EIGHTEEN: DAVE, OF THE WEEK.
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: LETTER FROM CINCINNATI / PORTFOLIO OF THE WEEK~KIRILL MUNIABIN / THE LIST / DEAR DAVE, REDUX (BRETT WARREN) / REVIEW: YAEL FRIEDMAN ON MARTHA COOPER.
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: LETTER FROM CINCINNATI, OHIO.
Photography inspires grassroots enterprise. It may be the democratic nature of the medium, but the regional centers for exhibition, education, and conversation in support of photographic practice and thinking are many, and most founded by enthusiastic citizen-supporters. Communities in Santa Fe, Houston, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles have a long history of dedicated activity.
FotoFocus in Cincinnati has been a notable center of photographic discourse and engagement since its founding in 2010, and its Biennial, which forms a coalition of exhibition organizations, academic conversation and curatorial projects every second October. Over 800 exhibitions and programs have been initiated since its origin, and of the highest cultural rigor and stamina.
With the inauguration of its new FotoFocus Center last weekend, the ambition and potential of this forward-thinking institution progresses further. The admirably collegial building, designed by the Cincinnati architect Jose Garcia, has a warmth and tactility of surface and seems quite perfect in its scale; it is an intimate space but capacious, and feels in cahoots with its neighborhood, and its brick, working class history.
Kevin Moore, the FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator has orchestrated its debut exhibition. Gathering the work of over fifty artists, “Big Tent” ratifies the egalitarian sensibility of the Center, as well as the photograph’s fundamental ethos of inclusivity and empowerment. It is a manifesto of the institution, as well as, in Moore’s words, “something of a defiant assertion in the current political climate”. And as such, “Big Tent” is true to its premise, mixing not-often-seen images from well-known artists with local participants, work from the past--- a luminous Paul Strand photogravure (“Boy”) from 1933--- to last year. The inclusion of stunning work from Cincinnati artists mixing with those of international stature is particularly relevant.
It is not a survey of the most provocative nor experimental work in photography. The exhibition concentrates on landscape and portraiture and work of a documentary nature. Entering the first gallery, one moves through protest and civic expression, anchored by a straightforward 2011 photograph by Accra Shepp of an Occupy Wall Street protester of calm self-possession (“Micky, October 1, 2011”). His signage, with the legibility of a cue card--SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT-- could be a dandy franchise for our present calamity. Close by is Robert Frank’s “Political Rally” (1956) with the gleaming parade tuba concealing its musician, a bullhorn of patriotic blather. Frank’s picture is nestled next to one from a series of “First American Portrait” by Marco Anelli of a new immigrant from Brazil in brassy presence, eager to assert herself into this new home.
Further, figures traverse the landscape: a flight of teenage girls across a spring meadow via Justine Kurland (“Golden Field” 1998) or in Tabitha Soren’s series of figures rushing (“Janelle” 2013) with a sense of anxiety, fleeing something beyond the frame, or some internal aggrievement; the narrative ambiguity increases the disquiet. And with the work of Larry Sultan from the magisterial series “Homeland” of day laborers on the periphery of California suburbia, here in a careful procession of exiled domesticity. In each: myth, fear and home braided into the American grain.
The structural scaffolding of “Big Tent” is inspired by the Amanda Gorman poem ‘In This Place (An American Lyric)’ and the exhibition, too, has sense of roaming through a social landscape with the unexpectedness of travel, the pleasure of the accidental and unforeseen. This baggy ramble is apparent on the second floor with its gathering of portraits, a sweeping cluster of individuals in salon style, most often outdoors in public space—in the landscape without the shelter of home and yet, occasionally each other--Katy Grannan’s portrait of a mother and daughter (“Anonymous, Modesto, CA” 2012) protecting one another: stoic and wary and inviolate. The wall is a chorus of self-sufficient voices; once invisible in the shadow of American rhetoric and now seen, amassing at the cultural center. The haunting portraits by Alyse Emdor of the incarcerated posing in front of idealized, hand painted backdrops, here represented by “Brisio Pintor, Preston E. Smith Unit Correctional Institution, Lamesa, Texas” (2013) is tender and heartbreaking. And from 1968, the Haight-Ashbury portraits by Elaine Mayes as the embodiment of a frontier romanticism and the idealism and melancholy of the young as a recurring universal motif. The Cincinnati photographer Michael Wilson has four photographs—scruffy pictures of the working-class citizenry and their joy, camaraderie, and mischief. Even the Robert Mapplethorpe included (“Rebecca Fraser” 1977) presents an individual seemingly without pretense, without privilege.
“Big Tent” is not an obvious and celebratory blockbuster, nor a variant of what will be a clumsy self-congratulatory assault next month (good lord save us). It replaces the tic of civic unity with self-sufficiency. Its optimism feels guarded, and the tent it suggests is fragile and fugitive. It is a curatorial project which is not linear but discursive and elliptical. One returns to the contentment of grazing through pictures and gazing, not swiping; of the silent magnetism of the photograph. It is a deeply humanistic endeavor and conspires to amplify those voices that insist on not being silenced. As the opening salvo of a newly energized venue of photographic communication, the exhibition brings vision and hope.
Stephen Frailey is a photographer and founder and editor of Dear Dave, magazine. His book of 100 short essays on contemporary photography, Looking at Photography, was published by Damiani Editore in 2020.
PORTFOLIO OF THE WEEK: KIRILL MUNIABIN.
“After my mother’s sudden death in 2019, my father was left alone. The first years were the hardest emotionally for all of us, but especially for him. The deep attachment formed over decades of successful relationships was seriously tested. But my father chose the path of a man who is not committed to new relationships, the path of a loner.
The generally accepted image of a man is still more associated with polygamy. Being in several relationships is considered a normal behavioral attribute of a “real” man. My father’s story is in sharp dissonance with this “norm”. It made me take a critical look at the issue of masculinity.
The “MENlancholy” project is about the fates of men who, regardless of age and social status, voluntarily or involuntarily remain without relationships. This is an attempt to find out the reasons and, perhaps, understand what it is like to be a man beyond gender stereotypes. What it is like to return home every evening where no one is waiting for you. Except for loneliness, which everyone lives in their own way.”
Kirill Muniabin holds a PhD in technical science. He has participated in group exhibitions at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Klompching Gallery in New York and the Duncan Miller Gallery in Los Angeles.
THE LIST. (OF THOSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
THIS WEEK’S RECKONING OF THOSE WHO ARE ON OUR MIND: A GLOBAL GATHERING OF THE INFLUENTIAL, THE CLEVER, THE SILENT, THE TRULY ORIGINAL, THE TENACIOUS.
DEAR DAVE, REDUX ©
A PORTFOLIO FROM THE PAST 15 YEARS OF DEAR DAVE, MAGAZINE HERE WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRETT WARREN FROM DAVE, 28 (2020)
Brett Warren has made photographs for Dior, Oscar de La Renta, Pamela Love, Oribe, Vogue and Manolo Blahnik, among others.
REVIEW: MARTHA COOPER “STREETWISE” BRONX DOCUMENTARY CENTER, NEW YORK.
By Yael Friedman
It’s near impossible to show images of New York from the 1970s and 1980s without making viewers feel like they are looking at artifacts of a very bygone era. And yet somehow, at the Bronx Documentary Center, an exhibit of legendary photographer Martha Cooper’s work, defies this archival impulse. In “Martha Cooper: Streetwise” over 100 photos, from her seminal images of graffiti and breakdancing to previously unseen images of drag racing, hang unframed and affixed with magnets to the walls of this cavernous former church in the South Bronx. They burst with the color, energy, movement and joy of Cooper’s subjects, upending the reflexive nostalgia and lament projected onto this period of the city’s past.
Cooper has gained a cult following for her documentation of graffiti and graffiti artists. As a photographer, she translated and elevated the images and worlds of these kids, whose tags on walls and trains were part of the daily life of every New Yorker, to whom, as individuals, they were otherwise mostly invisible. Her iconic 1984 book with fellow photographer Henry Chalfant, “Subway Art” (Thames and Hudson), which took years to find a publisher (to many, graffiti was only ever emblematic of urban blight) was quickly disseminated across the globe, passing through the hands of countless underground artists marking and playing in their own cities. The book served (and continues to serve) as both a manual and source of inspiration, helping usher a still vital global movement of street art. It is hard to imagine Banksy without Cooper, and many commissioned street murals, including by Shepherd Fairey, draw from her photos and pay tribute. And yet, while she has had dozens of shows around the world and has a dedicated Martha Cooper library at the Urban Nation Museum in Berlin, this is somehow her first retrospective in New York. The Bronx setting, informal display, and broad range of photos serve her body of work and her subjects in a way that a more formal gallery or museum show would not.
In 1977, as the first female staff photographer at Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, Cooper spent her days driving her small yellow Honda the length and breadth of the city. In addition to assignments, her editor, Susan Welchman, tasked her with finding feature photos called “weather shots.” To find these and finish her roll of film each day, Cooper began driving through the Lower East Side, drawn to scenes of children at play amid this crumbling urban landscape – building clubhouses, making go-carts, tending to their pigeon coops. While many eyes scanned these late 70s streets and saw only the tears in the urban fabric – empty lots filled with rubble and debris, broken fences that now enclosed nothing, old mattresses and other discarded remains of abandoned and burned out homes - Cooper saw how the kids in these neighborhoods found their raw material for play and improvisation, forging entire worlds for themselves while the rest of the city, and the adults around them, were otherwise distracted. As Susan Welchman describes it, “As an anthropologist, she loved taking photos of kids being busy – she herself was always very independent and industrious as a child, and she has always loved and admired little kids that are as well.”
One wall is dedicated to photos from her book “Street Play” from these years in the late 70s. They include arresting black and white images of kids not only “making do” with their environment at the time but absolutely commandeering it. In one photo, a young boy’s arms are wrapped around a fire hydrant to “cup” it and control the powerful stream, the rest of his small body jutting out behind the hydrant, mirroring the two huge streams of water bursting out before him. The most poignant photograph, of children climbing a fence with an empty lot and burned-out buildings behind them--the hallmarks of late 70s NYC -- most succinctly defies the visual shorthand for that time. Cooper sees with a searing honesty, but it is not a bleak one; she sees the joy as naturally foregrounded, it is there despite the other elements. As a trained ethnographer, acutely attuned to the worlds she walks through, Cooper was committed to capturing the context in which these children had to be resourceful, but they are never merely metaphors in a social commentary about this urban landscape.
Cooper’s keen sense and curiosity about children’s ability to be inventive in this environment led her to explore the city’s most visually ubiquitous youth culture – graffiti. Most New Yorkers reviled it at the time, and succeeding mayors made a great show of going to war with it. When the producers of the 1974 film “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” wanted to shoot their movie in the New York City subway, the MTA at first refused to allow it. After some prodding from the mayor’s office, the MTA relented but only under the condition that the subways were not depicted with graffiti on them. And yet Cooper found and celebrated this incredible universe, of young (mostly) men, who redefined the landscape of their city, and ultimately many others.
Several of Cooper’s images of the artist Dondi’s work are included in the show, as is her portrait of him in 1980, painting a train in the New Lots yard, where she once spent eight hours watching him work. Many of the artists she worked with are featured in these images, including Wild Style Crew, Frosty Freeze, Futura 2000, and so many others. More recent pictures, of female writers, are another reason this show is not just a historical record of a painted over and sanitized urban past. Even if they are of street artists abroad, the continuity, through this kaleidoscopic worldwide movement, makes the older images feel as vital as when they first appeared.
The photographer Helen Levitt famously photographed children at play in Depression-era New York. Levitt also elevated them beyond pure social commentary, but the children in her images still feel like they are at play inside an otherwise adult world, their innovations fantastical and temporary. Cooper’s kids, in contrast, create interventions in the adult world, and forge their own lasting communities, whether or not the adults see them. Geoff Dyer once asked, “Will anyone ever capture childhood as Helen Levitt did?” Martha Cooper’s body of work is a singular vision of the possibilities of childhood, and how the creativity of kids can shape the rest of the world beyond their own. It is a testament to her work and this curation that this is the exuberant ethos coursing through the show.
Yael Friedman lives in New York, and her reviews and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Economist, The Forward, Haaretz and The Daily Beast, among other publications.