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Photography

Charlotte Dumas’ Revealing Portraits of Animals

By Paul Laster on

Charlotte Dumas has a knack for photographing animals. Over the past decade, the young Dutch artist has made intimate portraits of dogs, horses, and wolves that compassionately reveal the reasons why we admire these enigmatic creatures. Mixing her knowledge of Old Master portrait paintings with an eye for striking photographic poses, Dumas has documented stray dogs on the streets of Palermo and in the shelters of New York City, police horses in their stables in Rotterdam and Rome, and wild wolves roaming the forests of Norway and Sweden.

Celebrated in the New York Times Magazine last year for her photographs of search and rescue dogs from 9/11, Dumas has followed that series with an equally important look at service animals for a solo exhibition in Washington, DC. Anima, which is on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art through October 28, presents three earlier bodies of work with a newly commissioned series on burial horses that carry soldiers to their final resting place in traditional military funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. Click through to see a selection of images from the show, and to watch a video of the photographer at work. … Read More

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Art

Fascinating Illustrations From R. Crumb’s French Retrospective

By Paul Laster on

America’s favorite underground artist, Robert Crumb was one of the originators of the “adults only” comic book scene that blossomed during the subversive days of the ’60s and ’70s. Both embraced and disdained for his absurdist, psychedelic view of American society, R. Crumb illustrated wild tales of sex-crazed amazons, hallucinating hippies, abusive cops, and bumbling businessmen. He coined the counterculture slogan “Keep on truckin…,” while making Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural comic book celebs. Breaking the taboos of the times, Crumb became famous for founding Zap Comix, which he first published in 1967, and got a second round of praise for reinvigorating the rebellious medium for a whole new group of punk-inspired artists in the 1980s, with his offbeat comic book Weirdo.

Living in the south of France since 1991, Crumb has recently taken on such revered subjects as Kafka and The Book of Genesis, which he painstakingly turned into a graphic novel. With no signs of slowing down, the underground icon is currently being celebrated with a retrospective, which is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, at the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris. Click through to view a selection of our favorite images from the show and to watch a video of Crumb discussing his lifetime of work at the museum. … Read More

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Photography

Striking Photos That Cleverly Remix Classic Works of Art

By Paul Laster on

A photographer with a sharp eye and a keen wit, Awol Erizku twists art history around to fit his needs. Observing that there weren’t many museum masterpieces featuring people of color, the 24-year-old artist set about creating his own versions of the classics. In his bohemian studio, which is situated below a flower shop in downtown New York, Johannes Vermeer’s iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring was transformed into Girl with a Bamboo Earring, with the model being a young black girl he spotted on the subway. Likewise, Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with Ermine was humorously remade as Lady With a Pitbull and Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus got slyly reinvented as Boy Holding Grapes.

“The models I choose to work with are not professional models but possess an undeniable, striking beauty,” declares the Ethiopia-born photographer, who grew up in the Bronx. A graduate of Cooper Union, Erizku has been working for the past few years as a commercial photographer, capturing the likes of Mos Def and the A$AP crew for magazine pages, while simultaneously pursuing his fine art work. After being featured in a group exhibition at NYC’s high-profile FLAG Art Foundation last fall, he landed his first solo show, which is currently on view at Hasted Kraeutler Gallery. Click through to view our favorite photos from the show and to watch a video interview with the artist, who’ll soon be off to Yale to further explore his dreams. … Read More

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Photography

Jim Marshall’s Intimate Images of Legendary Musicians

By Paul Laster on

The only photographer allowed backstage at the Beatles’ final concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park and the primary photographer at the legendary Woodstock music festival, Jim Marshall carved out a reputation as one of the best documentarians of the diverse and dynamic American music scene of the ’60s and ’70s. From pictures of Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop to Johnny Cash performing for enthusiastic audiences at Folsom and San Quentin prisons, Marshall had his lens on the counterculture that inspired one of the last revolutions to totally sweep the world.

“I worked hard but I never really considered it work,” Marshall has said. “I always enjoyed myself and only took an assignment if I had complete control and access. My reputation was such that managers didn’t f*ck with me. I had the trust of the artist. I would work with them and they knew I wouldn’t f*ck around or do anything they didn’t like.”

Marshall passed away in 2010, but his legendary work still lives on — with a lot of his documentary shots getting visibility for the first time since they were frozen on film. A striking solo show of pictures from his intimate interactions with such jazz greats as Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane; influential folk singers of the day, including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan; and fabled rock ‘n’ roll stars that defined the era, counting Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, and The Who, opens today at New York’s Steven Kasher Gallery. A new monograph, published by Chronicle Books, engagingly captures Marshall’s photos of the Rolling Stones 1972 recording session for the Exile on Main Street album and the band’s monumental US tour — 40 years after the fact and 50 years after the group got its start. Click through to view some of the Stones photos, along with other amazing pictures snapped by the magical Marshall during that time. … Read More

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Photography

Preview Ryan McGinley’s New Career-Spanning Monograph [NSFW]

By Paul Laster on

The youngest artist ever to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art — way back in 2003, when he was only 25 — Ryan McGinley has been a radical darling of the art world ever since. A chronicler of edgy youth culture, McGinley started out documenting his pals populating New York’s downtown art scene and then broadened his focus with summer road trips that captured free spirited, often-naked, guys and gals running through wide open landscapes, exploring underground caves, jumping off cliffs, climbing trees, and cuddling with creatures of the wild. His young, sexy models are willing to do whatever daredevil tricks deemed necessary to make the photos click.

Capsulizing the whole breadth of his career, Rizzoli has just released a large-scale monograph — titled Whistle for the Wind — that brings together McGinley’s colorful imagery in a visually compelling design and features a chummy conversation between the venturesome photographer and the equally adventurous filmmaker Gus Van Sant. “Whomever I’m photographing, I sort of fall in love with, or rather my camera falls in love with them,” the artist tells Van Sant. “It could be a boy or a girl, because it’s all a fantasy. It’s fiction.” Click through to view some of our favorite fictions from the book — compliments of McGinley’s keen eye and his camera’s loving lens. … Read More

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Art

Is Jeff Koons America’s Greatest Living Artist?

By Paul Laster on

Before you storm off to the comments section over that headline, stop a moment to consider that no matter where you personally rank Jeff Koons, a number of Europeans seem to think he’s America’s greatest. The subject of overlapping blockbusters in Frankfurt, Germany and the Basel suburb of Riehan in Switzerland — a full two years before he gets a grand stateside retrospective, which will span nearly every floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York — the enigmatic Koons is enjoying a moment of Old World splendor, one that even surpasses his dynamic display at the Palace of Versailles, outside of Paris, back in 2008.

Long a favorite of top galleries and mega-art-collectors, Koons is a perfectionist, who creates exquisitely crafted paintings and sculptures that reference ready-made objects — ranging from virginal vacuums displayed over bright lights and celebrities cast in ceramic or carved in wood to inflatable figures beautifully blown-up in shimmering steel and cartoon characters surrealistically captured in paint. With a goal making art accessible to everyone, Koons succeeds — with a little help from his friends — in turning Basel’s Beyeler Foundation and Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle and the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung into pop culture paradises, chock full of whimsical pieces, through the rest of the summer. Click through to view a whopping selection of our favorite works from all three venues. … Read More

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Photography

Striking Photos of Times Square in the ’80s

By Paul Laster on

Stepping back in time some 30 years, Times Square would be unrecognizable to most visitors currently on their way to the Disney Store, Toys”R”Us, or M&M’s World. Slime Square — as the area was popularly known back in the day — was an unruly refuge for sex shops, peep shows, martial arts, cheap electronics, greasy food, and all types of hustlers. The Forty-Deuce: The Times Square Photographs of Bill Butterworth, 1983-1984, a colorful exhibition that just opened at Brooklyn’s powerHouse Arena and a compelling monograph, newly released by powerHouse Books, chronicles this Sodom and Gomorrah on the Hudson — another appropriate nickname for this seedy part of town — with some 200 images, shot over the course of two years. … Read More

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Film

Marina Abramović’s MoMA Blockbuster Becomes a Movie

By Paul Laster on

Performance art has never had a more enthusiastic audience than the one that lined up for Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. A blockbuster of major proportions, the show was viewed by 750,000 people — some sleeping outside the museum overnight just for a chance to silently sit opposite the artist during her daily, 7 and a half hour, endurance-testing performance for 72 days. The widely acclaimed retrospective presented highlights from the artist’s 40-year career in a variety of media — from art photography and documentary videos to staged installations and re-performances by a cast of trained players — but within a short three months it was over. Now The Artist is Present lives again — offering even more viewers a chance to see the spectacle — in the form of a feature-length, documentary film. … Read More

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Photography

Playful Photos of Southern California’s Swimming Pool Culture

By Paul Laster on

Swimming pools have long been a cornerstone of Southern California’s joyful way of living. A focal point for recreation, architecture, and entertainment, the size and shape of the pool — as well as the carefree activities that take place around it — hold big bragging rights for actors, directors, designers, and artists living in Palm Springs, LA, and the surrounding, arid region. Backyard Oasis — a colorful survey of swimming pools in Southern California photography from 1945 to 1982, which was recently on exhibit at the Palm Springs Art Museum and also comes as a comprehensive, table-top monograph, published by Prestel — captures the power of the shapely pools and beauties that surround them, in all of its glory.

From architectural gems, once inhabited by Frank Sinatra and Raymond Loewy, and signature artworks by John Baldessari, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha to sexy celebrities like Rock Hudson and Marilyn Monroe posed poolside and skateboarders riding the curves of empty concrete bowls, Backyard Oasis — encompassing its own massive pool of creativity — packs a cool and powerful punch. Click though a selection of our favorite photos from the exhibition and the book. … Read More

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Photography

Magical Photos of Venice Without People

By Paul Laster on

Are the famous canals, bridges, and squares in crowded Venice ever free of people? If you ask anyone who lives there or any tourist who has ever visited, they’d probably proclaim, “Never!” Yet, magically, that’s exactly how the German-born photographer Christopher Thomas portrays the “Floating City” in his new series pictures, suitably titled Venice in Solitude. Shooting at dusk or dawn with a large-format camera while employing extinct Polaroid film with long exposures to omit any rapid movement, Thomas captured the usually bustling city in a ghostly state of repose.

Following similar projects in Munich and New York, the photographer spent a year in Venice documenting the architectural splendor of the celebrated Grand Canal, Rialto Bridge, and Piazza San Marco, as well as several serene spots off the beaten path. Exhibited in recent shows in Antwerp, Munich, and London and compiled in a new monograph, published by Prestel, Thomas’ black-and-white prints show a dreamlike Venice of old — where artists, musicians, and writers once roamed. Click through to view some of our favorite images. … Read More

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