DIANE ARBUS : In The Beginning

The Backwards Man in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1961

© The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC. All Rights Reserved

For Best Viewing Click on Images to Enlarge

Female impersonator holding long gloves, Hempstead, L.I. 1959

© The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC. All Rights Reserved

Man in hat trunks socks and shoes, Coney Island, N.Y. 1960

© The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC. All Rights Reserved

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue which includes two essays: "in the beginning" by Jeff L. Rosenheim and "notes from the archive" by Karan Rinaldo, Senior Research Assistant. The book is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

My favorite photograph in the Catalogue

Clown in a fedora, Palisades Park, N.J. 1957

Taxicab driver at the wheel with two passengers, N.Y.C. 1956 

© The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC. All Rights Reserved

diane arbus: in the beginning

July 12-November 27, 2016

The Met Breuer, 75 x Madison, NYC

As part of the inaugural season at The Met Breuer, diane arbus: in the beginning will open on July 12, featuring more than 100 photographs that together will redefine one of the most influential and provocative artists of the 20th century. This landmark exhibition will highlight never-before-seen early work of Diane Arbus (1923–71), focusing on the first seven years of her career, from 1956 to 1962—the period in which she developed the idiosyncratic style and approach for which she has been recognized, praised, criticized, and copied the world over.

"Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize." –Diane Arbus

diane arbus: in the beginning focuses on seven key years that represent a crucial period of the artist's genesis, showing Arbus as she developed her style and honed her practice. Arbus was fascinated by photography even before she received a camera in 1941 at the age of 18 as a present from her husband, Allan, and made photographs intermittently for the next 15 years while working with him as a stylist in their fashion photography business. But in 1956 she numbered a roll of 35mm film #1, as if to claim to herself that this moment would be her definitive beginning. Through the course of the next seven years (the period in which she primarily used a 35mm camera), an evolution took place—from pictures of individuals that sprang out of fortuitous chance encounters to portraits in which the chosen subjects became engaged participants, with as much stake in the outcome as the photographer. This greatly distinguishes Arbus's practice from that of her peers, from Walker Evans and Helen Levitt to Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, who believed that the only legitimate record was one in which they, themselves, appear to play little or no role. In almost complete opposition, Arbus sought the poignancy of a direct personal encounter. 

Arbus made most of her photographs in New York City, where she was born and died, and where she worked in locations such as Times Square, the Lower East Side, Coney Island, and other areas. Her photographs of children and eccentrics, couples and circus performers, female impersonators and Fifth Avenue pedestrians are among the most intimate and surprising images of the era. From the beginning, Arbus believed fully that she had something special to offer the world, a glimpse of its many secrets: "I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it's very subtle and a little embarrassing to me but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them."

Nearly half of the photographs that Arbus printed during her lifetime were made between 1956 and 1962, the period covered by this exhibition. At the time of her death in 1971, much of this work was stored in boxes in an inaccessible corner of her basement darkroom at 29 Charles Street in Greenwich Village. These prints remained undiscovered for several years thereafter and were not even inventoried until a decade after her death. The majority of the photographs included in the exhibition are part of the Museum's vast Diane Arbus Archive, acquired in 2007 by gift and promised gift from the artist's daughters, Doon Arbus and Amy Arbus. It was only when the archive—a treasury of photographs, negatives, notebooks, appointment books, correspondence, and collections—came to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 that this seminal early work began to be fully explored.

Among the highlights in the exhibition are lesser-known published works such as Lady on a bus, N.Y.C. 1957, Boy stepping off the curb, N.Y.C. 1957–58, The Backwards Man in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1961, and Jack Dracula at a bar, New London, Conn. 1961, as well as completely unknown additions to her oeuvre, such as Taxicab driver at the wheel with two passengers, N.Y.C. 1956, Woman with white gloves and a pocket book, N.Y.C. 1956, Female impersonator holding long gloves, Hempstead, L.I. 1959, and Man in hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, N.Y. 1960. Included among the selection of six square-format photographs from 1962 is the iconic Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962, a photograph that signals the moment when Arbus turned away from the 35mm camera and started working with the 2¼ inch square format Rolleiflex camera, a format that remained a distinctive attribute of her work for the rest of her life. The photographs from her early career reveal that the salient characteristics of her work—its centrality, boldness, intimacy, and apparent artlessness—were present in her pictures since the very beginning. Arbus's creative life in photography after 1962 is well documented and already the stuff of legend; now, for the first time, we can properly examine its origins.

Jeff Rosenheim, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, added, "Arbus's early photographs are wonderfully rich in achievement and perhaps as quietly riveting and ultimately controversial as the iconic images for which she is so widely known. She brings us face-to-face with what she had first glimpsed at the age of 16—'the divineness in ordinary things'—and through her photographs we begin to see it too."

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diane arbus: in the beginning is curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met. Exhibition design is by Brian Butterfield, Senior Exhibition Designer; graphics are by Anna Rieger, Graphic Designer; and lighting design is by Laura Mroczkowski, Lighting Designer, all of The Met's Design Department. The exhibition is made possible by the Alfred Stieglitz Society. Additional support is provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.

Text : Courtesy of  The Met Museum

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Read More :  Neal Selkirk is the only person ever authorized to make posthumous prints of the work of Diane Arbus.  Read my Interview with Neal Selkirk

NEIL SELKIRK: An Exclusive Interview with the elusive Photographer and Arbus Master Printer

 Robert Kennedy Announces for President, 1968

Photograph © Neil Selkirk. All rights reserved

Arbus, Avedon, Selkirk 

Poster for The Minneapolis Institute of The Arts, 1993

G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary for Interview Magazine

Photograph © Neil Selkirk. All rights reserved.

Neil Selkirk and Marvin Israel reviewing prints of "Masked Man at a Ball N.Y.C. 1967" in Diane Arbus's Darkroom, Spring 1972. Photograph by Cosmos Sarchiapone

Marvin Israel and Diane Arbus photographed at her 1971 Master Class by her student Cosmos Sarchiapone.

Diane Arbus: Monograph. Edited and designed by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel. Published by Aperture in collaboration with the landmark posthumous retrospective exhibition of Arbus' work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.

"If people know the work of Diane Arbus from the books, they have been looking almost entirely at reproductions of prints I made. All the books thus far are nearly 100% my prints. My philosophy has always been “if you can tell the difference between mine and hers, I’ve failed.”
 

L'Oeil de la Photographie
edition March 18, 2015

Neil Selkirk Talks To Elizabeth Avedon

Neil Selkirk, born in London in 1947, is an accomplished portrait photographer and masterful documentarian. He studied Photography at the London College of Printing, graduating in 1968; later studying with photographer Diane Arbus in her 1971 Master Class. Selkirk worked as an assistant to many of fashion photography’s most iconic figures (Richard Avedon, Hiro and Chris Von Wangenheim) before his own distinctive style succeeded in drawing editorial assignments from major magazines that include Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Interview, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, among others.

I spoke with Selkirk in his New York studio last week about his upcoming exhibition, Certain Women, at Howard Greenberg Gallery and the history of his career through the decades. He is the only person ever authorized to make posthumous prints of the work of Diane Arbus.

Elizabeth Avedon : What year did you come to America? 

Neil Selkirk : Before the end of school in London, I came looking for a job during the two-week Easter vacation. March, 1968. While I was here, Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the Presidency, Martin Luther King Jr. is shot, Newark erupts in riots. I had just interviewed with Irving Penn, I’m walking east on 40th Street towards Fifth Avenue, passing the New York Press Club. The door opens and Bobby Kennedy walks out. He’s just announced for the presidency. With cameras on him, but no crowd, he’s shaking hands with imaginary people so it would look as if he was engaged. I’m standing there with my camera snapping away thinking, “This is Bobby Kennedy!”. So incredibly much happened in the two weeks I was in New York, there was just no question of not coming back.

EA : You once told me some advice you were given about looking for a job in New York. What was it again?

NS : David Montgomery, a fashion photographer in London, said, “Don’t call first. Arrive at the door.” And it was fantastic advice.... My first real day looking for a job in New York I got job offers from Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Melvin Sokolsky, and Bert Stern. All four of them. I was on a tourist visa and I had to go back to London. I accepted the job at Penn, they applied for my visa, but were turned down. They never  appealed, and they never informed me that I didn’t have a job.

I worked for Avedon in London a few weeks later as a local assistant. They had just banned cigarette advertising on television in England and the advertising agencies were trying to find someone to do still photographs that would cost as much as a TV commercial so they could mark it up 15%. So they hired the most expensive photographer in the world, Richard Avedon, to come to London and take pictures of dog’s  heads; a hand holding a cigarette by the head of the dogs, Red setters, Golden Retrievers and some Labs. And that’s what we did for a week. I can’t imagine what they must have paid him.

The great thing about the job was that in the evenings when we weren’t doing these ads, we photographed Anjelica Huston and Julie Driscoll. Polly Mellon, the fashion editor was there - it must have been for Vogue. Julie Driscoll was a pop singer with Brian Auger and Trinity. Musically they were a very hot band at the time. At the end of the shoot, Dick (Avedon) gave her a kiss and she, being very, very English, said in her slightly Cockney accent, “Oh, I bet they’ll be awful,” which is a totally English way to say “Thank you.” He just froze. He sort of straightened, and said, “When I take pictures, they’re good.”

Anjelica Huston was photographed in her father, director John Huston’s house, which is where without knowing it I encountered my first Arbus photograph, an image that shattered me in a way that I had never been affected by a work of art before or since.

We were driving back from the house in a taxi and Dick received a message that said something like, “Mick Jagger can’t do it tomorrow, but he can do it Thursday,” Dick said, “We are shooting on Thursday. If he wants his picture taken, he can come to New York.” I don’t think he ever photographed Jagger. Never did.

I became the Avedon studio guy in Europe. As a result of that, I worked for Hiro in Paris, shooting the Collections for Harpers Bazaar.   

EA : What did you do when you couldn’t get a visa to work for Penn?

NS : When I finally found out that my job in New York with Penn had fallen through I took a job working for Adrian Flowers in London. Flowers was a big name in London’s photography scene in the 1950s through the early 90’s. His studio in Chelsea’s Tite Street was the place to be photographed for advertising and editorials for actors, celebrities and artists.

We’re on the set in Adrian’s studio photographing. I’m off to his right, and I’m probably a pretty good assistant, but he is really uptight about me having worked for Dick and he said, “Neil, I know you’ve worked for all the greatest photographers in the world, and you’re an intimate of Richard Avedon’s, but would you please pass the film holder!” I must have been behaving like a complete jerk. Later, when I approached him with “They want me to go to Paris to work for Hiro for two weeks.” He said, “What if I say no?” I said, “Then I’ll quit.” He should have said, “Get out,” but he folded.

So now I’m in Paris with Hiro and he hires me to work in New York. They had an immigration lawyer and I was able to get a trainee visa. I worked for Hiro for about 9 months in New York. Then Michael O’Neil, who was Hiro’s assistant, left to go on his own and I became the first assistant. I worked there until I left abruptly in July 1971.

EA : What did you do after you left Hiro?

NS : The day after I was fired I got a call from Tina Bossidy, the stylist for Chris Von Wangenheim, who was a rising star in the fashion photography world at that time. She said, “Hello, my name is Tina. I work for Chris Von Wangenheim. We are looking for somebody to assist Chris in Europe.” And I said, “Well, how about me?” She said, “But you work for Hiro” and I said, “Not since yesterday.”

We immediately shot off to Rome and Paris. When we were in Paris, we were in the Harpers Bazaar studio where Chris was shooting the Collections. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Avedon came in  the studio and confided to Chris that Diane Arbus had killed herself. Chris then took me aside and broke the news to me. That was July of 1971. I had done Diane’s class the previous winter.

I sent a postcard to Marvin Israel, art director and intimate friend of Arbus’, that just said, “If anything is going to be done in the way of a show or book, I’ll be back in November and I will be happy to help in any way I can.” I spent the rest of the summer and fall in England and when I got back in November of ’71, Marvin and Doon Arbus, Diane’s daughter,  asked me to work on what became the monograph Diane Arbus and the 1972 posthumous Arbus retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art.

They needed someone to go through all of her photographs to find the negatives because there was no indication on any of the prints of the associated negative numbers. It still remains a complete mystery how she found her own neg when she wanted to make a print. So I spent the winter going through all her contact sheets looking for the negatives of all the photographs she had ever printed. Finally, in the spring, I started to print for the book and the show.

The show opened at the Museum of Modern Art in November of 1972. It was incredibly successful. I think it was the most successful one artist show the Modern had ever had in any medium, not just photography. It was estimated that over seven million people worldwide saw the exhibition.

Initially, nobody wanted to publish the book. Just before the show was scheduled to open, Michael Hoffman at Aperture said he would publish it, and it immediately went to seven printings. Now it’s one of the most successful photography books of all time. It’s sold half a million copies or so.

[“Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph” Fortieth-anniversary edition, 2011. “The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal was to remain faithful to the standards by which Arbus judged her own work, and to how she hoped it would be seen. Nearly fifty years has not diminished the impact of these pictures; they penetrate the psyche with the force of a personal encounter, and transform the way we see the world. This is the first edition in which the image separations were created digitally; the files have been specially prepared by Robert J. Hennessey using prints by Neil Selkirk.” – Aperture ]

EA : While you were printing for the show, did anyone realize that it was going to change the face of Photography?

NS : No, it was being done because everybody involved had a sense of mission and commitment to do it, because we cared.

I have a couple of memories:

Marvin came down to Diane’s darkroom every morning to look at the prints, which was in the basement of an apartment building. I would finish printing at 2 or 3 in the morning and then meet him four hours later at like 7 o’clock in the morning. I remember he came in one morning and pushed the door open and said, “They shot Wallace!” He was jubilant. 

I remember walking down 7th Avenue from her darkroom and there was a bar called The Buffalo Roadhouse.  It was always on the other side of the road. I remember watching people at 2 or 3am in the morning, just when I finished printing, and thinking, “One day I’m going to be able to buy a beer.“ I literally never went in. I remember cracking open a penny jar to get on the subway which was 35cents and taking 35 pennies. They told me they wouldn’t take pennies.

Nobody had any money, its incredible how little money there was. I was paid something like $3,000. for the year – for the total year – I believe it came from the Museum of Modern Art, plus I got all the film left in Diane’s closet. I got a bunch of 120 film and $3,000. for the year.

None of us could afford anything. We needed one more 16 x 20” processing tray and we couldn’t buy it. We didn’t have the 15 bucks or whatever it was. So I called the Avedon Studio and said, “Have you got a tray you don’t need” and I wound up with this beaten up ancient developer tray of Dick’s which I then used to print the Arbus museum exhibition prints and is now one of the star trays in the book “Developer Trays" (powerHouse Books, 2014).

EA : You are and have been the connecting link to Diane Arbus for all of us through your prints of her work.

NS : I’m very conscious of that as a responsibility. I have always been obsessive about matching every aspect of the character of her prints whenever possible. If people know the work of Diane Arbus from the books, they have been looking almost entirely at reproductions of prints I made. All the books thus far are nearly 100% my prints. My philosophy has always been “if you can tell the difference between mine and hers, I’ve failed.”

They try to get as many original prints as they can for the exhibitions. About 40% of the 1972 MoMA show were my prints. Many more of Diane’s prints have been found since then; there were whole troves of prints that no one knew existed at the time of the MoMA show.

EA : Tell me about the Master Class with Diane Arbus. Is that how you met her?

NS : No, I’d already met her at Hiro’s and Avedon’s studio. She and Marvin would sometimes drop by. In fact she came into Hiro’s one day and asked, “If I give a class would you come?” Paul Corlett, another Hiro assistant, and I said, “Sure!” She asked a lot of people around Westbeth, the artist’s building where she lived, too.

She interviewed and ultimately accepted everybody who applied. My girlfriend, she was probably my wife at that point, had a really, really awful Shepherd mix which I dragged around everywhere. I didn’t know that Diane hated dogs. She later said - essentially that everybody’s work was so bad that she was afraid if she did the class she’d get contaminated. It was so great. She said wonderful things.

Diane’s last Master Class was at Westbeth. Marvin sat in with her on a lot of occasions. Anne Tucker, subsequently photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, was in that class; Paul Corlett and Cosmos, a widely known eccentric Greenwich Village photographer, were in that class. I think the assignments were based on a class she did with Lisette Model ten years before; and she just reviewed stuff and talked.

A lot of the text in the Aperture monograph is taken from Ikkō Narahara’s recordings of the class. Marvin said the trouble was his English was so bad that he always turned the tape recorder off when she was just about to say something fabulous. You could see something great coming and “plunk” he turned the recorder off.

I felt at the time I didn’t know if I was getting anything out of it. I always thought that I would find out years later. The thing is, I was, subsequently, after her death, so completely swamped by being totally immersed in all of her photography within a year, that I would never know. The immersion in her work completely changed everything for me because I was trained in England as a commercial photographer.

I basically went where Diane had gone, because they were the places that were interested in good photographs. So I went to Esquire and then very gradually, actually started using stuff that I learnt assisting in the commercial world to make glitzy pictures. Then Marvin told Ruth Ansel at the New York Times Magazine she should be using me. I took a portfolio up there of all the stuff I’d been doing for Esquire. She looked through all the work and said, “What’s this in the back of the box?” I said, “It’s just stuff I’ve been doing on the street.” She pulled it out and said, “This is great! Will you do this for us?”  So then I started working for the New York Times Magazine and taking unembellished photographs.

The first job I did for the Times, I think it was Maurice Nadjari, Governor Rockefeller's Special Anti-corruption Prosecutor. I got the photograph I wanted, I made a beautiful big print, I dry mounted it, I overlaid it, I did the whole thing to make it look incredible, took it in and Ruth said, “Wow, this is fantastic” and she ran it in to the editor, and the editor said, “Fantastic” so they ran the picture. After that for a period of years, I delivered a single photograph for each job, and they printed it. It was so amazing, and it lasted until eventually I shot Henry Kissinger who looked in the portrait as if he had doubt. They wanted something a little more heroic so then they asked for the contact prints....I was never able to work the old way again.

So one’s magazine career turns out to have been an endless struggle to get good work published…

Marc Balet, who was Creative Director at Andy Warhol’s Interview came to me and said would I shoot for them. I did a lot of quite good political stuff for them. It was mostly political stuff for the Times Magazine as well. I did all the Watergate people, I would keep getting these calls from Vanity Fair saying photograph this person, photograph that person, photograph the next person, and I did.  A lot of them were really good pictures but they rarely ran the stories.

I used to say, “The best magazines only lasted six months.” What I think I was trying to get at was the idea that quite often, really smart people manage to launch a magazine with very high ideals and standards, but frequently they simply fail, or are so radically watered down in order to survive that they cease to be anything but a shadow of their original concept. The first six months can be an exhilarating time for everyone involved.

The Village Voice did a fashion supplement called View and that lasted six months. The Movies lasted six months. Spy lasted longer but succumbed. Paper and Wired and Colors have survived by adapting, but working on the first issues was thrilling.

There was a magazine that started up by David Bruel called Avenue. It was delivered by limousine to all the doorman buildings between Fifth, Madison, Park from like 57th Street to 86th Street. It was super, super high end, and they just wanted great photography, there were no  restrictions whatever.

I found myself doing this wonderful shtick. Everybody I photographed, and they were all people of social significance in that area…. I suddenly realized, after a couple of assignments, that I had hot dog vendors in the picture, so I started deliberately including them in subsequent shoots; the shadowy figures actually delivered real substance. Then someone from Time Inc took over from David Bruel and he said, “Wait a minute. There’s a hot dog stand in the background!” I said, “Yeah, there’s always a hot dog stand.” I never worked for them again.

At around that time, I had two young children, I started doing corporate work. It paid ten times as much as magazine work. It was almost all traveling. I used to get up in the morning and go to the airport for years. But I simply did not have the time, and in fact could not afford to do all the editorial work. I had a really good gig working for corporations, doing annual reports and things like that. It was completely steady for almost twenty years. I made plenty of money, owned two houses, it put the kids through college. And that business died just as I was ready to get out. In the meantime I had been able to pursue and finance projects of my own devising that are turning into books.

EA : OK, we’ve turned the recorder off several times to tell each other some great stories from the past. Can’t we do a book of everything we can’t say on record?

NS : Isn’t it amazing what isn’t said? For ten or twelve years I did the Dow Jones Annual Report, the Wall Street Journal’s annual reports basically. My favorite place to have lunch was the cafeteria at the Wall Street Journal because everybody who worked there knew everything. I was so aware of how much we never hear about because for various reasons it isn’t published - it can’t be published. It was just amazing all the things these people knew! It’s incredible what you can’t say. I can’t remember what it is I just realized I couldn’t tell you.

It is an indication of how you can’t trust most books that are about anyone in the form of a biography. I don’t know if you are familiar with Heidegger on Aristotle, but I have a great quote that I saved. “What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence:

‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.” ― Martin Heidegger

Biography presented as truth is bullshit. That’s what’s so great about the “Slide Show and Talk By Diane Arbus” which is essentially a film record of an event. The soundtrack is an original audio recording of a 1970 slide presentation by Diane in which she speaks about photography using her own work and other photographs, snapshots and clippings from her collection. It was compiled and edited by Doon Arbus, Adam Shott and myself.

Even though it was essentially recorded on only one evening – in other words it’s not legitimate to say that this is “her” in the broadest sense – but it’s so much closer, just to hear her voice. It’s so important. You get a clue, where as everything that’s been written doesn’t give you anything like the sort connection….  the attachment one feels from a little bit of somebody talking to someone else about something that interests them.

EA : Is the slideshow a DVD?

NS : It’s not on a DVD. It would be, could be. It’s on hard drives - because it was too big – it’s very complicated - we’re inept.  We would schlep around the world with these hard drives and computers and have back-ups ready and all. It was always deeply stressful making sure it showed up on the screen. There’s a lovely story here. 

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Neil Selkirk’s Certain Women are on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from March 19 – May 2, 2015. A hand bound, limited edition book containing forty-four original, individually signed prints accompanies the show.

Neil Selkirk: Certain Women

March 19th to May 2nd, 2015

Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street, New York

http://neilselkirk.com
http://diane-arbus-photography.com
http://www.howardgreenberg.com
http://aperture.org/shop/diane-arbus-an-aperture-monograph-book

http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~jlipkin/206/readings/selkirk.pdf
http://www.studio360.org/story/230981-aha-moment-neil-selkirk-diane-arbus

APERTURE 40TH SPECIAL ISSUE FALL 1992: DAVID WOJNAROWICZ | Face in Dirt

David Wojnarowicz  |  Untitled (Face in Dirt) 1993

Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York

"All behind me are the friends that died; I'm breathing this air that they can't breathe; I'm seeing this ratty monkey in a cheap Mexican circus wearing a red and blue embroidered jacket and it's collecting coins and I can reach out and touch it like they can't. And time is now compressed; I joke and say that I feel I've taken out another six month lease on this body of mine; on this vehicle of sound and motion, and every painting or photograph or film I make I make with the sense that it may be the last thing I do and so I try to pull everything in to the surface of that action. I work quickly now and feel there is no time for bullshit; cut straight to the heart of the senses and map it out as clearly as tools and growth allow....I see myself seeing death; it's like a transparent celluloid image of myself is accompanying myself everywhere I go." David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS July 22, 1992

  Aperture Cover by Robert Rauschenberg
40th Year Anniversary Issue, Fall 1992

David Wojnarowicz's image "Untitled (Face in Dirt) 1990"
as seen on page 77 in Aperture's 40th Year Special Anniversary Issue

I recently came across APERTURE'S 40TH YEAR SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY ISSUE, published in Fall 1992. It's an extraordinary look back at Photography before the popularity of digital camera's came into the picture. ("Not until 2001 did Kodak begin selling mass-market digital cameras"–Ben Dobbin, AP). Michael E. Hoffman was still Director and Publisher of the Aperture Foundation. Hoffman published the legendary Diane Arbus Monograph by Marvin Israel and Doon Arbus in 1972, now in it's 40th-Year Anniversary Edition printing, as well as books by Edward Weston, W. Eugene Smith, Paul Strand and Dorothea Lange, among many other greats. In 1992, Basketball star “Magic” Johnson announced he was HIV-positive and Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, died of complications from AIDS. 

The following excerpt is from Aperture's 40th Anniversary Issue:

"1992, ABOUT APERTURE: Forty Years after it's origination, Aperture celebrates the Founders' affirming spirit. Seventy photographers published in Aperture since 1952 selected photographs especially for this Anniversary Issue. One image from each artist was chosen. The photographers also wrote their thoughts on photography in general or, if they referred, about their work in particular, much as the founders suggested should happen in their first editorial."

"The process of bringing together a "forty years" celebration forces one to see photographs as, among other things, indicators of their time. Several photographers address AIDS in their text or images; the brutality of this devastating epidemic became all the more jolting when David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS during the preparation of this issue, having selected his photograph, but without having had the time to write his text."

"Whereas images cannot directly combat the overwhelming reality of such tragedies, history–recent and distant– has proven how powerful photographs are in revealing injustices, insisting upon action, and inspiring controversy and often, change. In keeping with the spirit of Dorothea Lange and other Founders who measured Aperture's success in part by the depth and expression of it's social conscience, Aperture will continue to be a forum for those photographers who are committed to confronting the crises and concerns of our time...." –THE EDITORS, Number One Hundred Twenty-Nine, Fall 1992

Also included in this issue were photographs by Josef Koudelka, Eugene Richards, Mary Ellen Mark, Eudora Welty, Sophie Calle, McDermott and McGough, Alex Webb, Sally Mann, Maggie Steber, Chuck Close, Thomas Struth, David Turnley, Helen Levitt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Carrie Mae Weems, Joel Sternfeld, Masahisa Fukase, Jan Groover, Nick Knight, Barbara Morgan, and Margaretta K. Mitchell. There may have been others I missed.

See APERTURE'S 40TH YEAR SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY ISSUE: Part II here

The Aperture Foundation

**Text by David Wojnarowicz was from excerpts published in Aperture's 40th Year Special Issue, page 76, and originally excerpted from an interview by Barry Blinderman with David Wojnarowicz in Tongues of Flame, University Galleries, 1990, page 49,

DIANE ARBUS: FAHEY / KLEIN GALLERY

© The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC

"There's a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean everyone knows you've got some edge. You're carrying some magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way." –Diane Arbus

  

In 1967, Diane Arbus was included with her contemporaries Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, in the hugely significant exhibition “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York curated by John Szarkowski. A posthumous retrospective of her work was exhibited at MoMA in 1972, one year after her death.

Fahey/Klein Gallery presents a special Diane Arbus exhibition opening March 28. This exhibition includes several important Arbus photographs such as: Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, N.Y.C., 1963; Lady Bartender at home with a souvenir dog, New Orleans, L.A., 1964; Jack Dracula, the Marked Man, N.Y.C., 1961; Two ladies at the automat, N.Y.C., 1966; and Circus fat lady and her dog, Troubles. "Diane Arbus remains one of the most influential and revered artists in the history of photography." –Fahey/Klein

DIANE ARBUS: Photographs

March 28 – May 18

Fahey/Klein Gallery

2011 BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS | Part I

A few of my choices for

The Best Photography Books of 2011

+ + +

The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious
Aperture, 2011

The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the W.M. Hunt Collection
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York to Feb. 19, 2012

"When I turned 50, I decided my life’s mission would be to promote the pleasure of photography." William Hunt, collector, curator, consultant, writer, teacher... Read La Lettre's Interview with WM. Hunt

"The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious presents a wonderfully idiosyncratic and compelling collection of photographs assembled around a particular theme: in each image, the gaze of the subject is averted, the face obscured or the eyes firmly closed. The pictures present a catalog of anti-portraiture, characterized at first glance by what its subjects conceal, not by what the camera reveals. Amassed over the course of thirty years by New York collector W. M. Hunt, the collection includes works by masters such as Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham, William Klein, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Robert Frank as well as lesser-known artists and vernacular images." –Aperture

Eyewitness. Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century
Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Munkácsi
Royal Academy Publications, 2011

"At a crucial moment between two world wars, five men changed the face of photojournalism and art photography, and inspired the world. With their groundbreaking shots, Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, and Munkásci radically redefined photographic practice and theory, ushering in the modern era." Publisher's Description

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer
PowerHouse Books, 2011

"The elusive Vivian Maier has left us many clues and a diary of over 100,000 negatives that reflect her time and her place. The quiet observer,the plain spoken no non-sense woman, the obsessive photo taker, the nanny and mysterious legend in the making. There are a lot of good images revealed in these books all leading us to learn a little more from this sphinx like creature" – John A. Bennette, Curator of Maier's first New York exhibition, "Vivian Maier, Photographer," at the Hearst Gallery, New York

In 2011, Aperture released Diane Arbus: A Chronology and newly reissued Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph and Untitled: Diane Arbus on the fortieth anniversary of the original publication.

Who Is Marvin Israel? DVD

You and I. Photographs by Ryan McGinley
Twin Palms, 2011

"Following in the footsteps of Allen Ginsberg and his "Snapshot Poetics," McGinley turned his lens on the bodies and pastimes of his Lower East Side milieu, adding another generation to the History of Photography. This work, from the first years of this century, has given way to Ryan’s subjects running through and falling out of otherworldly utopian landscapes, caverns, forests and deserts; worlds away from the Chinatown tenements he still calls home."–Jack Woody, Twin Palms Publisher

Ryan McGinley Portfolio on La Lettre

Bordeaux Series. Photographs by Mona Kuhn
Steidl, 2011

Working with preeminent photography publisher, Gerhard Steidl, on her newly released Bordeaux Series, Kuhn said, “The thing is, I only have really wonderful things to say about Gerhard. He is indeed a genius of publishing.”–Mona Kuhn

Read Mona Kuhn's Interview

Salt & Truth. Photographs by Shelby Lee Adams
Candela Books, 2011

The Bridge at Hoover Dam. Photographs by Jamey Stillings
Nazraeli Press, 2011

Moby: Destroyed
Damiani, 2011

“When I play music, I’m just exclusively focused on the music. When I’m taking photographs, I’m exclusively focusing on that. There’s not a lot of interdisciplinary stuff going on in my head.”– Moby

Read Moby's Interview

+ + +

Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography
By Tod Papageorge. Aperture, 2011

Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography is a collection of essays, reviews and lectures by Tod Papageorge, Photographer and Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the Yale University School of Art. Papageorge discusses with deep critical insight are Eugène Atget, Brassaï, Robert Frank (with Walker Evans), Robert Adams and his close friend Garry Winogrand.

Tod Papageorge

+ + +

Sylvia Plachy's Out of the Corner of My Eye: de reojo, Goings On About Town

Although Sylvia Plachy didn't publish a book in 2011, her work remains timeless. Plachy, a Hungarian/American photographer, was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1943. Her family moved to New York City due to the Hungarian Revolution where she met photographer Andre Kertesz. Plachy's photo essays and portraits have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Granta, Artforum, Fortune, and everywhere else. They have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Paris and Tokyo. Her book, Self Portrait with Cows Going Home (2005), is a personal history of Central Europe with photographs and text, received a Golden Light Award for Best Book in 2004. In 2009, she received the Dr. Erich Salomon Preis in Berlin for Lifetime Achievement in Photojournalism. This January 2012, Plachy and Jeff Liao will be exhibiting Panoramic Photographs of New York City when The South Street Seaport Museum reopens.

sylviaplachy.com

2011 BEST PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS | Part II

HAPPY EASTER! Icon Writing and Other Stuff

Easter brings out the Icons

Clockwise, left: The very first icon I painted, Archangel Michael. All students at the Prosopon School of Iconology begin with this image; Richard Gere's photograph, South Pole, 2003; Jeffris Elliott's miniature print, Islamic Woman Ascending Stairs. Center: Sean Perry's Transitory exhibition announcement; Richard Gere's silver gelatin print, Dawn|Giza, 2005; my second icon painting, Archangel Gabriel. Booklet The 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas/Eight Verses on Training The Mind. Center: Native American relic–a gift from In The American West travels; kata from the Dalai Lama. Photographs © copyrighted material/All Rights Reserved

Bodhi Leaf from Bodh Gaya, India

Top clockwise: Traditional Japanese Tanba woodfired ceramic vase by Tanba artist Kiyoharu Ichino (new Ichino Exhibition April 2-May 5, 2010, Touching Stone Gallery); photograph of dancing Tibetan kids by Robyn Brentano; Edward S. Curtis photograph, Tobadzischini-Navajo; Bodhi leaf from The Bodhi Tree (aka "Tree of Awakening," is a direct descendant of the tree under which Siddharta Gautama Buddha attained Enlightenment), Bodh Gaya, India; antique laurel wreath crown gift; photograph, Tonenili-Navajo, by Edward S. Curtis; Traditional Japanese woodfired ceramic box by Tanba artist Kiyoharu Ichino; my practice pottery; center, greenish rock from Tibet, pottery I made with New Mexican Native American artist. Bottom: my drawing of my son for a painting; got the hat in Mongolia. Photograph © copyright/All Rights Reserved

The DADA Painters and Poets, Edited by Robert Motherwell

The DADA book, given to me by friend and mentor Marvin Israel, sits on top of a stack of Diane Arbus: Aperture Monograph's (one of the best-selling art books in history), he and Doon Arbus edited and designed to accompany their posthumous Diane Arbus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972; right, FAIRGROUNDS: Photographs by Sean Perry, a signed limited edition catalog, created with Jace Graf of Cloverleaf Press.

Prosopon School of Iconography

Russian Iconographer Dmitri Andrejev

Andrejev demonstrating his masterful painting technique

These days everybody is a Master and nobody an apprentice,

that's why we don't understand our chaotic nature

For a time I studied Icon Writing with Russian-born Master Icon Painters, Vladislav Andrejev, founder of The Prosopon School of Iconography and his son, Dmitri Andrejev. I practiced for the artistic difficulty and disciple of it. Since it's Easter, I thought it appropriate to pay homage to their work.

"The ancient Russian-Byzantine tradition of icon-writing reached its apogee during the XV century. Today, the iconographer within Prosopon attempts to produce icons reflecting the same state of inner, contemplative depth evident in the greatest examples of that tradition, through refinement of artistic nuance and attention to the iconographic canon and principles. As is fitting to the icon’s sacred function, only natural materials are used: wood panels gessoed with natural ground, genuine gold leaf applied by the bole method, egg tempera using ground pigments, and linseed oil finish. The iconographic method of the School is characterized by a multi-step process in which the succession of steps is concrete and definite, as are the liturgical services of the Church. Although striving for a high artistic level, the focus of the icon-writer is nevertheless on a personal spiritual discipline and growth."–Prosopon School, Technique and Method

Master Iconographer Vladislav Andrejev was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1938. After receiving formal education in fine art, Vladislav became interested in religious art, which was impossible to practice during the Soviet regime. The search for deeper meaning in art and life led him to solitary travels in parts of the Russian wilderness, and to the independent study of icon and fresco painting with a monk icon-writer. In 1980, Vladislav emigrated to the United States. He has 'written' numerous icons which can be seen in many churches and homes throughout the world. Vladislav’s iconographic technique and teaching method developed into a distinct school of painting. In 2000, he established The Prosopon School of Iconology, to promote this method and to promote the understanding of iconography and iconology.

Film: Vladislav and Dmitri Andrejev painted the dome of St. Michael's Church in St. Michael, Minnesota. Yevgeniy Vaskevich made a film about the project. To view the short Film, choose "Founder" here"

BEFORE: Scaffolding before Icons were drawn on the ceiling dome to scale. Copyright © Prosopon School of Iconology and Iconography /All Rights Reserved

DURING: Russian Master Iconographer Vladislav Andrejev painting. Copyright © Prosopon School of Iconology and Iconography /All Rights Reserved

AFTER: The almost completed Icon painted dome of St. Michael's Church in St. Michael, Minnesota. Copyright © Prosopon School of Iconology and Iconography /All Rights Reserved

2 DVD set
Instruction performed by Master Iconographer Vladislav Andrejev $98
Prosopon School of Iconography + Pandora Iconographer's Supplies