As the son of travel photographer George Holton, who studied under Ansel Adams, Thomas Holton grew up surrounded by images of distant lands capturing people from New Guinea to Guatemala.
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“I began to realise the magic photography has to transport the viewer elsewhere and tell new stories and share experiences,” Holton says. George Holton passed away in 1979 during his time working in the town of Lushan on the Yangtze River, while making a book about China, his wife’s native land.
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Two decades later, Thomas Holton embarked on a journey of his own: an 18-year odyssey into the life of a Chinese-American family, the Lams. He first encountered the family in 2003 while pursuing his MFA at The School of Visual Arts in his hometown of New York.
Young Man Posing for Polaroid, 1959, Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Don Steeple
ne of the very first gay beach towns in the United States, Cherry Grove on Fire Islandbecame a weekend and summer destination for the LGBTQ community in the years before the Stonewall riots, widely considered one of the most important events leading to the gay liberation movement. At a time when homosexuality was considered both a crime and a mental illness, Cherry Grove provided sanctuary from persecution, creating a space for the community to enjoy the pleasures of life on their own terms.
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In the new exhibition, Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove, curators Brian Clark, Susan Kravitz, and Parker Sargent of the Cherry Groves Archives Collection bring together 70 enlarged photographs and additional ephemera that offer a window into this extraordinary chapter of American history. Featuring images made at the beach, theater performances, art exhibitions, Duffy’s Hotel bar, the annual regatta, and end-of-season costume ball, where revelers could openly flout laws against cross-dressing, the exhibition celebrates the power of joy, love, and resilience just in time for Pride Month.
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“Hate and homophobia often forced homosexuals to live in secret in order to protect their own safety and reputations,” says Clark. “Salvaging our gay history is critically important to validate the ways we existed. We honor our gay elders and gay ancestors by telling the truth about their joys and struggles along with acknowledging their leading contributions to our world.”
End of Season APCG Ball, Community House, Woman with Headdress, September 1954, Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold SeeleyOne Hundred Club Party, 1949, Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley
Hailing from North London, photographer Miles Aldridge lived a charmed life as a young boy, his formative years spent within the inner circle that made the 1960s swing. His father, Alan Aldridge was an illustrator who got his start doing covers for Penguin Books before opening his own graphic design firm, INK, in the heart of Soho, where he worked with the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Who, and Elton John. “I grew up around my father’s psychedelic images and the rock and roll lifestyle ofSwinging London,” Aldridge says. “My sister Saffron and I would go backstage at Elton John concerts and see the incredible pageantry from behind the scenes.”
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But things fell apart when his parents divorced. “The family imploded,” he says. “I tried to put the pieces back together and of course they never do.” From the age of 10 until he went to art school in his 20s, Aldridge struggled to adapt as his mother fell into a depression and their once vibrant psychedelic home fell apart. When he found punk music in the 1970s, he discovered an outlet to release his pent up rage through music. He then formed a band called the X Men and played psychedelic-garage-punk music.
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Realizing his true talent laid in art, Miles Aldridge left the band to study illustration at Central St. Martins. After school, he worked in publishing doing book covers that stand up to this day but found this line of work was too solitary for his liking. “I wanted to do something more energized, collaborative, bigger, bolder and sexier,” he says. “Being a film director or a photographer were the two career options I toyed with. For a while I did both.”
In the Deep South lies Greenville, Mississippi, a distinctly progressive town set amid a conservative landscape that gave birth to writers, musicians, and artists including photographer and filmmaker Allen Frame. Being LGBTQ was an unspoken fact of life; few like sculptor Leon Koury had the courage to come out. In the early 1970s, while on break from Harvard University and later Imageworks, Frame spent time at Koury’s studio, finding a source of connection that kept him from feeling like a complete outsider in hypermasculine world.
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Dying to escape, Frame moved first to Boston before arriving in New York in 1977 just as the Gay Liberation Movement was in full swing. In 1981, he got a place on Perry Street just blocks from the Stonewall Inn, the site of the historic uprising in the fight for LGBTQ rights. At a time when one could easily afford to live, work, and party in New York, Frame took a job cleaning apartments, which left him with plenty of time to revel in the city’s burgeoning downtown art scene. Frame hung out in the East Village amid a new crop of artists and photographers including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Kenny Scharf, Dan Mahoney, Peter Hujar, and Alvin Baltrop.
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At the same time, Frame was making his own body of work, which French critic Gilles Mora and photographer Claude Nori described as “photobiography.” Like Goldin and Armstrong, Frame created a journal of his personal life, one that evokes the warm intimacy of a family photo album. No longer an outsider, Frame was fully immersed among the avant garde but a penchant for mystery and suspense remained in his work, one that becomes all the more poignant in light of the catastrophe that would soon destroy the fragile world he loved.
History is filled with works of art that have survived save one salient point: the name of the person to whom their creation might be attributed. In the 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, British author Virginia Woolf knowingly surmised, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
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Even though it wasn’t until the twentieth century that women began to command the political and cultural capital to demand credit where it was due, their contributions are all too often left out of the pantheon alongside their male counterparts. It is only in recent years that mainstream institutions have begun to center those relegated to the margins of history, and in doing so offer new paradigms by which we may reconsider women’s roles in shaping the world.
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The new exhibition, “Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection”, in Atlanta, brings together 100 works made over the past century, presents a panoply of perspectives and approaches across a wide array of genres including photojournalism, documentary, portraiture, and advertising. Featuring works by Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Sally Mann, Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Zanele Muholi, Sheila Pree Bright, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems, the exhibition explores image making through the female lens.
Tom of Finland, Untitled, c.1973, Tom of Finland Permanent Collection
Those who had the pleasure of meeting Tom of Finland (born Touko Valio Laaksonen, 1920–1991) may have expected to encounter a walking, talking version of his drawings. Instead, they would have been greeter by a gentle soul, whose Finnish upbringing made him a quiet and reserved individual, who would easily slip into the fantasy world of his homoerotic drawings for hours at a time.
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“If you know Finns, and most people don’t, they can be quite quiet,” says Durk Dehner, president of the Tom of Finland Foundation. “When I first went to Finland, Tom set up a cocktail party for me at his apartment. His friends started coming while he was arranging cocktails and preparing hors d’oeuvres. We were all sitting in the living room and nobody was saying a word. I was so uncomfortable, I went into the kitchen and said, ‘When are they going to start talking?’ He said, ‘Give them one more drink and they will,’ and that was the case. Of course six hours later I went into the kitchen and said, ‘When are they going to go home?’ That’s Finns in a nutshell.”
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Although Tom was unassuming, he was confident and determined to create works of art that would empower and inspire gay men at a time when homosexuality – and very the depiction of it – was criminalised, stigmatised, and misrepresented. Tom’s groundbreaking drawings of bikers and leathermen, which he made from photographs now on view in the new exhibition Tom of Finland: The Darkroom, revolutionised the portrayal of gay men forevermore. “He wanted his history to be in his art,” Dehnrer says. And so it was – but still many wish to know, what was Tom of Finland really like? Here his friends, lovers, and models reminisce on the man behind the myth.
Luke A Wright. Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, ALMA Communications, 2021.
“I am a collaborative person,” says Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, founder of ALMA Communications, a New York-based firm specialising in publicity, partnership, and publishing. Its client-list includes Air Jordan and Fotografiska New York, critic and curator Antwaun Sargent, and photographers such as Tyler Mitchell, Andre D. Wagner, and Diana Markosian.
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“My business operates at the intersection of contemporary art, fashion, beauty and social justice,” says Gottlieb-Graham. At just 26, she comfortably combines the language of the digital generation with a politically aware understanding of the power of art in centering previously marginalized groups within an institutional framework.
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Since launching ALMA on 01 January 2020, Gottlieb-Graham has taken on more than 40 projects in the fields of art, photography, book publishing, film, fashion, beauty, and nonprofit. She signs clients for three or six-month contracts, with the aim of building lasting relationships. “When I work with a new client, we’ll sit down and talk about their wish list,” she explains. “I’ll make a strategy, and that will change depending on specific projects or launches. Nothing is cookie-cutter. Everything is personal.”
Andre D. Wagner. Viola Davis and her 10-year daughter Genesis Tennon, for a feature titled Black Americana: A Photo Essay on Love and Pain, Directed by Regina King for W Magazine: The Directors Issue, April 2021.
Growing up in Mayberry, North Carolina, in the 1950s and 60s, artist Mel Odom would sneak out of his room after his parents went to sleep, turn the TV down low, and watch old movies late into the night. Mesmerised by the sleek yet sensuous art deco aesthetic that defined old Hollywood glamour, Odom revelled in the cool sexuality that smoldered under the glimmering surface of these films.
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Intuitively he brought this sensibility to his work as an illustrator, a passion that took root when he was just three or four years old. Born to a mailman and a housewife living in a small town, Odom found solace in drawing his own world. “As an adult I realised whenever there was something traumatic going on in the family or in my life, drawing where was where I would go to exhibit some sense of control,” he tells AnOther. “I would go to my room and draw for hours. My parents understood it was something that meant a great deal to me, so I had lessons from the time I was seven years old.”
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After receiving his first commission in third or fourth grade to draw 36 place cards for a school event, Odom understood he could make money doing what he loved. It’s a passion that he’s pursued throughout his life, one that he reflects back on in the new two-part exhibition, Mel Odom: Hard Stuff, now on view online and at the Tom of Finland Store in Los Angeles. For the exhibition, Odom brings together 100 drawings made between 1975 and 2019 that showcase his wholly original approach to illustration.
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.
As a Baby Boomer coming of age in Massapequa, Long Island, in the 1950s and 1960s,Meryl Meisler enjoyed the picture perfect suburban American childhood. Her days were filled with Girl Scout meetings, piano lessons, twirling practice, and ballet class; on weekends, her family would take trips to New York City to catch a Broadway show. Glamour and theatricality filled her youth, setting the stage for things to come when she moved to Manhattan during the summer of 1975, after receiving her MA in Art from the University of Madison in Wisconsin.
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Twenty-three of age, Meisler arrived in New York just as it was reaching the peak of decadence. The financial collapse of the city (as a result of the explosion in public spending), combined with the Sexual Revolution, the Gay Pride, and Women’s Liberation Movements to create the perfect storm: a playground for a new generation coming of age that could afford to work, live, and party in New York.
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Meisler sublet a room from her cousin Elaine on the Upper West Side, in Manhattan. “I fell right in,” she remembers. “I was freelancing as an illustrator, making sporadic money, and photographing. I set up a darkroom in the laundry room and that was that. I loved meeting different kinds of people from different backgrounds. My cousins had a gallery in East Harlem that brought together poets, artists, and musicians of all ages. Elaine’s older sister, Barbara, was friends with journalist Betty Friedan and all the famous feminists of the day. I was going to parties with movers and groovers, then out dancing at a Latin club. I felt at home. Whoever I was, this was where I belonged.”
