doesn’t feel premeditated, and the camera is a reflection of both parties.”
Curator and writer Bill Adler says Powell’s work was not amateurish so much as “anti-professional.” “He had a sense of a given moment,” says Adler, whose Eyejammie Fine Art Gallery hosted a 2004 show of Powell’s work. “He was a downtown New Yorker who treasured the funkiness and the idiosyncrasies of the city.”
Born in Naples in 1949, he moved to London in 1972 to devote himself to photography, although in the early 1970s he adapted to the most varied professions. His professional debut in the world of photography took place in 1975, when - thanks to his employment at the pop-rock weekly Radio Guide Magazine - he began touring England photographing concerts and pop music characters. Later he began to collaborate as a free-lance photographer for The Sunday Times Magazine, which dedicated to him the first cover for the reportage "La Mattanza". Later he also collaborates with L'Observer Magazine.
In 1980 Francesco Cito was one of the first photojournalists to clandestinely reach Afghanistan occupied by the invasion of the Red Army and, following various guerrilla groups fighting the Soviets, he traveled about 1200 KM on foot. His photographs of the first Red Star soldiers who were ambushed. In 1982-83 he made a report on the Camorra in Naples, published by the major national and foreign newspapers. Also in Naples in 1978 he made a report on cigarette smuggling from within the smuggling organization for The Sunday Times Magazine. In 1983 he was sent to the Lebanese front from the Weekly Era and follows the ongoing conflict between the Palestinian factions, represented by the pro-Syrian leader Abu Mussa and the nationalist Yasser Arafat, founder of Al-Fatah (Organization for the Liberation of Palestine). Cito is the only photo-journalist to document the fall of Beddawi (refugee camp), Arafat's last stronghold in Lebanon. He later documents the various phases of the Lebanese civil war up to 1989. In particular, in 1984 he devoted himself to the conditions of the Palestinian people within the occupied territories of the West Bank (West Bank) and the Gaza Strip. He follows all the phases of the first "Intifada" of the years 1987-1993 and of the second in the period 2000-2005, being wounded three times during the clashes. In 1989 he was sent to Afghanistan on the Friday of the Republic and still moves clandestinely in the wake of the "Mujahideen" to tell the story of the Soviet retreat. He will return to those areas again in 1998 sent by the weekly Panorama, with the intention of meeting Osama Bin Laden (meeting never happened due to the start of the bombing). In 1990 he was in Saudi Arabia in the first "Gulf War" following the first contingent of US Marines after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. It follows the whole process of the "Desert Storm" operation and the liberation of Kuwait (February 27-28, 1991). In the 90s he documents the different phases of the Balkan conflicts. In 1994 he made a report on the extremist Israeli settlers for the German weekly "Stern". In 1995 he won the third World Press Photo prize for the reportage with "Neapolitan weddings". In April 2002 he was among the few to enter the Jenin refugee camp under curfew and siege for 40 days by the Israeli "Tzahal" army (as well as other cities administered by the Palestinian Autonomy Government). In Italy Francesco Cito often deals with mafia cases, but also with other kinds of events (such as the Palio di Siena which earned him the first prize at the World Press Photo in 1996) and other relevant aspects of contemporary society. From 1997 onwards, the goal is also aimed at Sardinia, documented outside the tourist itineraries to better read its social aspects and restore an identity more linked to traditions. This work is partly enclosed in a dedicated photo-book ("L'Isola al di là del mare", 2003). In 2007 he was invited by the Sakhalin Governorate (Russian islands former penal colony told by Chekhov) for a photographic work on the territory, during which he illustrates the life and production activities following the discovery of huge oil fields. This work has been the subject of a photographic exhibition and a photo book on the subject published in Russia ("Sakhalin", 2007). Between 2005 and 2011 he carried out a documentary work in Palestine of the various phases of the construction of the Israeli wall, subsequently exhibited in various Italian cities. In 2011 he dedicated himself to documenting the conditions of Palestinian children suffering from deafness problems. This work too has been the subject of a photographic exhibition (in Bergamo), like the complex work on the coma theme (“Vite suspended”), still under construction, exhibited several times in various Italian locations. In 2015, the Author created the photographic exhibition "Color W&B" in Seravezza (Lucca), a retrospective of the many reportages conducted over the years in various countries around the world. On the occasion of this exhibition, he produces the book "Francesco Cito, Photographer", accompanied by texts by Ferdinando Scianna and Carlo Verdelli. In his long and intense career as a photojournalist, Francesco Cito has collaborated with the major national and foreign newspapers. To name a few: Era, People, The Friday of the Republic, Italian Illustration, L'Espresso, L'Europeo, Oggi, Panorama, Sette-Corriere della Sera, D Donna, Io Donna. And then: Die Zeit Magazine, Figaro Magazine, Frankfurten Allemain Magazine, Life, Paris Matche, The Independent Magazine, The Observer Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine, Stern, and more.
Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and became interested in photography at age fourteen. He studied photography at the Art Center School in Los Angeles from 1953 to 1955 and then began freelancing. His work appeared in Esquire, Art in America, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals, and he had his first solo exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1963. Subsequent exhibitions of his work include "Toward a Social Landscape" at the George Eastman House in 1966 and "New Documents" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967, both of which identified his photographs with those of other "social landscape" photographers such as Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, and Diane Arbus. Friedlander has published books regularly: Work from the Same House (with Jim Dine, 1969), Self-Portrait (1970), Flowers and Trees (1981), Lee Friedlander: Portraits (1985), and Cray at Chippewa Falls (1987). He has also produced the book Nudes (1991), and The Jazz People of New Orleans (1992). He has received a number of awards for his photography, including three Guggenheim Fellowships; five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships; and a MacArthur Foundation Award. Friedlander is responsible for printing the negatives of the turn-of-the-century New Orleans photographer E.J. Bellocq, whom he rescued from oblivion.
Friedlander's photography follows in the tradition of documentary photography as practiced by Walker Evans and Robert Frank. It is unusual for street photography in that it possesses a constant awareness of the photographer's relationship to the picture plane and places at least as much importance on it as on the image's ostensible subject--usually something like an empty street, a store window, or an unremarkable piece of town statuary. Friedlander's photographs also often contain his shadow and/or reflection, which lends an odd, uncomfortable edge to his observations.
© ICP New York / Lisa Hostetler
]]>
Sue Kwon began her career at The Village Voice, shooting subjects that ranged from runaways to underground Jamaican nightclubs in Queens. Her photographs have since been published in The Source, Vibe, and Paper, and she has become a well-known portrait photographer of hip hop stars. Her work has been featured in group shows in New York and Copenhagen and been the subject of solo shows at A Bathing Ape Gallery in Tokyo and Clic Gallery in New York. Her first monograph, "Street Level: Photographs 1987-2007" featured twenty years of her black and white street photography and was published by Testify Books in 2009. In 2021, her second book "Rap is Risen" is released.
Mattia Zoppellaro studied photography at IED in Milan from 1999 to 2001.
In 2003, after two years working experience at the Photography department of Fabrica (Benetton’s Communication Research Centre), he moved to England, where he started shooting for several music magazines and record labels.
In the meantime he develops different projects, from social reportage (Irish Travellers, Kosovar Refugees, Western Africa Witch Hunters, Hackney’s Homeless, Maximum Security Prisons in Italian North East), to entertainment (Sicilian Religious Ceremonies, Milan Porn Fair) and youth culture features (European Rave Parties, Mexican Punks, Dakar’s Hip Hop Scene).
In September 2017 he publishes his first book “Appleby” edited by Contrasto. In January 2020 The projects “CCCP” and “Straight Outta Pikine” are exhibited at Arte Fiera in Bologna. In October 2021 publishes his second book “Dirty Dancing”, edited by Klasse Wrecks about the late 90s Rave scene.
For years Mattia Zoppellaro has been documenting the European free party/techno scene. As an avid underground music fan and busy traveller Zoppellaro was not only a participant at the events but also a close member of this free roaming family. This has gifted him a unique and intimate access into the lives of the free party collective and everyone and thing they have touched along the way.
© Mattia Zoppellaro / Contrasto
]]>
Sophie Bramly (born 1959) is a French photographer, television producer/director, digital pioneer, and author. She’s best known for the hip-hop photos she shot in New York in the early Eighties, the hip-hop television show she hosted for MTV in London in the late Eighties, and the website and online community dedicated to female pleasure she established in Paris in 2008. This career has been described as “protean” in Le Figaro. In 2017 France's Ministry of Culture named Bramly a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Sophie Bramly was born to Jewish parents in Tunisia in June 1959, and moved with her family to Paris at the age of two. She is the sister of the writer Serge Bramly and the first cousin of Elsa Cayat, a columnist who was assassinated during the Charlie Hebdo shooting. In high-school, Bramly toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer, but ultimately studied graphic arts at Penninghen, the Paris art school. Upon graduation, Bramly began freelancing as a photographer and, shortly after, her work began to appear in publications including Paris Match, Elle (magazine), Le Jardin des Modes, and Metal Hurlant. She was 21 years old when some of her images were exhibited in a show called Autoportraits Photographiques 1898-1981 at the Centre Pompidou, alongside photos by Man Ray, Duane Michals, Cindy Sherman, René Magritte, Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, William Wegman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others.
Bramly was 22 when she was introduced to hip-hop on a visit to New York in 1981. “I was flabbergasted when I first saw the New York City Breakers at a party downtown,” she’s said. “Then a friend introduced me to some rappers, and after that I felt like Joan of Arc on a mission. I dropped everything else I was doing and I followed them everywhere they went for four years.”
Unlike some of her contemporaries, who focused on one or another of hip-hop’s sub-genres, Bramly documented pioneers from all four of hip-hop’s elements: emcees (including Grandmaster Melle Mel, Kurtis Blow, Lisa Lee, the Fat Boys, Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys), deejays (including Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Afrika Islam, Jazzy Jay, Grandmaster Flash, and Kool DJ Red Alert), graffiti artists (including DONDI, Futura, Zephyr, and Lady Pink), and breakdancers (including members of Magnificent Force, Dynamic Breakers, and the Rock Steady Crew). She also captured behind-the-scenes players, including the record producers Bill Laswell, Bernard Zekri, and Rick Rubin; the Fun Gallery’s Patti Astor; and notable establishment figures who collaborated with the hip-hoppers, including Herbie Hancock and Harry Belafonte.
It took nearly 30 years for Bramly’s New York photos to begin gaining renown. In 2011, the Red Bull Music Academy published a limited-edition book of her photos entitled “1981+,” which generated three separate solo shows of her work at galleries in France. In 2015, Paris’ Galerie 213 published a limited-edition book of her photos entitled “Walk This Way,” which resulted in four solo shows of her work. In 2018, in the wake of a group show entitled “Gold,” the Mucem Museum in Marseille acquired twelve of Bramly’s photos. That same year three of her photos, along with the contact sheets from which they were chosen, were published in Vikki Tobak’s book, “Contact High.” In his introduction to “Walk This Way,” Fab 5 Freddy wrote, “Like photos of a newborn baby just home from the hospital, no one else was looking this closely through a camera lens and capturing so many of this new culture’s pivotal players in such candid and intimate moments.” Bramly continues to take photos professionally and also for her own pleasure.
Back in France in 1984, Bramly began working on the first ever television show devoted to hip-hop. Called “H.i.p.H.o.p” and hosted by Sidney Duteil, a Frenchman of Guadeloupian heritage, it aired weekly on the TF1 network. As the show’s artistic director, Bramly created its logo. She also worked as a photographer, co-author and artistic advisor alongside Duteil on “Hip Hop Story,” an early French-language book devoted to the culture, published by Hachette Jeunesse in 1984.
Bramly moved to London in 1987, where she was a member of the team that created MTV Europe. She went on to produce and host “Yo!”—the first English-language hip-hop tv show to be broadcast in Europe. A showcase not only for American rap (and, occasionally, for the soul and funk that preceded it), but for the rap then being made in England, Holland, Spain, and France, “Yo!” ran weekly from October 1987 through to the end of 1990, with some 145 episodes. Inspired by Bramly’s example, MTV in America began producing Yo! MTV Raps less than a year after “Yo!”’s debut. Its first host was Fab 5 Freddy.
In 1991 Bramly returned to France and began working for PolyGram, helping to usher the music label into the digital age. After Polygram was merged with the Universal Music Group in 1999, Bramly founded and was named director of the firm’s New Media Department, which she ran until 2007.
After leaving Universal, Bramly established SoFilles, a production company focused on “la culture du plaisir feminin” (women’s sexuality), and a website called SecondSexe. “The day I realized that half of the Internet was porn but none of it – or almost none of it – was for women, made me really angry,” she said in 2014. “How come, 50 or 60 years after women’s liberation, women look like all they still care about was love and making babies, but not having sex?”. In 2008, Bramly produced X Femmes, a series for French television of ten short erotic films directed by female directors including Zoe Cassavetes, Mélanie Laurent, Arielle Dombasle, Lola Doillon, Laetitia Masson, Helena Noguerra and Caroline Loeb. The films were praised on doctissimo.fr as “capable of awakening a woman’s desire without falling into low-end pornography.” Bramly has continued to produce and direct documentaries for French television, all focusing on her three favorite subjects: hip-hop, female empowerment, and pro-sex feminism.
Bramly has also authored or edited three books, including Un matin, j’etais feministe (2019) which was described in ‘’Le Figaro’’ as “passionate, personal, and scholarly."
Mohamed Keita, born in Ivory Coast in 1993, Mohamed Keita found out that he had to leave his country at the age of fourteen because of the civil war that was going on there. He started a three-year journey through Guinea, Mali, Algeria, Lybia and Malta to finally arrive in Italy in 2010, at the age of seventeen. Welcomed from a youth centre for refuges in Rome, called Civico Zero, Keita started learning the Italian language, whilst working as bellhop in an hotel. Thanks to the period spent at Civico Zero, he discovered an innate calling for the art of photography, he first signed up for a photography school called Exusphoto and then at the Cinema and TV Institute Roberto Rossellini, that is how he started is artistic career. Nowadays Keita live and works in Rome, where he takes care of the youngsters in CivicoZero. In 2017, he collaborated in the creation of two photography workshops for children that lives in the outskirts of Bamako in Mali, and Nairobi, in Kenya, on which he is still working on. Since 2012, Keita has exhibited at many personal and collective exhibitions: the Pecci museum of Prato, the Photolux Festival of Lucca, the 13th International Festival of Rome, that is held in museum Macro. These are only few of the most important institutions he worked with, via workshops and/or exhibitions. He published his monogroph with Punctum Press in 2021 entitled "Rome 10/20"
An Iconic street photographer with a unique style, Bruce Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946. He first went to Penn State University but he found his sociology courses too boring for his temperament and he quit college. Gilden briefly toyed with the idea of being an actor but in 1967, he decided to buy a camera and to become a photographer. Although he did attend some evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Bruce Gilden is to be considered substantially a self-taught photographer.
Right from childhood, he has always been fascinated by the life on thestreets and the complicated and fascinating motion it involves, and this was the spark that inspired his first long-term personal projects, photographing in Coney Island and then during theMardi Gras in New Orleans.
Over the years he has produced long and detailed photographic projects in New York, Haiti, France , Ireland, India, Russia, Japan, England and now in America.
Since the seventies his work has been exhibited in museum and art galleries all over the world and is part of many collections.
The photographic style of Bruce Gilden is defined by the dynamic accent of his pictures, his special graphic qualities, and his original and direct manner of shooting the faces of passers-by with a flash. Gilden’s powerful images in black and white and now in color have brought the Magnum photographer worldwide fame.
Gilden has received many awards and grants for his work, including National Endowments for the Arts fellowships (1980, 1984 and 1992), French “Villa Medicis Hors les Murs” grant (1995), grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts ( 1979, 1992 and 2000), a Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship (1999) and in 2013 a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.
Bruce Gilden has published 23 monographs of his work, among them: Facing New York, 1992; Bleus, 1994; Haiti, 1996 (European Publishers Award for Photography); After The Off, 1999; Go, 2000; Coney Island, 2002; A Beautiful Catastrophe, 2004; Foreclosures, 2013; A complete Examination of Middlesex, 2014. In 2015, Gilden published Face, and Hey Mister Throw Me Some Beads! Un Nouveau Regard Sur la Mobilité Urbaine featuring the commission he did for the French transporation system RATP was released in April 2016. Only God Can Judge Me 2018, Lost And Found 2019, Palermo Gilden 2020, Cherry Blossom 2021.
]]>