Lionel Derimais. African-American young couple, Manhattan, New York City, NY; USA. 1980
Parisian native Lionel Derimais fell into photography by accident. He dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but his math grades made such aspirations impossible.
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“In 1977, a school mate showed me his camera. I immediately thought: ‘I’ll do that too’ – even though I had no idea what ‘that’ meant,” he recalls. That summer, Derimais got a job at a photography shop, bought his first camera, built a darkroom, and never looked back.
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In September 1979, he arrived in New York to study English at Columbia University. “But I just wanted to be ‘out there’ with film in my pocket, taking pictures,” he says.
Lionel Derimais. Kids posing for a photo while another one hides, Manhattan, New York City, NY, USA. 1980Lionel Derimais. A reflection of the Twin Towers in downtown Manhattan, Manhattan, New York City, NY, USA, 1980
At precisely 2:34 p.m. on April 29, 1939, a small group of amateur photographers gathered in the Blue Room of the Martinelli building in São Paolo, Brazil, to create the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). Lawyers, businessmen, accountants, journalists, engineers, biologists and bankers… These white collar professionals shared a common love for the innovative possibilities of photography. Together, artists including Thomaz Farkas, Geraldo de Barros, Gertrudes Altschul, Maria Helena Valente da Cruz, and Palmira Puig-Giró, among others would gather regularly in the spirit of competition and camaraderie to create a space for shared discovery.
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Informed by the movement towards abstraction dominating the modern art world, members of the FCCB pushed the boundaries of the medium into new realms, and their influence extended into artistic circles across Europe and North America. Like their peers working in painting, design, and literature, the FCCB found inspiration in majestic elegance of daily life, drawing from architecture, nature, texture, shape, shadow, solitude, and movement to create new ways of seeing the world.
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For 25 years, the FCCB continuously challenged visual tropes, resisting the lure of repetition and cliché in a search for originality of style and technique. But with the Coup of 1964, in which the United States funded the Brazilian Armed Forces overthrow of President João Goulart, a brutally repressive regime dominated the country for the next twenty years. As the FCCB prepared for the Eighth São Paulo Bienal in September–November 1965, the government began to jail critics and intellectuals, an act that signaled the end of an era had arrived.
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After the FCCB disbanded, they all but disappeared from the history of modern photography outside Brazil. In her final exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art, curator Sarah Hermanson Meister has organized Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography and the Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, 1946–1964, a restoration of a vital but forgotten chapter of art history, opened since May 8. Featuring more than 60 photographs drawn from the MoMA’s collection, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue present a series of works that offer indelible insight into mid-century modernism with a Brazilian touch.
American photographer Gary Green first picked up the camera as a youth coming of age in suburban Long Island during the late 1960s. “My parents thought it was another thing I’d give up like the saxophone and other hobbies that languished after a year or two,” he recalls. But, to his parent’s surprise, his interest in photography steadily grew into a career.
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In the summer of 1976, Green moved to New York to work for a commercial photographer in midtown Manhattan. “New York was cheap, dirty, and dangerous in the best way. There was art to be seen, music to be heard, and artists making work everywhere,” he says.
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Camera in hand, Green quickly hit the burgeoning punk scene at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, photographing bands like the New York Dolls, Blondie, and the Ramones, as well as the people on the scene like Andy Warhol. In the new exhibition, Rebels & Dandys, which features a selection of work from his recent book When Midnight Comes Around (Stanley/Barker), Green looks back at this pivotal era in music history.
From its very outset, photography occupied a curious place within the world of art, its mechanical nature offering a new way of seeing and recording, while simultaneously confounding the status quo at every turn. Its deceptive simplicity, margin for error, and ability to reproduce a single image infinite times challenged all that traditionalists held sacred about the singular work of art. Although photographers long sought for their work to be recognized — and valued — as art, it would be nearly 150 years before the establishment acknowledged it as such. Unsurprisingly it took artists themselves to show functionaries as much.
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As a photography critic at The New York Times from 1981-1991, Andy Grundbergplayed a pivotal role in the elevation of photography within the art world. He arrived in New York in August of 1971 with youthful dreams of being a poet. He got a job working in Soho just as the neighborhood was transitioning from a manufacturing center to an artists’ outpost, working as a day laborer to help transform huge industrial buildings transformed into lofts. At the time, the New York art world was firmly entrenched on 57th Street, just a stone’s throw from Sutton Place, but by the end of the decade, the downtown scene would rise to prominence.
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Photography, with its ability to do what no other medium could, played first a functional then a formal role in the contemporary art scene. In the new book How Photography Became Contemporary Art (Yale University Press), Grundberg pens the perfect mix of history and memoir that chronicles the mediums transformation in the 1970s and ‘80s. Offering a first-person account from the frontlines, Grundberg explores the radical artists and movements that shook up the scene and reflects on the medium’s relationship with feminism and artists of color.
We are born into bodies inscribed with histories that we do not control, a complex mix of truth and trauma, archetype and stereotype. As we walk the earth at a specific time and place, we are met with expectations and limitations based on the bodies we hold — but the force of our very nature empowers us to reimagine and create new paradigms writ large. This is the magic of Panamanian American artist Nydia Blas, who uses photography, collage, video, and books to render intimate scenes of Black girl bliss.
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In her first monograph, Revival (Kris Graves Projects, April 2021), Blas takes us inside her world, a space of exquisite sensitivity where she is free to explore, confront, and celebrate the very essence of body and soul. Using her lived experiences as a girl, woman, and mother, Blas carefully weaves allegorical images of the feminine into majestic tapestries of resilience, resistance, and reclamation through what she describes as a “Black feminine lens”.
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Growing up in the predominantly white college town of Ithaca, New York, Blas was introduced to folklore as a child when her Aunt Beverly gifted a copy of Virginia Hamilton’s book The People Could Fly: American Black Folktale. Blas came to understand what matters most is choice. We hold the power to choose our own thoughts and beliefs, and use them to heal the wounds we carry, passed on from one generation to the next.
With the recent publication of Women Street Photographers (Prestel), photographerGulnara Samoilova has once again returned to the public eye — but in a very different way from when she won the World Press Photo for her photograph of September 11. After the trauma she endured that day, Samoilova left photojournalism, never to return. She established a successful wedding photography studio but eventually found herself depressed. Money and status simply were not enough — she needed to return to her love of making art.
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Encouraged by the words of American photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Samoilova decided to change careers in 2015. She dreamed of traveling the world and taking street photographs, a passion she enjoyed since she first picked up the camera as a teenager in her hometown of Ufa, the capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan in Russia.
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The answers became clear after the 2016 Presidential election in the United States. Triggered with memories of sexism experienced throughout her career, Samoilova decided to create Women Street Photographers, a now-highly popular Instagram feed, in 2017. With the success of the community, she could organically expand the platform to include a website, exhibition series, artist residency, inspirational films, and now the book, which brings together the work of 100 artists from around the world pushing the boundaries of street photography into new realms.
This year, the United States will mourn the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a historic event that precipitated U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which barely register in the American public’s consciousness. No longer the cause célèbre driven by a desire to destroy Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, few may be aware that a May 21 deadline for complete U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan will symbolically mark the end of the nation’s longest war. All but discarded as yesterday’s news, these wars have become an afterthought to the American mind, their consequences on foreign and domestic policy largely ignored.
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Yet their impact continues to resonate and inform the world in ways in a myriad of ways deeply and inextricably intertwined, a hallucinatory labyrinth of events and implications Magnum Photos member Peter van Agtmael seeks to explore in his latest book, Sorry for the War (Mass Books). “Sorry for the War is dedicated to the anonymous lives caught in the middle of America’s wars. Twenty years later, we hardly know a face or a name,” van Agtmael writes in the acknowledgments, a poignant reminder of the incalculable cost of war.
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Since 2006, van Agtmael has documented America at war at home and abroad, creating a hallucinatory picture of a nation willfully giving itself over to the numbing powers of cognitive dissonance. In Sorry for the War, van Agtmael takes us inside the belly of the beast, drawing damning parallels between the horrors of war and the fetid bliss of ignorance. Combing documentary photographs with images of mainstream media, van Agtmael explores the vertigo-inducing disconnect between reality and spectacle through a series of surreal images accompanied by annotated captions that provide at times deeply disconcerting context.
enjoy the wonderful and bizarre things that reveal themselves in public places, what I learn from them, and how I adapt to different situations. Street photography is a constant life education and that’s why I keep coming back to it,” says British photographer Matt Stuart, author of the new book Think Like a Street Photographer (Laurence King).
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After giving up skateboarding in his early 20s, Stuart found a new love in street photography, which offered some of the same thrills. “Both are about trying to make a ‘trick,’ but with street photography, you can make the tricks tangible in the form of a print and they can last forever,” Stuart says.
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Inspired by Joel Meyerowitz’s groundbreaking colour work, Stuart embraced the photographer’s approach to decentering the illustrious “decisive moment” in the act of picture-making. He also admires Trent Parke’s anarchic approach and Alex Webb’s work ethic, describing the latter as a “photographic athlete.”
American photographer Donna Ferrato is possessed with a candor you rarely find, a willingness to traverse the most delicate, vulnerable parts of life and do so with extraordinary courage and sensitivity. Long before the mainstream media was paying attention to the issues facing women’s lives, Ferrato was fully attuned to the extraordinary importance of bearing witness.
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In her new book Holy (powerHouse Books), Ferrato traverses a lifetime behind the lens documenting the lives of women from all walks of life. Fearlessly confronting once taboo issues like sexual assault, domestic violence, and sex work, Ferrato recognizes photography as a tool to speak truth to power and testify to not only the tragedies and traumas befalling women but the victories that achieve against the odds.
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Holy began in 2017 after the U.S. Presidential election left Ferrato feeling enraged. “I was a bear whose paw was caught in a steel trap. I was howling, I was angry, I was furious that that man had been voted in. I knew what was going to happen because we all knew [what he would do]: shutting down Planned Parenthood, women’s health clinics, telling trans people they could not serve in the military and get the health care they needed, taking children away from families at the border — just taking away all of our rights,” she says.
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“I couldn’t tolerate it anymore. I was responding like a desperate animal when I first started this book. If you could see he first iteration where I was in a white-hot rage you would understand that I didn’t know where I was going. I’m so flawed. I make so many mistakes. I am driven by my emotions and my impulses, and I’m changing my mind all the time. I’d look at the book and it wasn’t good enough.”
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When COVID hit, Ferrato found herself alone. Without distraction, she delved into her past, asking herself, “Where were the cracks in your upbringing that lead you to be such a firebrand?” Here, Ferrato shares a few stories from her extraordinary path.
Hailing from Iowa, America’s Heartland, Jordan Gale remembers coming to a turning point. “Once I had the thought, ‘Okay, I’m a photographer,’ moving to New York seemed like the next step. For a few years, I toyed with that move, but was always too scared to pull the trigger.”
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After spending 2019 on the U.S. Presidential campaign trail, Gale decided it was time. “I put everything I owned into my car and drove 16 hours east to my friend’s apartment in Brooklyn,” he says. “I had an ear-to-ear grin as I was stuck in traffic going through the Holland Tunnel. It was exhilarating and I was proud of myself. It was one of the few life decisions I’ve felt confident about making.”
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Gale arrived in February 2020 – just weeks before New York became the global epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic. “At the beginning, there weren’t many visible signs of the crisis yet,” he remembers. “I would drive through midtown and be in awe of the empty streets. You wouldn’t see a single person.”
A year before 1967’s famed Summer of Love, American photographer William Gedney(1932-1989) set out for San Francisco on a Guggenheim Fellowship to record what he described as “aspects of our culture which I believe significant and which I hope will become, in time, part of the visual record of American history.”
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Filled with optimism and hope, Gedney arrived in San Francisco ready to embed himself amid a new generation of youth coming of age that rejected the strictures of the status quo in the pursuit of happiness. He gravitated towards a group of hippies living at “The Pad,” a communal house in Haight Asbury, just a few blocks from the home of the seminal counterculture rock band Grateful Dead.
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Between October 1966 and January 1967, Gedney made 2,100 photographs across 62 rolls of 35 mm film, chronicling the everyday lives of a group of lovers and friends as the beatnik era gave way to the hippie scene. In these images there is nothing of the Pollyanna spirit to come, no “love will save the world” ethos brimming amid the youth, but rather a forlorn, more disaffected truth.
