“Merrymakers dance the night away,” reads the bottom of a magazine sheet that the 2015 Baxter St Workspace Resident Pacifico Silano ‘tore’ from a vast collection of gay porn ephemera for his intricately hung solo exhibition at Baxter St Camera Club’s Chinatown location. Tear Sheets fits like a glove as a title to Pacifico’s practice, which … Continue reading
“She lost all her innocence She said, ‘I am not a feminist’ –Hole, “I Think That I Would Die” Examining society’s impossible expectations for women in her essay “Bad Feminist: Take One,” Roxane Gay describes, “…the right way to be a woman is to be thin, to wear makeup, to wear the right kind of … Continue reading
In an interview with The Guardian’s Dominic Rushe, photographer and porn star Peter Berlin explains, “I have wondered what it would be like to just have Peter Berlins on this planet. I think I’d prefer that. It sounds selfish. Very rarely have people made me stop the way I made people stop. If I was … Continue reading
Walking through the multitude of black-and-white photographs at the Grey Art Gallery’s compelling retrospective of photographer Tseng Kwong Chi’s brief yet prolific artistic career, one nagging questions comes to mind: Who exactly was Tseng Kwong Chi? Continue reading
“They called it the Terminal Bar but they had no idea that like twenty years later the place’d be filling up with terminal cases.” –Tom Waits, Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters (33-34) While our favorite down-and-out drunken troubadour Tom Waits was not actually referring to New York’s bygone glorious and dangerous dive–the Terminal Bar, he … Continue reading
Photographer Benjamin Fredrickson’s current exhibition at Daniel Cooney Fine Art further reveals the power of photography to not only document but also to break taboos. Continue reading
In Susan Sontag’s seminal On Photography, Sontag states, “A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs–especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past–are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds … Continue reading
If any photographer, in addition to Wojnarowicz himself, could be said to preserve an alternate history, it would have been Los Angeles-based photographer Albert J. Winn, who sadly passed away this week. Continue reading
Last week, Renaissance man James Franco opened his New Film Stills at Chelsea’s blue-chip Pace Gallery, which has since sent me into a Franco-inspired slow rage boil since I first heard about and had the unfortunate pleasure to see the exhibition. Continue reading
Because it is time, the eyes open, the body stands up, the hand stretches out, the fire is lit… —André Breton and Paul Eluard In his introduction to the retrospective exhibit of his work “The Personal Eye,” Clarence John Laughlin offers this theory to explain the artistic vision of his photographs of Louisiana plantations and of New … Continue reading