Marilyn Monroe by Milton H. Green

 

Marilyn Monroe, 1954
Photographies by Milton Greene 

Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith: ‘If you don’t come, I’ll be with a guy’

 

Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, at a Kansas City club in 1978.ALLAN TANNENBAUM (POLARIS/CONTACTOPHOTO)

Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith: ‘If you don’t come, I’ll be with a guy’

‘Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?’ she asked the artist, hoping to escape another man. That night, they stopped pretending. They shared a dazzling love story, marked by excess and art

Terry O'Neill / Stars II

 

Raquel Welch
Foto de Terry O´Neill

Terry O’Neill 

STARS II

Judi Dench, 2005.TERRY O'NEILL

 

‘A reflection of who she was’: major Diane Arbus exhibition hits New York

An expansive survey of the photographer’s work lands at the Park Avenue Armory, offering an unusually assembled look at her defining images

Veronica Esposito

Tue 3 Jun 2025 18.20 BST

Constellation, the enormous new show of photographer Diane Arbus’s life work, aims to present the artist as no one has seen her before. Embracing randomness, this exhibition of a full set of 454 master prints from Arbus’s only authorized printmaker, Neil Selkirk, tries its best to give audiences a completely unstructured presentation of the photos.

Bruce Davidson

Paul Newman
Connecticut, 2000l
Photo by Bruce Davidson

Bruce Davidson

"If I am looking for a story at all, it is in my relationship to the subject — the story that tells me, rather than that I tell."

- Bruce Davidson

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1933, Bruce Davidson won first prize in the Kodak National High School Competition at the age of 16. He went on to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University.

 

Peter Hujar, Ray Johnson, 1975. ©The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Categories

REVIEWS

Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death | Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, Venice, Italy

BY DAVID E. LITTLE, JULY 1, 2024 

Organized by Grace Deveney, the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago, with the Peter Hujar Foundation, this exhibition was one of 30-plus collateral events surrounding the 60th Venice Biennale. Drawn from the only photography book published during the artist’s lifetime, Portraits in Life and Death (Da Capo Press, 1976), these 41 photographs juxtapose two groups of images created a decade apart: mummified bodies from the Palermo Catacombs, photographed in 1963 when Hujar traveled to Italy on a Fulbright grant, and his better-known portraits of artists, writers, and performers photographed in New York in the early 1970s. On view through November 24, the exhibition is installed in four human-size rooms connected to the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, a 14th-century church near San Marco.

 

Peter Hujar, Christopher Street Pier (2), 1976. ©Peter Hujar Archive, LLC,; Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery and Fraenkel Gallery

Categories

FEATURE

Peter Hujar’s Photographic Truth

BY MARK ALICE DURANT, JANUARY 23, 2018 

If asked to name a New York photographer in the 1970s and ‘80s, who employed a medium-format camera to make elegant black-and-white portraits and homoerotic figure studies, more than likely you would think of Robert Mapplethorpe. This is not surprising, since Mapplethorpe achieved meteoric success and celebrity in his lifetime. Yet Peter Hujar was there first, making intensely intimate and exacting photographs of lovers, friends, and artistic heroes for more than a decade before Mapplethorpe picked up a camera. Hujar and Mapplethorpe inevitably knew each other, and everyone in the downtown scene, it seems, knew them. They travelled, at least initially, in similar social circles, and photographed many of the same people. So pervasive were their influence and reputations that the photographer Josef Astor recalls that when he moved to New York in the late 1970s as a young, gay, aspiring photographer, he was expected to choose between an allegiance to Robert Mapplethorpe’s camp or Peter Hujar’s. Despite their commonalities, they created very distinct bodies of work, and their rivalry was not always friendly. Hujar considered Mapplethorpe’s images too calculated and sanitized, dismissing the work by observing, “Well, it looks like art.”

‘He was a born member of the underground’: how Peter Hujar captured the New York demimonde

 

‘He was a born member of the underground’: how Peter Hujar captured the New York demimonde

This article is more than 4 months old

He only published one book – and it was hardly noticed. Now his portraits of drag queens, poets and artists are seen as vital documents of a vanished world. As they go on show, the photographer’s favourite subjects recall his genius

Alex Needham

Mon 15 Apr 2024 16.51 BST

H

e made me wear white,” says Fran Lebowitz, down the phone from New York. The writer is talking about the day her close friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, shot her for Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he ever made. “Peter was very specific. It was in my apartment which was the size of, I don’t know, a book. And the light was a big thing – as it was with all photographers, back when they were actually photographers.”

 

Emmet Gowin, Edith, 2004 (Rain Droplets in a Web). Gold- toned salt print on gelatin coated paper. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin. © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery.

Behind the Scenes of Emmet Gowin at the Morgan Library and Museum

Joel Smith as told to Alexandra Pechman

29 May 2015

Throughout his prolific career as a photographer, Emmet Gowin has threaded together seemingly disparate subjects: his wife, Edith, and their extended family; American and European landscapes; and aerial views of environmental devastation. In 2013, Aperture copublished a long-awaited survey publication, Emmet Gowin, in conjunction with a related exhibition organized by Fundación Mapfre, Madrid. On May 22, the Morgan Library and Museum opened Hidden Likeness, a show of Gowin’s photographs from throughout his career paired with selections he made from the museum’s vast holdings of ancient Near Eastern seals, medieval books, music manuscripts, and prints and drawings, as well as photographs. Online editor Alexandra Pechman spoke with Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head, Photography, during a tour of the exhibition during its installation in early May. In June, Aperture Foundation Members at the Patron level will have a private tour of the exhibition led by Smith. What follows are a few selections from Smith’s commentary on how the Gowin show came together. 

 

Rhipha flammans. August, 2008, La Fortuna, Chiriquí Province, Panama.

Emmet Gowin’s Stunning Celebration of the Lowly Moth

ANDREA K SCOTT

3 SEPTEMBER 2017

The moth doesn’t enjoy the same charmed reputation as its lepidopteran cousin, the butterfly. With a handful of exceptions—the Japanese movie monster Mothra, a moody late work by van Gogh—moths are dismissed as pests, waging war on our sweaters when they’re not dive-bombing the lights. The insects even got a bad rap from Jesus: in the Sermon on the Mount, Heaven was praised for being moth-free. But with his kaleidoscopic project “Mariposas Nocturnas,” the American photographer Emmet Gowin does for the moths of Central and South America what the influential German duo Bernd and Hilla Becher once did for the water towers of Western Europe, transforming an apparently lowly subject into riveting art.

 

Edith, 1963
Photo by Emmet Gowin

Emmet Gowin:
Loving the Problem

The telephone rang in a Pennsylvania home last month and was answered by Edith Gowin, known to many as the subject of her husband’s most striking photographs.

“Emmet is deep down in the basement, but I’ll run and get him for you,” she said. On the other end of the line, the caller paused, genuinely unsure if she was speaking plainly or in metaphor, as Emmet Gowin is famous for the lyricism and poetry of his imagery and writing.

Emmet Gowin shares stories through photography

 

Edith
Photo by Emmet Gowin

Artist Emmet Gowin shares stories through photography

Posted on October 08, 2014 by Laura Brentrup

By KOURTNEY KAWANO (for The Dartmouth)

October 7, 2014

Few people have heard of — yet alone seen — water treatment pollution caused by paper mills. Even fewer have seen such damage from the sky and called it art. Yet for world-renowned photographer and current Montgomery Fellow Emmet Gowin, a certain fascination and peculiar sense of beauty comes in the circular blossoms of tropical hues that explode from the seemingly serene water.

Bruce Davidson / Zabriskie Point

Bruce Davidson Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni during the making of "Zabriskie Point." California. USA. 1968. © Bruce Davidson | Magnum Photos

Magnum on Set: Zabriskie Point

Bruce Davidson photographed the making of Michelangelo Antonioni’s surreal investigation into 1960s American counterculture, shot in the Californian desert

Magnum photographers have, over more than seven decades, captured pivotal moments in popular culture as much as historic events and societal sea changes. Working behind the scenes on sets of many classic films, they have captured not only iconic stars at various stages of their careers, but also documented the changing nature of cinema and film production. Sets, equipment, and special effects that once seemed futuristic are, with the passing of time rendered disarmingly romantic.

Here’s what makes Evan Vucci’s Trump photograph so powerful

 

Donald Trump
Photo by Evan Vucci

Elevation, colour – and the American flag. Here’s what makes Evan Vucci’s Trump photograph so powerful

Por qué la fotografía de Evan Vucci del atentado contra Trump es tan impactante

Jo Adetunji
Published: July 15, 2024 8.11am BST

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania was captured by several photographers who were standing at the stage before the shooting commenced. 

Tina Barney on Photography as a Way of Marking Time Across Generations

Sunday New York Times. 1982
Photo by Tina Barney

Tina Barney on Photography as a Way of Marking Time Across Generations

Interview by Spencer Bailey

March 9, 2023

To the photographer Tina Barney, a scene can be captured in an instant, but a place is best framed over generations. Across her 40-year-long career, Barney has become internationally renowned for photographing, in this very way, her particular milieus—family, friends, and neighbors in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, most notably, but also in New York and Sun Valley, Idaho. Growing up in New York City with an art collector father, a model-turned-interior-decorator mother, and an amateur photographer grandfather, Barney’s childhood was one brimming with visual culture and artistic influences. Her path to photography, though, was rather circuitous: In her early 20s, Barney joined the Junior Council at MoMA, for which she helped catalog prints in the museum’s department of photography. Immediately intrigued by the medium, Barney then began visiting photography galleries and collecting pictures by the likes of Edward Weston and Robert Frank (then available for around $100 or $200 apiece). Soon enough, she purchased a 35-millimeter Pentax and began making photographs herself.

Tina Barney’s self-portrait, 2023, in her Watch Hill, R.I. home. She finds still-lifes at her home
a relief; she doesn’t have to chase people to get them to pose.Credit...

Tina Barney: The Photographer’s Origin Story

With a show at Kasmin and a new book of rediscovered photographs, both called “The Beginning,” the ethnographer of the elite reflects on finding her voice.

Hilarie M. Sheets

February 24, 2023

Tina Barney was home alone in Watch Hill, R.I., during 2020 and needed a Covid quarantine project. While many were cleaning their closets, the acclaimed photographer exhumed about 1,000 35-millimeter negatives shot in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when she was learning the basics of her craft at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho and turning a lens to rituals and relationships among her affluent circle of friends and family.