BY STEVE BISSON
STEPHEN SHAMES
Bronx Boys
"The Bronx has a terrible beauty, stark and harsh, like the desert. At first glance you imagine nothing can survive. Then you notice life going on all around. People adapt, survive, and even prosper in this urban moonscape of quick pleasures and false hopes… . Often I am terrified of the Bronx. Other times it feels like home. My images reflect the feral vitality and hope of these young men. The interplay between good and evil, violence and love, chaos and family, is the theme, but this is not documentation. There is no story line. There is only a feeling."—Stephen Shames
A 1977 assignment for Look magazine took Stephen Shames to the Bronx, where he began photographing a group of boys coming of age in what was at the time one of the toughest and most dangerous neighborhoods in the United States. The Bronx boys lived on streets ravaged by poverty, drugs, violence, and gangs in an adolescent “family” they created for protection and companionship. Shames’s profound empathy for the boys earned their trust, and over the next two-plus decades, as the crack cocaine epidemic devastated the neighborhood, they allowed him extraordinary access into their lives on the street and in their homes and “crews.”
Bronx Boys presents an extended photo essay that chronicles the lives of these kids growing up in the Bronx. Shames captures the brutality of the times—the fights, shootings, arrests, and drug deals—that eventually left many of the young men he photographed dead or in jail. But he also records the joy and humanity of the Bronx boys, who mature, fall in love, and have children of their own. One young man Shames mentored, Martin Dones, provides riveting details of living in the Bronx and getting caught up in violence and drugs before caring adults helped him turn his life around. Challenging our perceptions of a neighborhood that is too easily dismissed as irredeemable, Bronx Boys shows us that hope can survive on even the meanest streets.
Info HERE
© Stephen Shames
© Stephen Shames
Bronx Boys presents an extended photo essay that chronicles the lives of these kids growing up in the Bronx. Shames captures the brutality of the times—the fights, shootings, arrests, and drug deals—that eventually left many of the young men he photographed dead or in jail. But he also records the joy and humanity of the Bronx boys, who mature, fall in love, and have children of their own. One young man Shames mentored, Martin Dones, provides riveting details of living in the Bronx and getting caught up in violence and drugs before caring adults helped him turn his life around. Challenging our perceptions of a neighborhood that is too easily dismissed as irredeemable, Bronx Boys shows us that hope can survive on even the meanest streets.
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AARON SISKIND
Another Photographic Reality
The first true retrospective of a towering figure in American photography and the only book on Aaron Siskind currently in print, this volume features important, rarely published work and an authoritative text by noted photo historian Gilles Mora.
Info HERE
Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) was a major figure in the history of American photography. A leading documentary photographer who was active in the New York Photo League in the 1930s, Siskind moved beyond the social realism of his early work as he increasingly came to view photography as a visual language of signs, metaphors, and symbols—the equivalent of poetry and music. Through the forties and ifties, he developed new techniques to photograph details and fragments of ordinary, commonplace materials. This radical new work transformed Siskind’s image-making from straight photography to abstraction, from documentation to expressive art. His concern with shape, line, gesture, and the picture plane prompted immediate comparison with abstract expressionist painting, particularly with the art of Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. It took some years for Siskind’s unprecedented photography to gain full acceptance, but, by the 1970s, he was an acknowledged master, publishing and exhibiting widely. Siskind was also one of the founding donors who established the archive at the Center for Creative Photography.
Aaron Siskind’s oeuvre is so original that it defies classification, and it has not received the sustained critical attention that it richly merits. In fact, there are no other books on Siskind currently in print. Aaron Siskind presents the first complete retrospective of this legendary photographer. It highlights important, rarely published bodies of work from Harlem; from Bucks County architecture; and from the “Tabernacle,” “Gloucester,” “Martha’s Vineyard,” “Louis Sullivan,” and “Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation” photo series. The book also includes an introduction by Gilles Mora, an expert on modern American photography, and texts by critic and photographer Charles Traub. This study, based on the Siskind archives at the Center for Creative Photography and supported by the Aaron Siskind Foundation, fills a resounding editorial void around one of the most challenging and important figures in the art of American photography.
© Aaron Siskind | University of Texas Press
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CARMEN WINANT
My Life as a Man
My Life as a Man depicts a single collage deconstructing and rearranging its composition. Resolution is sought but never “found.” The book features original text contributions from Matthew Brannon, Moyra Davey, Courtney Fiske, Jim Fletcher, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jonathan Griffin, Geoffrey Hilsabeck, Michael Ned Holte, Sarah McMenimen, Anna Livia, Alexander Provan, Ross Simonini and John Yau. Each book comes with a unique cover image collaged on as well as a folded newsprint poster featuring eighty finished crossword puzzles from the NYTimes by the artist’s mother.
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© Horses Think Press
Carment Winant is an artist and writer. She also work as an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Contemporary Art History and live in Columbus, Ohio.
© Carmen Winant | Horses Think Press
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WILSON CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY
Salt and Silver
Salt prints are the very first photographs on paper that still exist today. Made in the first twenty years of photography, they are the results of esoteric knowledge and skill. Individual, sometimes unpredictable, and ultimately magical, the chemical capacity to ‘fix a shadow’ on light sensitive paper, coated in silver salts, was believed to be a kind of alchemy, where nature drew its own picture.
Salt and Silver brings together over 100 plates drawn from the Wilson Centre for Photography, accompanied by two roundtable discus- sions with curators, academics, historians and collectors from world renowned institutions. Encompassing many of the great works of the period, the publication includes prints by Edouard Baldus, Louis Blanquart-Evrard, Mathew Brady, Charles Clifford, Louis De Clercq, Maxime Du Camp, Roger Fenton, Jean-Baptiste Frenet, Charles Hugo, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Calvert Richard Jones, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, Charles Marville, Felix Nadar, Charles Negre, Felice Beato, Auguste Salzmann, William Henry Fox Talbot, Felix Teynard and Linnaeus Tripe.
Participants in roundtable conversations include: Simon Baker, Tate; Martin Barnes, V&A; Elisabeth Edwards, De Montfort University; Carol Jacobi, Tate Britain; Hope Kingsley, WCP; Hans Kraus, Hans P. Kraus Jr Inc; Anne de Mondenard, Mediatheque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris; Lori Pauli, National Gallery of Canada; Michael G. Wilson, WCP.
Info HERE
Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840 – 1860 is the title of the exhibition taking place at Tate Britain from 25 February through 7 June 2015. This is the first exhibition in Britain devoted to salted paper prints, one of the earliest forms of photography. A uniquely British invention, unveiled by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, salt prints spread across the globe, creating a new visual language of the modern moment. This revolutionary technique transformed subjects from still lifes, portraits, landscapes and scenes of daily life into images with their own specific aesthetic: a soft, luxurious effect particular to this photographic process. The few salt prints that survive are seldom seen due to their fragility, and so this exhibition, a collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Photography, is a singular opportunity to see the rarest and best early photographs of this type in the world.
Organised in collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Photography.
Curated by Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art 1850–1915, Simon Baker, Curator, Photography International Art, Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, Assistant Curator 1850-1915 and Hannah Lyons, Assistant Curator 1850–1915.
© Wilson Centre for Photography | MACK