Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters

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Reviewed by Ann Landi

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters
by Phyllis Rose
Yale University Press, 272 pp, $26.00

We live in an age when shows of photography are a mainstay of many major museums, and a handful of artists who seriously pursue the medium have even achieved celebrity status (think Sherman, Arbus, Mapplethorpe). So it’s almost mind-boggling to realize that the struggle to get photography considered a “fine art” rather than simply a mechanical craft, at least in this country, is little more than a hundred years old, and that the medium’s meteoric launch into the public consciousness is largely thanks to the efforts of one man: Alfred Steiglitz. [Read more…]

Radiant Poetic Shadows And The Timeless Framings Of Roy DeCarava

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Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (through June 30)
Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Despite a couple of career retrospectives and a small handful of books, the late photographer Roy DeCarava is one of the most overlooked photographers of his era. His photos are among the few photographic equivalents to sound. Somehow, in spite of this majesty, his obscurity persists. But this spring, across Los Angeles, his work is being well served. DeCarava is represented by 21 photographs in the Broad Museum’s Soul of a Nation show, where the late photographer is one of many voices. While several of his disciples are part of the Annenberg Space for Photography’s Contact High show dedicated to the documentation of hip hop, it is the Underground Museum’s Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, on view until June 30th 2019, where DeCarava gets the best chance to imprint his genius upon the next generation. [Read more…]

An Interview With Activist Photographer Nick Brandt

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By Cynthia Biret

This Empty World, the latest exhibition by acclaimed photographer Nick Brandt (at Fahey/Klein, Los Angeles, through 27 April), is a captivating account of wildlife colliding hard against an endless tide of human encroachment and unchecked corporate development. Once roaming free upon endlessly expansive and entirely majestic lands, these now endangered animals find themselves wandering amid stands of cement walls, their destinies perilously disrupted by ditches, bus stations, construction sites, highways, dried river beds and, of course, people. So many people. Everywhere, locals — whose mere presence carries with it an indeterminable fate of doom — stare away from these  gorgeous creatures, grounded as they are in their own sense of isolation and despair. When their eyes do seem to meet, at least in Brandt’s photographs, the encounter is altogether fruitless, for the two are equal victims of a global environmental destruction that churns-on despite local action. [Read more…]

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite

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at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Nancy K. Turner

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can transform one million realities
–Maya Angelou

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite, is an intimate in scale, personal in scope, potent exhibit. It documents through photographs, ephemera, and fashion, Kwame Braithwaite, his wife Sikolo, his brother Elombe Brath and their circle of musician and artist friends as they built a movement based on the philosophy of cultural empowerment, dignity and affirmation originally espoused by Marcus Garvey. [Read more…]

Annie Leibovitz, The Early Years: 1970-1983

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Archive Project No. 1
at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through April 14)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
           –-Lyrics: Stephen Sills/Buffalo Springfield
              “For What It’s Worth”

Annie Leibovitz has combed through her enormous archive of negatives to personally curate and print these 4,000 (yes, that’s right) mostly black and white photographs for this poignant and profound exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. The exhibition chronicles the turbulent late sixties, the “me decade” of the seventies and the beginning of the prosperous early eighties. Printed in various sizes with some as small as 3”x5” straight from a contact sheet to later work that is printed much larger with an irregular black border (that echoed both Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, two photographers that she admired), they are push pinned to a hemp wall in a precise grid in a sometimes curiously casual looking installation meant to evoke a kind of walk-in scrap book. These pictures are truly an amazing visual history of the way we were, while clearly indicating where we were headed. [Read more…]

Paradox California: Two Artists, One State of Mind

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at Launch LA (through March 23)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

If California is in many ways a state of mind, as well as a state in the western continental U.S., Paradox California exemplifies its mystique. The California dream depicted in this lush and burnished exhibition from photographic artist Osceola Refetoff and mixed-media artist Chelsea Dean is desiccated by desert heat, burnished gold and amber and brown by desert sun, and crested by dry blue skies as vivid as a Mojave wildflower. [Read more…]

La Raza And The Onetime Voice Of Chicano Activism

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at the Autry Museum, Los Angeles (through February 10)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

You know something is happening but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?
–Bob Dylan, “Ballad Of A Thin Man”

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
–George Santayana

The sixties was a tumultuous decade, filled with assassinations, race, student and antiwar riots. This traumatic and dangerous time, when the social fabric was being torn apart, also gave birth to many civil rights movements for marginalized people such as women, gay/lesbian/transgender and people of color. This exhibition at The Autry Museum focuses on the Chicano movement specifically and on La Raza, a newspaper/zine that was crucial to exposing, through text and image, the Chicano movements struggle for social justice from 1967-77. [Read more…]

Deana Lawson’s Planes Soars

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Deana Lawson: Planes
at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (through February 17th, 2019)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell 

The space of The Underground Museum might be what you expect, but it might not be. It is housed in an unassuming storefront on a busy street in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. As visitors enter, they appear in a small museum gift store, with the usual items expected there: books about featured and past artists, some trinkets, and a sign-in registry for the museum’s mailing list. Just past the entry door and counter is another door. This is a carved wooden door, more like an ornate front door, if memory serves correctly, and here is the true entrance to the museum space and to Deana Lawson’s exhibit, Planes. [Read more…]

Southern Discomfort: The Photographs of Sally Mann

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Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
at Getty Center, Los Angeles (through February 10, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

Abide with me! Fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens: Lord, with me abide!  –Hymn

Sally Mann’s haunting black and white photographs are a hymn to the South she loves so ferociously, with all its troubled, tangled, twisted history filled with bitter defeats. The charismatic photographs of her children, of her own black nanny Virginia, who also cared for her children, and of the Civil War battlefields are poignant, bittersweet narratives examining the complexities of race, place, family and faded memory. [Read more…]

Vivian Maier: Photographic Poetry Swathed in Mystery

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Vivian Maier: Living Color
at KP Projects La Brea Gallery, Los Angeles (through December 29)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Vivian Maier has been called a street photographer, although many of her photographic works are less about capturing the action around her and more about revealing a certain intimacy in her subjects. She was meticulous in her work; unedited and unculled, her images have an amazing range of power and depth. She has been called the nanny photographer, and while it is true that she spent forty years working as a nanny, she spent more time than that perfecting her craft. She has been called a mystery and an enigma, and to some extent, surely, she was that, having hidden her work from view, stored it in storage lockers, and then let those storage units fall into arears. Much speculation has been made as to whether or not Maier wanted her work discovered or cared little if it was lost. [Read more…]

Helmut Newton: Private Property

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at 10 Corso Como, NYC
Reviewed by Jill Conner

The infamous partnership between art and fashion is receiving overwhelming recognition throughout New York galleries and museums this Fall. From September to November, 10 Corso Como introduced Private Property by the world-renowned fashion photographer, Helmut Newton. Although Newton passed away in 2004, this specific set of photographs had never been exhibited in the United States. Initially Private Property was created in 1984, but Newton had not intended for these photographs to be seen publicly. This dossier of 45 gelatin silver prints covers a decade of Newton’s career, from 1971 to 1983, and presents a mix of unknown models with well-known celebrities who, at that time, were beginning to gain notoriety. [Read more…]

Fred W. McDarrah: New York Scenes

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at Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC (through November 3)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

The Village Voice is, sadly, now a hallowed memory of the past, but many of its iconic images live vividly on through the work of Fred W. McDarrah, the publication’s first picture editor and its sole staff photographer for decades.

McDarrah, who died in 2007, aimed a powerful lens at some of the most creative and turbulent times in New York City’s history. Eighty of his vintage black and white photographs are on display at the Steven Kasher gallery, in a show that coincides with the publication of the comprehensive Abrams book, Fred W. McDarrah: New York Scenes. [Read more…]

Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable

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Reviewed by Jill Conner

Garry Winogrand. Park Avenue, New York, 1959 [monkey in car, vertical]

Park Avenue, New York, 1959 [monkey in car, vertical]

Directed by Sasha Waters Freyer
2018 / 90-minutes
A Greenwich Entertainment Release
at Film Forum, NYC

When Garry Winogrand died unexpectedly in 1984, he left behind over 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film. Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, directed by Sasha Waters Freyer, is a fascinating documentary that examines the quiet life of one of America’s most prominent postwar photographers, setting that in contrast to the professional career he had been most known for.  As a stringer who worked primarily for mass-print magazines such as LOOK and LIFE, Winogrand has long been associated with prominent subjects such as Marilyn Monroe, Mohammed Ali and John F. Kennedy. However, this film’s vast number of interviews — which include his first wife Adrienne Lebeau, Thomas Roma, Jeffrey Fraenkel, Todd Papageorge, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Shelley Rice, Laurie Simmons and Matthew Weiner — show Winogrand as someone who enjoyed his own invisibility while rendering serendipitous inconsistencies. [Read more…]

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

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at the Morgan Library and Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Jed Perl

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Joel Smith
Fundación MAPFRE/Aperture, 246 pp., $50.00
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

This is what the great photographer Brassaï, who spent a lifetime recording the merry-go-round of twentieth-century Paris, had to say about his work: “I hunt for what is permanent.” Peter Hujar, who photographed New York and died in the city in 1987, could have said the same thing. Hujar’s achievement, the subject of a compact, engrossing retrospective now at the Morgan Library and Museum, has a nerve-wracking power. Here is an artist who yearns for the certainty of forever while refusing to deny the indeterminacy of the present. Hujar explores a considerable range of subjects. The exhibition, entitled “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life” includes portraits of friends, erotic nudes, nocturnal cityscapes, and studies of animals in the countryside. Hujar responds to different subjects in different ways. He’s there for the subject. The work never suggests a signature style. Avidity itself is his style. Henry Miller called Brassaï the eye of Paris. Peter Hujar is the eye of New York. [Read more…]

The Aggressively Uncategorizable Roger Ballen

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Roger Ballen: Ballenesque
at Fahey/Klein Gallery (through June 16, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

Ballenesque: Roger Ballen: A Retrospective
by Roger Ballen and Robert JC Young
Thames & Hudson, 336 pp., $80.00

Sometimes an artist’s style is so aggressively uncategorizable, so interdisciplinary and outside conventions, that it defies not only genre, but any meaningful comparisons to history or peer — and their name simply becomes its own adjective. Meet US/South African artist Roger Ballen, whose sui generis style of photography-based practices has been dubbed Ballenesque, because there’s literally no better way to describe it. Of course, in this case, Ballen himself began referring to his own work that way fairly early on, in the 1990s, and honestly he has a point. [Read more…]

Stray Dog Of Tokyo, Daidō Moriyama

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by Ian Buruma

Daidō Moriyama: Record 
edited by Mark Holborn
Thames and Hudson, 424 pp., $70.00

Provoke: Between Protest and Performance—Photography in Japan 1960/1975 
edited by Diane Dufour and Matthew S. Witkovsky, with Duncan Forbes and Walter Moser
Steidl/Le Bal/Fotomuseum Winterthur/ Albertina/Art Institute of Chicago, 679 pp., $75.00 (paper)

Daido Tokyo
by Daidō Moriyama
Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain/Thames and Hudson, 192 pp., $40.00

Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

One of Moriyama Daidō’s most famous black-and-white photographs is of a stray dog, a bit wolfish, with matted hair, looking back into the camera watchfully, with a hint of aggression. He took the picture in 1971 in Misawa, home to a large US Air Force base, in the northeast of Japan. Moriyama has described this dog picture as a kind of self-portrait:

I wander around, glare at things, and bark from time to time…. Something there is close to how I look at things and to how I probably appear when I’m wandering. Having become a photographer, I always sensed that I have strayed.  [Read more…]

Old Nick v. Jesús

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Paid Facebook Ad by Kremlin

A Facebook advertisement paid for by a Russian account with ties to the Kremlin in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election. Courtesy of the US House Intelligence Committee.

Capturing the Bluebird: Bukowski And The Photograph That Still Sings

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by Daniel Rolnik

The original angels were battle tested, busted he-men and women that fought tirelessly against hell and its demons. Their wings were scarred and their faces far from the clean-cut sissified versions embedded in stained glass windows and bible etchings. Angels were veterans, complete with rank, file, and all the side-effects that come along with watching your brothers and sisters die beside you in war. Angels were imperfect things with wings that fought on behalf of God.

Then there’s Charles Bukowski; a poet with an angel inside him that obeyed his commandments. An angel, he called his bluebird. [Read more…]