Posts by: Miss Rosen

On the northeastern tip of Hokkaido, Japan, Shiretoko National Park lies in the balance. Taking its name from the native Ainu language, “the place where the earth protrudes” is one of the most remote places in the island nation. The temperate and subalpine mixed forests are home to brown bears and Kamuiwakka Falls, a hot springs waterfall known as “water of the gods.”

Designated as a 2005 UNESCO World Heritage Site, the park is also home to deer, whose population has been controversially culled by the government. Japanese photographer Takashi Homma began documenting the site of the kills in 2009, working over the next decade to compile a series of work just published in Trails (MACK).

Canadian artist Richard Hambleton (1952-2017) emerged from the Lower East Side art scene in New York as an urban legend at a time when the city was filled with characters that inspired some of Hollywood’s most iconoclastic films.

The young artist first left his mark on the streets of 15 cities across Canada and the United States between 1976 and 1979, creating Image Mass Murder Art — a series of police-style “chalk” outlines painted around volunteer “homicide victims.” In some cases he splashed red paint to add a hyperrealistic touch to the “crime scene.”

By 1979, Hambleton was firmly established in New York at a time when the Lower East Side was coming into vogue during the era of graffiti and street art. Alongside contemporaries such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hambleton became notorious for his “Shadowman” paintings that loomed ominously on the streets, in the alleys, and at corners waiting to strike pedestrians at a time when street crime was a regular feature of daily life.

Ruth Ford, c. 1930s. Portrait by George Platt Lynes

Lily Yuen with fellow performers, in Lily Yuen Collection, Schomburg, Folder 6: scrapbook 1926-1930. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Fashion models, first described as “mannequins” arrived in New York via London in 1909. Their purpose, as their name denotes, was to sell merchandise to a burgeoning consumer class — while simultaneously advertising archetypes that simulated insatiable desire.

This desire was cultivated within something the product could never supply — a psychological state of want and aspiration designed to heighten insecurity and anxiety through the creation of a state of constant craving. Tapping into the psychological underpinnings that can only exist when survival is no longer the mainstay of one’s being, merchandisers understood the link between consumption and identity necessary to maintain the capitalist enterprise.

Glamour, romance, sex, and pleasure became the foundation upon which the mannequin was based — making the very spectacle of the human body and visage an object available for purchase. In the creation of the model, the individual was reduced to a thing that could be commodified and exploited for the express purpose of profits.

Fred Ramos. A Honduran child plays near train tracks in Arriaga, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, October 2018.

Johis Alarco?n. Nicole Carcelén, 19, plays with a cotton plant in her hair. The black slaves who first came to Ecuador were forced to work in cotton fields, cane fields and coal mines. For Nicole, cotton plants represent the strength of her ancestors and the strength of their blood. La Loma, 2018.

Yael Martinez. Alin Granda at her father’s home in Taxco Guerrero.Ignacio Granda went missing in Iguala Guerrero on May10, 2013 Alin was one year old.With more than 100 thousand deaths that the fight against organized crime has left, there is a generation of children growing in a context of violence. Guerrero Mexico on July 13, 2017.

With the second edition of the Bronx Documentary Center’s Latin American Foto Festival, curators Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera provide a space for photographers living and working in Latin America to tell their stories on their terms. The Festival, held in nine venues throughout the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx, gave some 50,000 residents — many of whom are Latinx immigrants — the opportunity to engage with stories from their homelands through exhibitions, workshops, tours, and panel discussions.

The history of colonized lands is rarely told by those who have suffered the fate of centuries of imperialism that have systemically decimated the people and the lands of every continent outside Europe. Over the past 200 years, the people of Latin America have fought for independence and sovereignty, and against puppet regimes installed by the United States that first began in 1823 under the Monroe Doctrine.

As ICE raids systemically target Black and Latinx communities, the Foto Festival provides a pertinent moment to pause and reflect on the impact of white supremacy in its many forms, and the ways in which those it aims to exploit, oppress, and erase fight back in a struggle for life or death.

Many Americans profess surprise at the inhumane social practices coming from the present White House. Perhaps they are comforted that they once had the luxury to have never been concerned about the forces of the military and prison industrial complexes weighted against foreign lands and U.S. citizens alike.

Perhaps the carnage of AIDS never touched their families. Perhaps they were never the victim of land grabs, medical experimentation, or any number of the genocidal acts waged by this nation that are documented in the annals of history and the on-going subject of current events.

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them,” poet Charles Bukowski opined, summing up the new wave of “Not my country!” that greets those who have chosen denial over truth up until it finally affected them.

Rify Royalty

The Illustrious Blacks

Larissa Velez-Jackson

“Downtown” is a state of mind that continues to exist long after Eighth Street was abandoned, its storefronts left empty and its streets laid to waste, long after the glory days documented by everyone from Tom Wolfe to Andy Warhol.

The lands south of 14th Street, once the centerpiece of bohemian life, have become a strip mall, charging exorbitant rates that can only be afforded by those who believe money trumps all. Residential spaces downtown have become the exclusive enclave of transplants raised on dreams of being Carrie Bradshaw without having to be an actual escort, a fact of life Candace Bushnell firmly understood when she penned the “Sex in the City” column for The New York Observer long before the Kushner family stripped the paper of its cache and cred.

Downtown as it physically stands in 2019 is a hollow echo of its former self. But the downtown mindset endures in a very telling way; now that Manhattan proper has become the provenance of the bridge and tunnel set, well, you can find the downtown attitude in the boroughs themselves. Here, in little pockets hints of Old York remain: Mom & Pop shops, luncheonettes with Formica counter tops and swivel stools, apartment buildings and private houses home to generations of families who came over after World War II and were forced into distant enclaves due to racist redlining policies.

Bob Adelman (1930–2016), People Wall, World’s Fair, New York, 1965, gelatin silver print. The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased as the gift of Nancy and Burton Staniar, 2015.131. © Bob Adelman Estate

Amy Arbus (b. 1954), The Clash, NYC, 1981, gelatin silver print. The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of Amy Arbus, 2018.74 Copyright © Amy Arbus

The mind loves to generalize, group and sort, to make categories where they might exist and impose them where they do not. It’s simpler this way; superficiality releases us of the presence of complexity, contradiction, and inconsistency that are the hallmarks of life. Once sorted and filed, we can rely upon confirmation bias to avoid the painful discomfort of ignorance.

The photograph — in as much as it is art, artifact, evidence, testimony, illusion, and artifice — allows us to simultaneously reinforce and question the assumptions we hold. It is only fitting that a group show about the group could offer the possibility of exploring the many facets of our insatiable desire to organize life into neat and palatable portion sizes.

In Among Others: Photography and the Group, now on view at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York through August 18, 2019, Joel Smith, the Morgan’s Richard L. Menschel Curator brings together more than 60 works from the 1860s through the present that explore that which we have long taken for granted as a photographic archetype.

Lola Flash, Dominque, Brooklyn, 2011, from the series [sur]passing.

Lola Flash, Raven O, USA, 2017. From the series LEGENDS.

African-American photographer Lola Flash first rose to prominence during the late 1980s when she began documenting the work of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). As a member and activist, Flash photographed demonstrations in New York, Washington DC, and London, marching in solidarity in a life-or-death fight against the government.

She developed her signature cross-color style at this time as a means to subvert the perceptions of race and representation that have long informed and defined so much of the photographic canon. The subject of color has been a thread that continues throughout her work, leading her to explore the subject of colorism and the impact of pigmentation on Black identity and consciousness.

In the new exhibition, [sur]passing on view at Autograph in London through August 17, 2019, Flash presents a series of larger-than-life portraits of global diasporic figures posed against the urban skyline, inviting us to consider our response complexion in all its many splendored forms.

It’s a subject that is discussed at length within the Black community, in large response to the conditions imposed by white supremacy. Many outside the community may consciously or unconsciously ascribe to the heavily socialized stereotypes around light and dark skin, not to mention hair texture and facial physiognomy. By centering and celebrating color, Flash continues to push redefine representation of Black identity from the inside.

The exhibition also includes a selection of bold and experimental early works from Flash’s series Cross Colour and Gay to Z, alongside works from her ongoing series LEGENDS, portraits of prominent members of queer and non-gender conforming communities. Here Flash reflects on working three decades in the trenches.

Eugene Hensley and Jobie Pray. Wilder, TN. 2017.

The Old Coon Hunter Mural at Ciderville Music Hall. Powell, TN.

“My daddy, he was a moonshiner. I’m not ashamed of it,” Opal Sharp Wright tells author Rachel Boillot in the new book Moon Shine: Photographs of the Cumberland Plateau (Daylight).

“He was crippled, he couldn’t work no regular job I guess dad had to feed his kids. He had three brothers that lived over there by him and they’d help him sometime, they’d all gather up there at the stlll and you could hear ‘em a-signing and making music.”

Growing up in the 1920s during Prohibition, Sharp Wright came of age inside a culture as old as America itself, a way of life that finds its swan song in Boilot’s tender and merciful book.