Omar Victor Diop, Dom Nicolau (Circa. 1830-1860) From the series: Project Diaspora 2014

2017 has been an incredible year as I dove head first into the deep end of the world of media. It has been filled with all kinds of high and lows, challenges and triumphs – but I wouldn’t have it any other way as it has strengthened my resolve, clarified my purpose, and given me the most extraordinary sense of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and determination.

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At a time when just reading the headlines can feel like getting slapped in the face, where the future seems hopeless and life feels bleak, I’ve come to understand that I am not here to shadowbox with lies, to argue with the irrational, or sell out for popularity. Instead, I am here to provide a space for knowledge, wisdom, and understanding garnered by some of the most incredible minds of our times, those who have dedicated their lives to questioning the status quo, to exploring new paths to freedom and liberation. I am here to share these stories so that you may find a place for inspiration, enlightenment, and positive vibes.

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Rather than look away from the difficulties of life, I am attracted to those who have faced them head on, surmounted them, and lived to tell the tale. They speak for so many who we have lost, who have been silenced or disappeared, or simply are not in a position to tell the story for themselves. I find beauty in truth, integrity, authenticity, originality, and courage in whatever form it comes. Though justice may be non-linear, it is inevitable.

Photo: Copyright Jamel Shabazz

Photographer Jamel Shabazz Reflects on the Memories That Shaped His Vision of New York Street Style (Vogue)

When Jamel Shabazz took up photography back in the 1980s, he gave voice to a new generation of young black men who were redefining the look of street-level New York City with their colorful Kangol caps, Adidas shell-toe sneakers, and graphic Cazal glasses. A former corrections officer, Shabazz would wander neighborhoods like Harlem, Brownsville, and the Lower East Side with his camera, approaching strangers who caught his eye, engaging them in conversation, and concluding with a portrait. Read the full story at Vogue.

Charlie Ahearn, DJ AJ 2 from the series Scratch Ecstasy, 1980 © the artist and courtesy P.P.O.W.

Picturing the Early Days of Hip-Hop (Aperture)

Hip Hop came of age inside the cinderblock walls of the Ecstasy Garage Disco in the Boogie Down Bronx. By 1980, it was the place to be as the flyest DJs and MCs honed their skills among their peers. In tribute, filmmaker Charlie Ahearn has teamed up with Grand Wizzard Theodore, inventor of the scratch, to recreate their weekly slide show as the centerpiece of Ahearn’s exhibition Scratch Ecstasy, currently on view at P.P.O.W. Gallery. Miss Rosen, who worked with Ahearn on his 2007 book, Wild Style: The Sampler, speaks with Ahearn and Theodore about the interplay between sight and sound in the development of Hip-Hop culture during its formative years. Read the full story at Aperture.

Photography Ricky Flores

How Hip Hop Rose From the Ashes of the Bronx (Dazed)

The South Bronx became infamous during Game 2 of the 1977 World Series, when newscaster Howard Cosell noticed a nearby abandoned school engulfed in flames and not a fire truck in sight, uttering his legendary phrase, “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.”

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The Bronx had been burning throughout the 70s, in a massive series of fires set by arsonists working on behalf of landlords who knew they could collect more money from insurance fraud than they could from rent. From 1970 to 1980, more than 97 per cent of seven census tracts in the South Bronx had been lost to fire and abandonment, turning the once majestic neighborhood into blocks of rubble resembling a war zone. Yet, through it all, the people of the Bronx persevered. Read the full story at Dazed.

Brothers with Their Vines, Coney Island, NY, 1976 Photography Arlene Gottfried, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art

How Arlene Gottfried Photographed NYC’s Truest Self (Dazed)

“Only in New York, kids, only in New York.”

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American columnist Cindy Adams’ famed bon mot could easily caption any number of photographs in the archive of Arlene Gottfried. Whether partying in legendary 1970s sex club Plato’s Retreat, hanging out at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café with Miguel Piñero, or singing gospel with the Eternal Light Community Singers on the Lower East Side, Arlene was there and has the pictures to prove it. It was in her beloved city that Arlene Gottfried drew her final breath. She died the morning of August 8, after a long illness that may have taken from her body but never from her heart. Read the full story at Dazed.

At dawn, the Manhattan skyline shows no lights due to a power blackout, New York, New York, July 14, 1977. The photo was taken from Jersey City, New Jersey. (Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images).

How the Blackout of 1977 Helped Hip Hop Blow Up (Crave)

 

On the evening of July 13, 1977, DJ Disco Wiz and his partner Casanova Fly (later Grandmaster Caz) were in the park on Valentine and 183rd Street in the Bronx with their sound system set up for a battle with a local cat they had regularly been blowing off. But DJ Eddie wouldn’t take no for an answer, so they relented and gave him a chance to make a name for himself.

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The city had been going through a ten-day heat wave with temperatures above 100. Wiz was concerned if their small portable fans would keep the amps cool, as they didn’t have internal cooling systems. Although it was hot and humid, people were having a good time. Around 9:30 p.m., Caz got on the turntables. Then the record slowly spun to a stop. Read the full story at Crave.

Jamila Woods

Black Women Poets You Need to Know (Dazed)

 

2017 has been a watershed year for Black women speaking truth to power while reclaiming their time, transforming the conversation and controlling the narrative. We have reached the tipping point, wherein new voices burst forth on the global scene, in every field from business to politics, science to sports, photography to poetry.

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On September 3, Pulitzer Prize-wining poet Tracy K. Smith signed in for duty as the United States Poet Laureate – the highest position a poet is given by the government, with the express purpose of raising the national consciousness of reading and writing poetry.

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Smith is in tremendous company, as a bevy of Black women are publishing new books of poetry, sharing their art, wisdom, and vision of life with the world. We spotlight seven poets whose work shows us the way that verse can transform the way we understand ourselves, each other, and life itself. Read the full story at Dazed.

Omar Victor Diop, Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Congo (c. 1643-50). From the series: Project Diaspora 2014.

Self Portraits by Senegalese Photographer Omar Victor Diop Recreate Historic Portraits (Feature Shoot)

The great African proverb wisely observes, “Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”

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The lion has arrived in the form of Omar Victor Diop, a rising star in the photography world. Born 1980, in Dakar, Senegal, Diop has inherited the great traditions of African studio photography and takes them to the next level in his new exhibition, Project Diaspora, currently on view at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta, GA, through August 18, 2017.

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In Project Diaspora, Diop tells the story of the lions of African history through the recreation of historic portrait paintings of key figures in art, politics, theology, and trade living between the 15th and the 19th centuries. This particular period reveals the complex relationship between African and the rest of the world, as European imperialist forces ransacked the continent, enslaving its people, occupying its lands, and looting its natural resources. Read the full story at Feature Shoot.

Shedding Light on the Suffering of Animals in Captivity
(Feature Shoot)

The path to truth is a long and arduous road, traveled by the few who can withstand the slings of arrows and bows. It takes courage and strength to allow the myths to fall away and stand face to face with the cold heart of reality. Photographer Colleen Plumb set for on this path many years ago, looking to understand the relationship between wo/man and animal that we have inherited from our ancestors.

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“Then God said: Let us make* human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth,” Genesis 1:26 decreed, creating a divide that would come to result in an oppressive hierarchy. Read the full story at Feature Shoot.

“Portrait of Wangechi Mutu, Mamiwata”, 2017 oil on canvas painting: 94 7/16 x 120 1/8 inches (239.9 x 305.1 cm)framed: 104 7/8 x 130 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches (266.4 x 331.5 x 11.4 cm) © Kehinde Wiley, courtesy Sean Kelly, New York

View a Series of Portraits of Extraordinary Black Artists (Dazed)

The Trickster exists in different cultures around the globe: the wily shapeshifter with the power to transform the way we see the world. As an archetype, The Trickster can be found in any walk of life where people must operate according to more than one set of rules, moving seamlessly between the appearance of things and the underlying truth.

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Artists know this realm well for they are consigned to delve deep below the surface and manifest what they find. Yet their discoveries are not necessarily in line with the status quo; more often than not, they will upset polite society and upend respectability politics by speaking truth to power – quite literally.

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In the United States, African Americans know this well. Throughout the course of the nation’s history, they have been forced to deal with systemic oppression and abuse in a culture filled with double speak that began with the words “All men are created equal,” penned in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson, a man who kept his own children as slaves until his death. Read the full story at Dazed.

Copyright Sean Maung

A Night on the Town with LA’s Queer Vaqueros (Huck)

Santa Monica Boulevard is one of Los Angeles’ most fabled thoroughfares, running West from Silver Lake, through Hollywood and Beverly Hills all the way to Ocean Avenue, just off the Pacific. “There are different areas on Santa Monica that have different flavours,” photographer Sean Maung, an LA native, explains. “When you say ‘Santa Monica Boulevard,’ most people think of West Hollywood, which has a very strong gay and lesbian scene. But I’ve always been really attracted to Santa Monica Boulevard in East Hollywood.”

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The random mix of people from local Russian, Thai, and Latino communities appealed to Maung, who has been documenting the street culture of his hometown for over a decade. While photographing transgender prostitutes working the street late at night, Maung saw the words “Club Tempo” on an orange sign in front of a mall and thought to himself, “What’s Club Tempo? And why is it in the back of a strip mall in East Hollywood?’” Read the full story at Huck.

Michael Lavine for Bad Boy Records

The Story behind The Notorious B.I.G.’s spooky ‘Life After Death’ Album Cover (The Undefeated)

Twenty years have passed, but the shock is still fresh — and still incomprehensible. On March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G., was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. It remains unsolved.

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At 12:30 a.m., Wallace left a Vibe magazine Soul Train Music Awards after-party at Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum. The SUV in which he was traveling stopped at a red light just 50 yards from the venue. A dark Chevrolet Impala SS pulled up along the passenger side. The driver rolled down his window, drew his weapon and fired. Four bullets struck Wallace. He was rushed to nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and was pronounced dead at 1:15 a.m.

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Not long afterward, The Notorious B.I.G. rose again. Read the full story at The Undefeated.

Stare, 2008. © 2017 Roger Ballen

A Road Map Through the Life of Roger Ballen (Feature Shoot)

When Roger Ballen graduated from high school in 1968, his parents gave him a Nikon FTn camera. It was flown over from Hong Kong by a friend and lost in customs for several weeks before it finally arrived. The day that Ballen received it, he headed to the outskirts of Sing Sing prison to take photographs, a prescient moment to launch a journey in photography like no other before or since.

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His name alone conjures up curious and disturbing visions of an uncanny world, one that recalls the spaces of the dreamscape, theaters of the unconscious. Here reality is a construction, but it is also something else: it is the space where our minds are released from rational sensibilities. To describe the work as unnerving would be polite. It is as though the non-linear spaces of the mind are given full flight. Read the full story at Feature Shoot.

Gordon Parks: Red Jackson, Harlem, New York, 1948; gelatin silver print; 19 1/2 x 15 3/4 in. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.

A Fresh Look at Gordon Parks’ Photo Essay “Harlem Gang Leader” (Feature Shoot)

1948 was a watershed year in the career of American photographer Gordon Parks. An established fashion photographer who had been working on assignment for LIFE magazine, Parks was also an accomplished author, publishing his second book, Camera Portraits, a collection of his work accompanied by professional observations about posing, lighting, and printing. At the same, time, Parks longed for something deeper and more essential to his soul.

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“Photographing fashion was rewarding but for me somewhat rarefied,” he revealed in his memoir, Half Past Autumn. “Documentary urgings were still gnawing at me, still waiting for fulfillment.”

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He met with his editors to make his very first pitch: the story of Leonard “Red” Jackson, the 17-year-old leader of the Midtowners, a Harlem gang that had been caught up in the turf warfare that had been plaguing the neighborhood throughout the decade. He showed them 21 pictured edited from a body of hundreds photographs made over a period of four weeks made shadowing Red as he went about his business. The work tells the story of survival in its most poignant form, caught in the space where poverty, oppression, and violence foment and froth. Read the full story at Feature Shoot.

‘Untitled’ Photo by Michael A. McCoy. Baltimore Uprising, Baltimore, MD, 2015

Six Tips for Aspiring Protest Photographers (Huck)

After completing two tours of duty in Iraq in 2008, U.S. Army combat veteran Michael A. McCoy turned to turned to photography as a therapeutic tool to deal with the horrors of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. With a camera in his hands, McCoy could escape from the memories of being inside a war zone as photography enabled him to be full present in the moment, bare witness, and share his story with the world.

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The 2014 death of Mike Brown at the hands of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson changed everything. The protests that raged across the city sparked a movement against police brutality and the killing of black men, women, and children at the hands of law enforcement officials. For McCoy, Ferguson was the moment of truth.

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“I started photographing protests because I wanted to start documenting history,” he explains. “I realized that I could use my camera as a tool and amplify the issues affecting myself and my community that need to be heard. I could have been Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, or Eric Garner.” Read the full story at Huck.

Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Gran Fury, 1989–1990, four-color bus-side poster, ink on PVC, 30 × 140 in. For Art Against AIDS On The Road.

How to Spark Serious Social Change, Using Art (Huck)

During the early years of the AIDS crisis, when an HIV positive diagnosis meant certain and gruesome death, Avram Finkelstein became a pivotal figure in ACT UP, the direct action advocacy group that worked tirelessly to combat U.S. government silence around the disease.

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“Power structures count on our silence, but that doesn’t mean we’re obliged to give it to them,” Finkelstein remembers. “Raising your voice is a tremendous threat, and it’s the only threat you ever have to make.”

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As co-founder of the collective Silence = Death and member of the art group Gran Fury, Finkelstein worked tirelessly to raise awareness and fight the power through a powerful combination of art and activism. “When words and images are combined, their power increases exponentially,” Finkelstein explains. “We thought: Why not just sell political agency the same way everything else is sold to us?” Read the full story at Huck.

‘The Rumble in the Jungle’ — and the Poster That Sold It (The Undefeated)

In the darkest night part of morning they came 60,000 strong — to watch undefeated world heavyweight champion George Foreman take on challenger Muhammad Ali. It was another time. The 20th of May Stadium in Kinshasa, Zaire, is now the Stade Tata Raphaël in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and The Rumble in the Jungle, as it was known, was scheduled to begin at 4 a.m. local time on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1974. This was so the match originally titled From Slave Ship to Championship would air live on closed-circuit television in U.S. theaters at 10 p.m. EST.

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From backstage, journalist Norman Mailer described the scene. Although his entourage was somber, Ali appeared relaxed as he addressed himself in a mellifluous tone: “I been up and I been down. You know, I been around. It must be dark when you get knocked out. Why, I’ve never been knocked out. I’ve been knocked down, but never out.” Read the full story at The Undefeated.

Dissecting the Political Impact of Acid House (Dazed)

Back in 1979, in a Chicago nightclub called The Warehouse, DJ Frankie Knuckles helped incubate the nascent genre of house music. Taking its name from The Warehouse, house music spread through the US underground and around the globe, and in London, it transformed into something entirely new. The acid house movement combined the hippie spirit found on the island of Ibiza with the sensation of taking a trip, be an ecstasy pill, a hit of acid, or a plane ticket to a faraway land.

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By 1987, acid house had taken UK by storm with an irrepressible, revolutionary energy that evoked the utopian vibes of the Summer of Love. Peace, love, respect, and unity were the order of the day, albeit within the confines of illegal parties that were cropping up across the country, drawing thousands of revelers from all walks of life who wanted nothing more than to dance through the dawn. But the acid house scene was more than a cosmic display of hedonism. It was a movement that subverted the racial and class boundaries of Margaret Thatcher’s seemingly endless premiership. Although its political impact is often overlooked, acid house united a deeply segregated society, and what’s more, it empowered those who have been written out of history to rise and come to the fore. Read the full story at Dazed.

© Lilla Szász: Mother Michael Goes to Heaven, part from series (2008-2010)

Intimate Photos of a ‘Family’ of Sex Workers in Budapest (Dazed)

Lilla Szasz fell into the underworld when she began documenting teen girls living in a detention home in Budapest. Here, she met girls who had turned to sex work to survive. While they were locked up, pimps waited outside the gates for their release, with ample supplies of drugs to keep them caught in a cycle of addiction and debt.

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Their tragic stories spoke to Szasz. She yearned to know more about the people living on the edge, on the margins of society. In 2008, she travelled to downtown Budapest, where she met Monica and Michael, young sex workers who shared a flat. Their neighbours had been extorting them, threatening to call the police, so they moved to a larger place in the slums, where no one cared what they did. Read the full story at Dazed.

Meat Joy, 1964. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann

Art Pioneer Carolee Schneemann Looks Back On 50 Years Of Work (Bust)

Artist. Feminist. Revolutionary. Carolee Schneemann, now 77 years old, has been traversing the sacred spaces of female sexuality and gender in the name of truth, liberation, and freedom from the patriarchy for more than half a century. Raised on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, Schneemann learned not to fear viscera, injury, or death. Instead, she embraced the creative and destructive forces of Mother Nature and fused them into work that challenged every assumption about women in the art world.

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A multidisciplinary artist, Schneemann has created groundbreaking paintings, photographs, performance-art pieces, and installations that expose deep female secrets, pleasures, fears, and taboos. Using her body as a starting point, Schneemann also challenges cultural norms that discourage female artists from using their own nude bodies as the subjects of their work. Most memorably, in her landmark piece, Interior Scroll (1975), Schneemann stood on a table, assumed “action poses,” then slowly extracted and read from a scroll tucked neatly inside her vagina. Read the full story at Bust.

Copyright Thierry Mugler

A Brief History of Thierry Mugler’s High-Voltage Fashion (Dazed)

The legendary house of Thierry Mugler occupies the space between fashion and myth, manned by a designer so visionary that no less than Beyoncé, David Bowie and Lady Gaga have called upon him to create couture so haute your body temperature rises just looking at pictures of it. In celebration of his iconoclastic career, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has announced plans for Thierry Mugler: Creatures of Haute Couture, slated to open in February 2019. It will be the first solo exhibition of the designer’s work.

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For over two decades, Mugler was a reigning force in fashion, an enfant terrible who defied bourgeois sensibilities with his spectacular looks and magnificent, sometimes almost hour-long runway shows. “I have always been fascinated by the most beautiful animal on the Earth: the human being,” Mugler revealed on the occasion of the exhibition’s announcement. That fascination led him to create clothes which transformed the wearers into futuristic femme fatales, whose superpowers were seduction and self-assurance. Read the full story at Dazed.