Photographer Henry Horenstein remembers the 1970s well: “When we were in our early 20s, we didn’t have that much to do. I’d go out, drink beers with friends, I had girlfriends (or tried to get them), and I had a dog. I had a personal life. I don’t have that anymore. Life is too busy.”
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A student of Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White, Horenstein has been making photographs since the early 1970s. He observes, “Over the years I’ve photographed many different types of subjects, even animals and the human form. But I’ve always returned to my roots as a documentary photographer. More than anything, I like a good story. And I try to tell one in a direct way, with humor and a punch line, if possible.”
Arlene Gottfried is a New York original. Hailing from Brooklyn, Ms. Gottfried moved from Coney Island to Crown Heights when she was just ten years old, living in the area during the 1960s, as white flight and Civil Rights changed the face of the neighborhood. In the 1970s, Gottfried lived in the Village while studying photography at F.I.T. After her father had died, the family moved to the Lower East Side. Back then, it was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, rich in traditions native to the island, which, when combined with local influence, produced its very own style: Nuyorican.
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Nuyorican is rhythms, horns, strings, and winds—or it is simply spoken word filling the air. Best exemplified by Miguel Piñero’s Nuyorican Poet’s Café, it is a state of mind in the place to be. Nuyorican is a street vendor selling fried codfish fritters and fireworks on July 4, announcing his wares as he made his way up and down the street shouting: “Bacalaitos y Fireworks!”
Artwork: Attributed to Bears Heart (Nokkoist) b. 1851 d. 1882. Southern Cheyenne. Executed at Fort Marion ca. 1875-78. watercolour, graphite and coloured pencil on paper, width: 11 1/4”, height: 8 5/8”.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the American West was transformed into a mythical landscape, a wide open frontier of flora and fauna populated by a native race that was all that stood between newly-arriving American dreams of Manifest Destiny. Many had the idea that they were pioneers, making a “discovery,” and in doing so a new era came to pass. Herds of buffalo were systematically exterminated and native peoples were forced on to reservations. In brief, America effectively began to erase itself.
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Historically speaking, the term “Plains Indians” refers to tribal groups originating in the vast grasslands lying between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfoot, and Comanche, among others. Rich with traditions of oral and pictorial histories, the Plains Indians told their story as the environment demanded. The earliest records show petroglyphs and pictographic painting on rock walls; later they embellished buffalo hide tipi covers, shields, and personal garments with scenes bearing witness to major events. After the buffalo disappeared, they began to work on muslin, canvas, and commercial prepared hides, as well as on pages from lined accounting ledgers made widely available to Plains Indians peoples in the reservation period, roughly after 1860.
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A selection of these artworks is currently on view at Donald Ellis Gallery, New York (Booth #238). This is the gallery’s first time at The Armory Show, and is indicative of an rising interest of the Plains Indian ledger drawings (1865-1900). Ellis, who established his gallery in 1976, is considered the foremost dealer of historical Native American art. He remembers his first encounter with ledger drawings was in 1996 at and exhibition at the Drawing Center. He recalls, “It set New York on its ear. People flipped out. That planted the seed. I consider this one of the most important aspects of American art history.”
Chris “Daze” Ellis, The Odyssey, 2015, Oil and spray paint on canvas, Courtesy of the Artist
The New York City of Chris “Daze” Ellis’s world is a beautiful, hypnotic siren singing the softest of lullabies or just as quickly drop a beat and rhyme on top of it. She’s demanding, but she gives as good as she gets. She’s the queen befitting a king, and has found herself the subject of Chris “Daze” Ellis: The City is My Muse, on view at the Museum of New York, NY, now through May 1, 2016. Ellis observes, “This exhibition is a testament to my love affair with New York as my muse. It is an endless source of subject matter and an inspiration for many years. A muse is someone or something that captures your attention and imagination in a way that presents endless possibilities. New York is like that for me.”
“I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do,” Andy Warhol said. His dedication to the creation of beauty in both the glamorous and the commonplace forever changed the course of art, culture, and communication. He worked in both commercial and fine arts, always able to build a bridge between these two worlds and he used the book as a vehicle throughout his career. In celebration of his works, the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, presents Warhol by the Book, a four-decade retrospective on view now through May 5, 2016.
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Featuring more than 130 objects dating back to his student days, the exhibition includes the only surviving project from the 1940s. It also features a remarkable collection of drawings, screen prints, photographs, self-published books, children’s books, photography books, text-based books, unique books, archival material; and his much-sought-after dust jacket designs. To call Warhol prolific would be an understatement. He simply was a one-man factory who aptly advised, “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”
Artist. Editor. Revolutionary. Anton Perich has been exploring the boundaries of art and culture since the late 1960s, when he lived in Paris. Upon arriving in New York City in 1970, Perich charted his own path that included, among many things, the invention of an electric photography machine in 1977–87. The work was truly ahead of its time, as the mechanization of the work of art had not yet been embraced by the world. Perich speaks with Crave about ingenious invention, one which prefigured the very era in which we live.
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What was the inspiration for electric photography?
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Anton Perich: The inspiration was TV. The old-fashion cathode tube. I didn’t grow up with television in former Yugoslavia. I watched some in Paris where I was in the late ‘60s. It was magic, French TV with sensual overtones, with sexual undertones. In the ‘70s, before building the painting machine, I did lots of photography and video. I really loved the video image, and I wanted to paint and create photography with electricity. I realized then that the future of image would be electric and not chemical. Immediately after completion of the machine I produced some very large photographs with the machine. About 5×6 feet, ink on paper. Looking at them today, they definitely told the future of the electric image. They look like they were made with Photoshop today, and not 35 years ago.
In 1963, the Kamoinge Workshop produced their first portfolio of photographs taken by members who made up the group. The portfolio included a statement that read: “The Kamoinge Workshop represents fifteen black photographers whose creative objectives reflect a concern for truth about the world, about society and about themselves.” Accompanying that were the words of member Louis Draper, who elegantly wrote: “Hot breath steaming from black tenements, frustrated window panes reflecting the eyes of the sun, breathing musical songs of the living.”
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A collective was born. The word Kamoinge is derived from the Gikuyu language of Kenya. Translated literally, it means “a group of people acting together.” This spirit of camaraderie and family suffused the development of the group, which included Roy DeCarava, Anthony Barboza, Louis Draper, and Shawn Walker. Early meetings were held in DeCarava’s midtown Manhattan loft. The following year, they rented a gallery in Harlem on Strivers Row, where they held meetings and hosted exhibitions. When the gallery closed, they moved the meetings to other members’ homes in the city, keeping their bonds intact throughout the years.
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In 2004, founding member Anthony Barboza was selected President, and set out a course to create a photography book showcasing the group’s legacy. Together with fellow member Herb Robinson, Barboza has edited Timeless: The Photographs of Kamoinge (Schiffer). Featuring more than 280 photographs taken over fifty years, Timeless is an extraordinary collection of work that reminds us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
In the United States, a person who has been arrested is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The burden of proof is on the prosecution; they must provide compelling evidence that shows the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. In the interim, the accused may be entitled to release from jail if granted bail by the court. It is here that the bail bondsman finds work. The bail bondsmen have a standing security agreement with local court official, in which the post an irrevocable bond for the defendant to appear in court. If they fail to do so, the bondsman can legally become a bounty hunter for the state and deliver fugitives to the jurisdiction of the court to recover the money paid under the bond. Bondsmen generally charge a fee of 10% for a state charge, and 15% for a federal bond.
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The practice of bounty hunting is illegal in most countries, but in the United States it is as homegrown as the Second Amendment. The presumption of innocence protects everyone, including criminals who might take advantage of the opportunity to run. In Band Bond (Fabrica), Italian photographer Clara Vannucci goes inside the New York City system, working alongside the bondsmen themselves, traveling through Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan—even crossing state lines to track a fugitive to Baltimore, Maryland.
Marcia Resnick was there, at the center of it all, in a burst of light and flame that set New York on edge with a new movement in art, music, literature and film. Her new book Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977-1982 with text by Victor Bockris (Insight Editions) features photographs of the enfants terribles of the time, people like Johnny Thunders, James Brown, William S. Burroughs, John Waters, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, men who did it their way like my man Frank Sinatra said. Marcia Resnick shares her thoughts and her photos in a conversation here.
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I love how you speak about creation of Re-visions as a way to demystify your past. Would you say the same is true of Punks, Poets & Provocateurs, or was the creation of the book driven by something else you wanted to explore about life?
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Marcia Resnick: In Re-visions I was confronting myself as the subject which I understood least and most wanted to understand. The next subject in line for such consideration was the male species, specifically my relationship to men, especially my attraction to “Bad Boys.”
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I like to think a portrait of the artist is always their subject: who they choose, the energy the two create, the frames they select—all of this is a story about the photographer themselves. When looking through Punks, Poets & Provocateurs I see a multi-faceted gem as filtered through the lens of the masculinity at a specific time and place. As a woman looking at men, what do you find most compelling about them? Is it something you see in yourself, something you aspire towards, or a mix of the two?
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Definitely a mix of the two. As I said in the book “Bad Boys can be at once formidable and endearing. Being ‘bad’ also makes people attractive, especially to the opposite sex.” I think most people are intrigued by danger regardless of what their sex is. Living on the edge is dangerous and Punk Rock was the new alternative music. The writers and provocateurs I photographed also went against the grain, making considerable innovations in their respective artistic endeavors.
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The Bad Boy archetype is an American ideal: the rebel driven by profound individualism—and maybe something else. In some ways it sums up the ethos of punk: fuck the system D.I.Y. style. Looking back, I’m a little shocked by how it doesn’t seem that long ago but it seems so very far away. What would you say made the era you were photographing so ripe for rebellion?
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In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s people could afford to live in NYC. Everyone was challenging what was expected of them because the counterculture was still ripe. Rock musicians and artists alike were graduating from art schools. Painters were making films. Writers were doing performance art. Sculptors were doing installations. Artists were acting in films, making music and generally collaborating with each other. People were also more sexually unconstrained. This climate ended when Aids and the atmosphere of paranoia began to stymie the nightlife.
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Punks, Poets & Provocateurs is an incredible compendium of the scene, very potent and resonant with a sense of energy that has, in some ways, all but disappeared. Looking back at your photographs, what mist resonates with you after all these years? What do you see in your photographs that you can only see now, with the benefit of hindsight?
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I realize how fortunate I was to experience NYC and life in general when I did. Though I embrace the extraordinary technological advances that have come in time, people today communicate through electronic media. Back then, the world seemed smaller, everyone knew who their friends were and people actually got together to talk and exchange ideas.
Julio Larraz describes the vivid images that he paints as visions that come to him as dreams he sees during the day. These images may come on and off over the years, though some, Larraz reveals, “are recent ones, other are long-time friends. There is a mixture of it. I don’t like to do theme works. I prefer to take something and see it from fresh eyes, rather than see it forever.”
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The result is a distinctive mélange of dynamic imagery that makes for an incredible collection of work, offering something for everyone in a delightful compendium of endless innovation. From seascapes, landscapes, and aerial views to still lifes, imaginary portraits, and other figurative works, the work of Julio Larraz takes us into a fantastic world brimming with an elegance, grace, wit, and charm.
Ed Hamilton wrote Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York’s Rebel Mecca (DeCapo Press, 2007), one of my favorite books in quite some time, the perfect compendium of secret histories and New York noir happening inside one of the city’s most haunting landmarks. I was swept away by the stories, and by his prose, feeling transported into another world, a nether world, a place filled with the curious and curiouser.
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Hamilton has returned to his beloved city with a new book, The Chintz Age (Cervena Barva Press), a collection of seven stories and a novella that brings us into the hear and now. Everything is gentrifying at an eerily rapid pace, and the old school is being pushed out, rubbed out, and erased. Hamilton’s new book brings back the great characters of old York, the punks, hippies, beatniks, squatters, junkies, derelicts, and anarchists that made this city legendary. Give it up for Ed Hamilton!
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Miss Rosen:So much of New York has changed radically in the past two decades. I count the Disney Story in Times Square as the harbinger of the 21st century capitalism that has changed the fabric of the city so radically. Please talk about how the changes to the city gave birth to The Chintz Age?
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Ed Hamilton: There once was a place for everybody in the city, for all types of people from every social class—artists, activists, club kids, rappers, squatters, immigrants, bums, even stockbrokers—that’s what made NYC so great. There was also such a thing as tolerance. You might not like all these different sorts of people, but nobody was forcing you to go where they lived or worked. Everybody knew that the strippers and the hookers lurked in Times Square, and if that sort of thing offended you, you could easily just avoid the area. But then somebody (developers, promoters of tourism, with Giuliani as their hit man) decided there was money to be made by a bit of social engineering, and so they set out to remake NYC in their own narrow minded suburban image.
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The first to go were (no surprise here) the least powerful; and no one complained much when a handful of sex workers and pornographers were harassed and driven out of town. (This backfired a bit, by the way: now the sex shops are more dispersed, with some of them in very upscale neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Chelsea.) No one complained too much when Giuliani virtually criminalized the homeless, either.
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After that, there was no stopping the tide: we had policies designed to kick the poor out of their projects (they proved more resilient than perhaps expected, and the latest idea, backed by DeBlasio, is to take away their green space and build right over the top of them); then the working and middle classes were targeted; and now even the upper middle class and rich (outside the 1% of speculators and oil millionaires) are finding it hard to afford a decent place in the city (and increasingly boring and not worth it anyway if they have to eat at Olive Garden and shop at 7-11).
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My wife, Debbie, and I came to the city in 1995, so the change was already well under way—and, though we deplored the gentrification, we were probably a part of it, in a way. My first book, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, chronicles the relatively gentle, gradual gentrification of the hotel we’ve lived in for twenty years. But that pales in comparison to the hyper-gentrification that has swept the city in the past few years (and which I think is coming to be seen as in almost nobody’s interest). When developers took over the Chelsea in 2007, ousting the Bard family who had run the hotel for 60 years, Debbie and I, together with a handful of other tenants, decided to resist the takeover. We won many battles, but ultimately lost the war: about seventy tenants (virtually all of them people in the arts) were ultimately evicted, and much of the historic hotel has been gutted.
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The New Yorkers you describe, their world views and way of life, now seem so long ago and so far away, showing how quickly New York can change. Can you talk about what your characters all share that makes them New Yorkers of the old school?
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New York, of course, is a city of transplants, as most of its residents seem to come from elsewhere. My characters are, for the most part, regular, middle class people who have fled the suburbs (which should be understood less as an actual place than as a state of mind, or perhaps as a symbol of the boring, the mundane), seeking something better. They are all involved in creative fields, and share a sense of idealism and possibility. They feel like they are part of a larger whole, and are carrying on a tradition that is more important that their individual selves.
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For Dave, in the story “Fat Hippie Books,” this tradition is defined in terms of Bohemianism, a life lived in service to art and humanity, rather than strictly for the pursuit of money and comfort; for Martha, in the title story, it’s a somewhat different tradition of struggle, activism, and resistance to oppression. These are characters that are proud to be New Yorkers; they feel that it gives them an aura of toughness and uniqueness that sets them apart from those who were satisfied with a desk job in the office park and a two-car garage. And I think, also, that they share a sense that they are just borrowing the city, leasing it on a temporary basis to inspire their art and to reinvent themselves. They are under no misconceptions that they own the city, or can defeat it. But they do want to leave it (at least a little bit) better than when they found it. They share a deep respect for those who went before them as artists and activists in New York, as well as an almost paternal concern for who will follow in their footsteps. They feel like they are caretakers of the city, nurturing and passing on a grand tradition that they hope will outlive them, and perhaps even live forever.
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The tough part of this question is what makes these relative “old-timers” (really just slightly weary, though still energetic middle aged people) different from the newer sort of New Yorkers. That question is central to The Chintz Age, as many of my characters struggle with that question as well. And I’m not talking about the sort of sociopathic developers and speculators who run roughshod over everything; they’ve always been around, and it’s just that politicians have given them free rein lately. I’m more interested in the type of New Yorker made possible by the real estate boom, what Jeremiah Moss, on his blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York calls “Yunnies” or young urban narcissists. You know the type: be they hipsters with their noses buried in their I-phones, or rampaging soccer moms pushing double-wide strollers, they’ll take you out without batting an eyelash—because, in fact, they don’t even see you, and you don’t even exist for them. Theo, in “Plagiarism” has an encounter with this type of person, somebody whose smug, me-first attitude allows her to steal, without compunction, another writer’s work. What flabbergasts Theo the most is that Kristabelle Tweed, a fellow writer, after all, doesn’t even give a thought to her own artistic integrity, but is so self-involved that all that’s important is success and the glorification of herself by whatever means.
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But were prior generations really any different from the new people? The older folk were ambitious too, that’s for sure, and they stepped on people as well, especially the successful ones. Maybe the Yunnies just have their own ways of doing things. So I’m afraid I don’t have a definitive answer to this question (and none of my characters do either, and that’s a part of their existential dilemma). When I’m in a charitable mood, I would like to give the newcomers the benefit of the doubt, and I try to explore their concerns with several of the younger characters in my book. A notable example is the young self-involved writer, James McKinley, in “Highline/Highlife,” whose attempt to make himself a master of the literary universe—elevating himself, Godlike, over the city in his glass-and-steel tower, but mostly in his vivid imagination—backfires disastrously, as he succumbs to paranoia and jealousy.
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Legends of the Chelsea Hotel was one of my favorite books of 2007. I’m so inspired to go back and read it again. The Chintz Age is a wonderful follow up volume to that book. I love how your work reminds me of the phrase, “8 millions stories in the naked city.” Can you speak to how these two books inform each other about the changing face of New York?
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While I tried to make the stories in Legends as grittily realistic as possible, there is a romantic element to most of them as well (which is part of what I meant by calling the stories and the people “legends”). Even as I document the downfalls of junkies and prostitutes and self-destructive artists, I am also, in a way, celebrating their lives, saying that maybe it’s better to burn the candle at both ends than simply to punch the clock until you finally check out. This duality led to some interesting comments from my fellow residents: on the one hand I had people chastising me for promoting the a return to the bad ol’ pre-gentrification hotel (“I lived here in those days, and sometimes I was scared to go into the hallway,” one man told me), while other critics damned me for demonizing drug users (“Junkies are people, too, you know”).
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I’ve continued this tradition, but perhaps taken it even more into the romantic, legendary direction—The Chintz Age is, after all, fiction, so I have a bit more leeway. I describe the stories on the back of the book as “grittily realistic fairy tales,” and while “fairy tales” may be the wrong word (it almost certainly is, as it implies a supernatural element), and I while thought about using “myths” or “folk tales” or even “legends” once again, what I wanted to express was that, even in certain rather grim situations, where the challenges of a hard core deterministic, materialistic city daunt and overwhelm us, grinding us to bits, there is still the possibility of transcendence and redemption—both for my characters, and, hopefully, for myself.