BLONDIE: Plastic Letters LP poster, Chrysalis Records (1978)X-RAY SPEX: ‘Identity’ 45 banner poster, EMI Records (1978)
By the mid-’70s, music collector Andrew Krivine had gone off rock and roll. What had once embodied the revolutionary spirit of youth had become a bloated, pompous dinosaur raking profits for money-hungry music industry executives. Then, he found punk.
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“For me, punk heralded a new era in rock music,” he says. “It had brevity, aggression and sonic velocity that spoke to me emotionally. It became my music.”
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During the summer of 1977, Krivine travelled to London to visit his family.While there, he purchased the Clash’s debut LP, marking the start of what would become one of the world’s largest collections of punk ephemera.
THE CRAMPS: flyer for concert at CBGB’s, New York City, NY (24 May 1977), The Cramps designTHE CLASH: Get Out of Control tour blank posters (November 1977), Sebastian Conran design (courtesy of Sebastian Conran)
In November 1963, just months before apartheid in America was finally outlawed, two groups of black photographers based in Harlem came together to form the Kamoinge Workshop. It went on to become the longest-running photography collective in the world.
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Taken from the Gikuyu language of the Kikuyu people of Kenya, Kamoinge means “a group of people acting and working together”. The collectivist approach, which helped bring about Kenya’s independence from Britain that same year, offered the perfect antidote for a group of young black men who were systematically excluded from advancing through white-owned institutions.
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Every Sunday, Kamoinge members met in each other’s homes for a full day of conversation, critique, and shared wisdom. In the ’60s, they opened their own gallery on Harlem’s famed Striver’s Row, hosting group exhibitions, as well as talks with luminaries including Langston Hughes and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In the ’70s, they went on to produce and publish The Black Photographers’ Annual, a four-volume anthology.
After 25 years together, British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster split up. It wasn’t just the end of a marriage, but the end of an era – and Webster was charged with the task of rediscovering herself.
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“I wanted to go back to that moment before I met him,” Webster says. “What kind of a person was I? I was really happy when I was a teenager. I was completely carefree and didn’t know what was going to happen in the future.”
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After moving out of their home and studio, Webster decided to open three boxes she had been toting around since leaving her childhood home of Leicester, England, in the mid-’80s. That’s when she struck gold.
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One box was filled with ephemera from Webster’s teen years; a treasure trove of records, concert ticket stubs, t-shirts, magazines, photographs, early artworks, and personal letters that shaped her aesthetics, philosophy, and sense of self.
Justine Kurland. Daisy Chain, 2000; from Girl Pictures (Aperture, 2020).
American pop culture has maintained a lifelong love affair with the notion of the anti-hero, the quintessential rebel ready to right the wrongs of injustice on their own terms. The runaway often takes the form of a youth coming of age, who recognises the only way to live true to themselves is to escape the oppressive structures of family and society, and learn to survive on their wits.
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Yet while there are plenty of Huckleberry Finns and Holden Caulfields in American literature, there is a profound absence of girls daring to go it alone. It is here, into this void that photographer Justine Kurland first stepped more than 20 years ago when she began making the series Girl Pictures. The project, made between 1997 and 2002, has just published by Aperture.
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“I wanted the girls to run away to escape patriarchy, to forge a world of their own,” Kurland says. “I realise my fantasy derives from an American one; Manifest Destiny and dreams of the frontier. But the expansion West is essentially a colonialist desire, one of violence and genocide.”
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Resisting the system of American patriarchy and its imperialist agenda, Kurland transforms the landscape of teenage rebellion into mythic scenes of Arcadia. Here, a collectivist mindset permeates every frame, one that allows groups of young girls to band together and live off the land without exploiting it for themselves.
During the first half of the 20th century, when homosexuality was a crime, the act of even depicting it could land an artist jail time.
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“A lot of the art that I found was not work that had been exhibited or reproduced before,” says Jarrett Earnest, author of The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York 1930-1955 (David Zwirner Books) and curator of the 2019 exhibition of the same name. “It was private art, made for their own pleasure and needs.”
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“The work lived in the collections of friends, as museums wouldn’t have wanted it. It got passed to friends and lovers, and was circulated and preserved through those relationships, which were overlaid with artistic, intellectual, sexual, and romantic interests.”
Of all the historic Seven Sister Colleges, only five remain single-sex, including Bryn Mawr College, its gothic campus nestled in an opulent Philadelphia suburb. Founded in 1885 as a Quaker institution, the prestigious institution quickly became known for its support of the LGBTQ community under the leadership of its second President, M. Carey Thomas, who held the reigns from 1894-1922.
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A staunch feminist long before it was in vogue, Thomas was a leading member of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and an early proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment – which still has not passed the US Senate. More than a century ago, Thomas thumbed her nose at convention, openly maintaining a relationship with Mamie Gwinn, who lived with her on campus at a time when same-sex marriage was illegal. “Only our failures marry,” Thomas famously quipped in a speech to Bryn Mawr graduates.
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But Thomas, like so many suffragettes, used her power to advance the cause of white supremacy. In 1916, Thomas gave a speech to the freshman class so that her position on the matter was clear: “If the present intellectual supremacy of the white race is maintained, as I hope that it will be for centuries to come, I believe it will be because they are the only race that has seriously begun to educate their women.”
Sylvester in Golden Gate Park, 1970. Photographer Fayette HauserPhotographer Fayette Hauser
By 1969, the Haight-Asbury district of San Francisco was the epicentre of countercultural life – a community where hippies could tune in, drop out, and reinvent themselves to their heart’s delight. With psychedelics as their guiding force, they rejected societal conventions to pursue the possibility of utopia on earth.
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“It was a real fluid scene,” says Fayette Hauser, author of The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy, 1969-1972 (Process Media). “When I got there it was dynamite and intense. Everyone was gorgeous. The body consciousness was in full bloom. Everyone was so sexy.”
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Hauser moved into a house on Lyon Street inhabited by a panoply of artists who started going out as a pack. Dressed to the nines, the group quickly drew attention from like-minded people. This included ‘Hibiscus’ (born George Edgerly Harris III), a native New Yorker who studied avant-garde theatre.
At the end of 2018, model-turned-photographer Kacey Jeffers returned to his home on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean, after his visa expired. Frustrated by the New York grind, he decided to take some time to recalibrate and recharge his creative energy by immersing himself in a new project: a series of portraits of schoolchildren, brought together in his new book, Uniform.
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“My camera was my tool to build something,” Jeffers says. “Portraiture is my foundation as a photographer, and I wanted to photograph local kids at school in their uniform so I could merge elements of fashion, portraiture and reportage. Clothes are never the first thing I look at; I’m more interested in the person but I wanted to show how what that person is wearing shapes their character. For me, fashion has a purpose.”
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On Nevis – which is the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, fourth President of America who has recently been resurrected in the Broadway musical, Hamilton – education and the promise it brings is highly esteemed. “When I started to think about the project, I had to think about what it meant to me and look at my memories,” Jeffers says.
Weegee. Harlem. “I spotted this happy man coming out of church, he told me that he was a clothing salesman and that every Easter Sunday he put on his full dress suit.”
In July 1945, Weegee published his magnum opus, Weegee’s Naked City, a collection of photographs taken on the streets of New York, his adopted hometown. Originally released as a luxurious hardcover edition with gravure prints, the book was subsequently kept in print for more than eight decades as a paperback with halftones – an impressive run by any publishing standard.
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But now, the book has been restored to its original glory in a new edition from Damiani/International Center of Photography. The latest edition comes with new texts by New York Magazine City Editor and Weegee biographer Christopher Bonanos, and ICP Weegee specialist Christopher George.
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Born Usher Fellig in Ukraine in 1899, Weegee took up photography at the age of 14, just three years after his family emigrated to New York. Self-taught, he opened a photo studio in 1918 and started working as a freelance photojournalist in 1935. Over the next decade, he would amass one of the most compelling collections of city life, capturing the gruesome glamour and ghoulish truths in a series of snapshots taken mostly at night.
In the early 1990s, Catherine Opie made a series of studio portraits of members of California’s LGBTQ sadomasochistic leather community for the Dyke Deck, a limited edition set of playing cards sold exclusively at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Like many underground artworks of the time, they were known among a select few but largely left out of the annals of contemporary art history.
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One day in 2017, while pursuing her MFA in Photography from ICP-Bard, African-American artist Naima Green stumbled upon the project while perusing databases in the New York Public Library for an intensive research class. Green was struck by a deep sense of kinship coupled with a feeling of surprise and disappointment for never having heard of the Dyke Deck before. She immediately set out to get a copy in order to learn more.
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After seeing the deck listed for $700 on an esteemed art-collecting website, Green headed over to eBay where she found a deck for $35. A week later the cards arrived. A seed was planted in Green’s imagination and over time it began to take root in the artist’s backyard: the borough of Brooklyn. It is here that Greens’ dream project took shape in a modern-day version of the deck that would focus on the community she knew best: queer, trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people of colour coming of age in the new millennium.
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“Brooklyn is a place where it has felt possible to be my biggest, queerest self and evolve into the person who I am and have become,” Green tells Dazed. “Brooklyn has given me a lot of space to breathe that some other environments that I have been in have not. In getting closer to myself by moving here, it was important to invite in all the people who have been a part of that story for me. But I also didn’t want to keep perpetuating this cycle of the queer Brooklyn faces you always see. It felt important to invite people that I don’t know to be a part of it.”
Jordan Casteel. Shirley (Spa Boutique2Go), 2018 Oil on canvas 78 x 60 in (198.1 x 152.4 cm) Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New YorkJordan Casteel. Joe and Mozel (Pompette Wines), 2017 Oil on canvas 90 x 78 in (228.6 x 198.1 cm) Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York
The art of Jordan Casteel is grounded in empathy—in the space where the boundaries between the self and the other melts away leaving the impenetrable bond of compassion and understanding that lies at the very root of our humanity. Here, in the sacred realm of spirit, a mutual affinity between souls is distilled and preserved forevermore in mesmerizing works of art.
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“My entire life, I would be the person described as a deeply empathetic, caregiver, leader, observer,” Casteel says. “It’s been a natural space for me to encompass because it is so inherent to who I am. I have always been curious about what people experience before they got in front of me: all the things that make them who they are. Then, when they are in front of me, paying attention to the subtle gestures, body language, and tonal shifts in a conversation that allude to something deeper or more meaningful.”
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In Within Reach, her first solo museum exhibition (temporarily closed due to COVID-19) and accompanying catalogue, Casteel invites us into her world in a series of nearly 40 large scale paintings that celebrate the beauty of color as it exists in people, places, and the nature of art itself. Casteel’s encounters with the people of her community are so powerful and poignant, you might think she has known her subjects all her life—but many of the relationships begin with the first encounter to make their portrait. That’s simply Casteel’s way; she moves through the world with fluidity and ease, her curiosity guiding her to cultivate connections with people from all walks of life that populate the communities where she has lived and worked over the past decade.
Jordan Casteel. Noelle, 2019 Oil on canvas 78 x 60 in (198.1 x 152.4 cm) Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New YorkJordan Casteel. Amina, 2017 Oil on canvas 90 x 78 in (228.6 x 198.1 cm) Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York
