Posts from the “Women” Category

Women War Photographers: From Lee Miller to Anja Neidringhaus

Posted on September 26, 2019

Photo: © Gerda Taro, “Republican Militiawoman training on the beach outside Barcelona, Spain, August 1936”. © International Center of Photography,

The most famous images of war are largely shot by men: images of stoicism, heroicism, drama, and tragedy often focusing on the male participants. Over the past century, while women war photographers have slowly made their mark, they have not been outwardly recognized for their efforts until now.

In Women War Photographers: From Lee Miller to Anja Neidringhaus (September 2019, Prestel), editors Anne-Marie Beckmann and Felicity Korn showcase the contributions of eight women who have risked their lives to get the picture.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name originating at Kunstpalast in Germany, the book features the work of Gerda Taro, Lee Miller, Catherine Leroy, Susan Meiselas, Carolyn Cole, Françoise Demulder, Christine Spengler, and Anja Niedringhaus.

Read the Full Story at The Luupe

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Photography, Women

Alex Prager: Play The Wind

Posted on September 10, 2019

Big West, 2019. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Alex Prager’s lifelong love affair with Los Angeles has informed the creation of her art since the beginning of her career, when she went around the city with a camera and a friend making photographs guerilla-style – no permits and all heart.

The city as muse is an archetype that runs throughout art history, from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris to Keith Haring’s New York City, providing a setting just as alive as its inhabitants. It is a sensation evident in every breath of Play The Wind, Prager’s new exhibition of film, photography, and sculpture.

“This is the most autobiographical work I have ever done,” Prager says, a statement that reveals itself figuratively and literally throughout the show. Upon entering the gallery, you are greeted by the figure of ‘Big West’, a towering sculpture of a woman decked out in her freshest Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, whose message is simply: ‘Welcome Home’.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Play the Wind Film Still #2, 2019. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

Categories: AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

April Dawn Alison

Posted on August 8, 2019

“Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life,” the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez knowingly remarked, reminding us that what we see and what we believe is often just an illusion of sorts. Beneath it all, lays the true self, an identity we often keep hidden from the world — including ourselves.

But there are those who dare to delve into the person they are we no one else is there to witness it. These moments are a manifestation of something beyond the person others see: it is the self that exists within our deepest being. To record this, to document it, to create evidence of that which exists for no one else — this takes nerve. It is here our story of April Dawn Alison begins.

In 2017, a painter named Andrew Masulio donated an archive of over 8,000 Polaroids to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) — previously unseen self-portraits of April Dawn Alison, the female persona of Alan Schaefer (1941-2008), an Oakland-based photographer who lived in the world as a man. The archive reveals to us a fully-realized secret life beautifully revealed in the exquisite monograph, April Dawn Alison (MACK), selections from which are currently on view at SFMOMA through December 1, 2019.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Niki de Saint Phalle: The Female Gaze in a World of Men

Posted on May 30, 2019

Vogue 1971. Portrait of artist Niki de Saint-Phalle painting one of her large Nanas sculptures in her studio outside Paris. (Photo by Jack Nisberg/Condé Nast via Getty Images)

“Very early on I decided to become a heroine,” said artist, filmmaker, and feminist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002). “What did it matter who I would be? The main thing was that it had to be difficult, grandiose, exciting.

De Saint Phalle shaped her destiny from a young age after realizing those closest to her would destroy her if they could. Physically abused by her mother and sexually abused by her father as a child, de Saint Phalle refused to become a victim of the petty bourgeois who raised her to be a housewife and mother.

“I could not identify with Mother, our grandmothers, our aunts, or Mother’s friends. Their territory seemed too restrictive for my taste,” de Saint Phalle said. “I want the world that belonged to men… Very early I got the message that men had the power and I wanted it. Yes, I would steal their fire from them.”

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Niki de Saint Phalle (kneeling) by Dennis Hopper, 1963

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Jacques Marie Mage, Painting, Women

Warhol’s Women

Posted on May 7, 2019

Andy Warhol. Judy Garland (Multicolor), 1978. Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm) © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander

Andy Warhol turned appropriation into fine art, perhaps the most profoundly American aspect of his practice. Where Dada subverted the known, Warhol exalted it, creating a pantheon of iconography that charmed, rather than challenged, the status quo – while simultaneously being edgy enough to avoid becoming camp, corn, or schmaltz.

Warhol is America looking back at itself, with a nod and a wink, taking art in the age of mass reproduction to the next level when he began making silkscreens in August 1962. Marilyn Monroe’s tragic death sparked it off. She was his first, perhaps his greatest, and far from his last, as he transformed The Factory into an art world machine.

Andy’s Marilyn is a Mona Lisa of sorts — her many incarnations and moods a psychic x-ray into the person none of us ever knew. Using a publicity photography by Gene Korman for the 1953 film Niagara, Warhol took the manufactured image and remade it into something beautiful and grotesque.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Andy Warhol. Judy Garland (Multicolor), 1978 Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm) © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tim Nighswander

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Lebohang Kganye: Ke Lefa Laka – Her-story (2012-2013)

Posted on May 3, 2019

South African artist Lebohang Kganye was just 20 years old when her mother died in 2010. A couple of years later, Kganye was looking through family photo albums in their Johannesburg home and realised that many of the clothes her mother wore in the pictures were still in her wardrobe.

Kganye became intrigued. Most of the snapshots were made before she was born in 1990, at her grandmother’s house and on the lawn. Up until then, Kganye explains, the photos and albums were never really all that significant. “I’d go to my grandmother’s house and we’d look at the photos every now and then, and laugh about how they’d aged, the different periods they had gone through,” she says. “We had never gone over individual photos, the history, and the narrative of each.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, Africa, Art, Huck, Photography, Women

Bieke Depoorter: Agata

Posted on March 20, 2019

Bieke Depoorter. Agata. Beirut. Lebanon. August 2, 2018. © Bieke Depoorter | Magnum Photos

Seeing is believing, and therein lies the rub when picking up the camera and taking photographs. “I don’t think pictures tell the truth,” Bieke Depoorter says, recognizing the fundamental paradox of art. Representation is not the thing itself, but a world all its own.

Because of this belief, Depoorter takes exquisite care of those she meets. “I want to be with people first as a person, then as a photographer,” she says. “I am really questioning the medium. Why I am doing it? How do you use the people you are photographing, and how can we collaborate with them? How can one photograph or work with ‘the other’ without putting oneself above them?”

These questions are at the heart of Agata, a project Depoorter started in November 2017, as part of the Magnum Paris Live Lab. The Belgian photographer remembers the moment as a dark period when feelings of doubt dragged her spirit down.

But then, one night, a lot changed. Depoorter was invited to visit an infamous strip club in Paris’ Pigalle district. “They gave me champagne all night long. I think they wanted me to strip there,” she recalls. “I really liked the atmosphere. There were not a lot of men. It was a very strange place. The bouncer told me, ‘There’s a girl here. I think you will like her.’”

Read the Full Story at Magnum Photos

Bieke Depoorter. Agata. Paris. France. November 2, 2017. © Bieke Depoorter | Magnum Photos

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Magnum Photos, Photography, Women

Laurie Simmons: Big Camera, Little Camera

Posted on March 17, 2019

Long House (Orange and Green Lounge), 2004. © Laurie Simmons

Have you ever wanted to step into a picture and live in that world? It’s a feeling American artist Laurie Simmons knows very well. “When I was a child, I had a strong desire to enter into the drawings in the storybook,” she says. “I can remember sitting on my mother’s lap and feeling this frustration. I wanted to get inside and walk around with the characters.”

As a member of The Pictures Generation (a group of American artists from the 70s who critically analysed the media), Simmons explores the subject of womanhood through enigmatic images that subvert stereotypes, forcing viewers to question their own assumptions.

40 years in the making, Laurie Simmons: Big Camera, Little Camera, is a major retrospective exhibition and book exploring the construction of gender, identity, reality, and illusion – as well as the photograph itself. Her work stages scenes that become poems, metaphors, and meditations on much larger ideas.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography, Women

Gail Buckland: A Life in Photography

Posted on March 5, 2019

Author. Educator. Curator. Gail Buckland’s life in photography is as vast as the medium itself, revealing a love that was born of a dream. Buckland remembers how it all began.

“I wanted to be a journalist. My first choice school was Northwestern, the Medill School of Journalism. After she was accepted, my family drove out to visit the school. We drove a thousand miles, and the first thing my parents wanted to find was the Hillel on campus. We kept walking around campus, passing blonde, blue-eyed people the entire way,” she says.

“On the drive from Evanston, Illinois, back to New York, my parents questioned my choice. ‘Why not go to a Liberal Arts school here?” So I went to the University of Rochester. I never thought about photography. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Then, my freshman year I had a dream. I woke up and I wanted to be a photographer. And that was it.”

From that first moment of unconscious clarity, Buckland’s life has lead her along a path, one that has allowed her to pursue her passion for the medium. Like so many who dedicate themselves to the photograph. Buckland was lead to the form by a need to see more than her immediate senses would allow.

“I remember one time at AIPAD, I was leading a panel discussion with Ralph Gibson, Eva Rubenstein, Duane Michals, and a few other people. I asked them, ‘What was the one photograph you saw that changed the course of your life?’” she says.

“At the end, someone asked me to answer my own question. I remember where I was. I went to MoMA and saw Edward Weston’s photograph of a cabbage leaf. I never saw a cabbage lead look like that, and I had been eating cabbage my entire life. It was a revelation. I need a way of seeing more deeply because my own eyes aren’t doing it for me.”

It was here, in this recognition that not only her eyes but also her emotions and her own personal photography would be aided by a study of the masters of the medium. Buckland began to consider the photograph as more than a work of art and a record of the world, but a tool to help herself and others see life more clearly.

“In school I studied the the metaphysical and psychological realms of photography influenced by the teachings of Minor White and Roy Hattersley, and I was also taking photos to be like Dorothea Lange. I was idealistic. I wanted to change the world in the 1960s, like many others. I was very influenced by Cornell Capa’s ‘Concerned Photographer’ shows at Riverside Museum. Capa used that phrase to describe the position some adopted with their work, using photography as a tool for humanitarian service to educate and change the world,” Buckland explains.

“Once I latched on, I absorbed as much as I could. But I did not want to live in this country under Nixon. I was very radicalized at this time and I wanted to get out before I planted a bomb or did something I would later regret. I went to Manchester, England. I had been printing photographs I had taken the summer before on a trip to Crete with a group artists and I had no one to show them to so I looked up Bill Brandt, who was the only photographer I knew in England. He agreed to see me, saying, ‘I know what it means to be a photographer in a foreign country.’ We spent hours going over my prints. I was an undergraduate and Brandt was enormously generous.”

Brandt gave Buckland invaluable advice. He let her know she could crop her prints. By giving her full authority over her work, Brandt let her know she did not, as a creative mind, need to follow the rules of the establishment. Buckland was free to set her own path, and so she began to explore her options.

Buckland recalls, “I made the transition into curatorial work because I needed to earn a living. At that time, no one was doing anything with old photographs in the UK, and that combined my interests in photography and history. The Royal Photographic Society was hiring part time, and the Arts Council was also hiring part time. So I worked at both.”

In spring 1972, the Victoria & Albert Museum hosted “From Today Painting is Dead.” The title of the show is from a quote attributed to French painter Paul Delaroche, probably made in 1839 when the artist saw [heard about? Please check] examples of the Daguerreotype.

“The exhibition at the V&A was the biggest and most important photography show in the UK in 50 years. I went to Windsor and chose photographs from the Queen’s collection and to many other major collections. I also compiled the 1000 entries , written mostly by the curator of the exhibition Dr. David Thomas, for the catalogue,” Buckland notes.

“At the same time I was working at the Royal Photographic Society, cataloguing the collection. I catalogued 350 Roger Fentons and 600 Julia Margaret Camerons [GB: check numbers]. I eventually became the Curator of the Royal Photographic Society, and then I later left to concentrate on the work of William Henry Fox Talbot.”

Fox Talbot was a British savant and photography pioneer who invented the photogenic drawing and calotype process the foundation of photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Buckland spent seven years on the research, which resulted in the landmark exhibition, “Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography” at the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1979 and book of the same name.

“Photography has allowed me to explore all areas of life. In my day, photography was a specialty unto itself. I like to say I’ve done everything from Fox Talbot to Rock and Roll,” she adds in reference to “Who Shot Rock and Roll,” a ten-museum exhibition tour and book that featured works by photographers from Richard Avedon, Albert Watson, and David LaChapelle to Dennis Hopper, Andreas Gursky, and Ryan McGinley.

The author of fourteen books on photography and history, Buckland has collaborated with luminaries including Cecil Beaton, Sir Harold Evans, and Al Gore in her illustrious career. She remembers when Beaton put her name as large on the cover as his own and told her, “We are partners in this project.” From those early heady days in England, Buckland has come full circle, now working in Brooklyn on a new exhibition and book of photography for 2016.

“I like looking at the pictures. I don’t like making the final selection. You know you have to do it, but I prefer the actual research and the pleasure of entering someone else’s world. It is like the end of Ulysses: ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ The act of creation is such an affirmation. I just feel more alive from it. I respond to art in the deepest, most profound way. I can’t imagine my life without it,” she says.

“Now at my age, I’m not interested in playing it safe. I am not curating for my colleagues. You can have popular and critical success: you don’t have to sacrifice one for the others. It’s not just about celebrating established people; it’s about taking risks too. My mission now is to break down the hierarchies and enlarge the field.

“Photography is the great democratic art. A judicious use of words can help enrich an experience. It’s difficult to write a book. After fourteen books, it doesn’t get any easier. It’s torture—but it helps me understand what I think, and how to be clear about my thoughts, about what is now forty years of working in – and teaching – photography.”

Categories: Photography, Women

Patty Carroll: Domestic Demise

Posted on January 18, 2019

Over the past four years, American artist Patty Carroll’s life has been in a state of flux as the question of home has had her turned upside down. While managing a move from her primary residence in Indiana to a new apartment and studio in Chicago, Carroll was simultaneously doing renovations on a place in Miami.

“Home became an overwhelming situation of ‘What the hell am I doing?’ and ‘Where am I today?’” Carroll laughs. “It was more than I could deal with. Houses were doing me in.”

But rather than go under, Carroll transformed the sensation of chaos and impending doom into a series of photographs entitled Domestic Demise, which opens at Catherine Couturier Gallery in Houston on January 19.

The latest chapter in Carroll’s ongoing Anonymous Women project, Domestic Demise takes the game of Cluedo as its departure point, staging lavishly decorated scenes inside rooms like the Conservatory, Library, Kitchen, and Hall. Here, the titular ‘Anonymous Woman’ meets her untimely end. The moral of the story: The perfect home is a catastrophe in the making – but at least you will go out in style. You might even say, “Death becomes her”.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me

Posted on January 2, 2019

Mickalene Thomas. Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher, 2009. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel. 82 x 72 in. Private collection

Mickalene Thomas. Afro Goddess Looking Forward , 2015. Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel. 60 x 96 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Look, but don’t touch, just imagine how it feels as your eyes caress the surface of a work of art by Mickalene Thomas. Painting, photograph, and collage commingle effortlessly as sequins, rhinestones, and glitter every hue imaginable make their way across the picture plane. Spellbound, you stand there and breathe it all in, taking refuge in the infinite glory of the sublime.

At the heart of Thomas’s work is an intoxicating sense of intimacy, a sensual embrace that that seems to embody the very air we breathe. One is immediately seduced and disarmed, overwhelmed by the feeling of being welcomed into this milieu, a space that suggests a boudoir filled with velvet and lace, with veils that cover and reveal, of secrets to be shared.

At its very center, it is about relationship, about the dynamic that exists between artist, model, and viewer that dances into the timeless sunsets of an infinite land. It is rooted in the connections Thomas holds with the women who inspire her to create a wonderland.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Mickalene Thomas. Racquel: Come to Me, 2017. Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, oil stick, and glitter on wood panel. 108 x 84 in. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Women