Topho

September 2013 - The seventies issue

topho Featuring photographers:

Hugh Holland Robert Mapplethorpe Nan Goldin Michael Jang ++

£11.00

CONTENTS:

04 06 10 14 INTRO

EXCESS & ANDROGYNY

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: Polaroids

PABLO BARTHOLOMEW: Outside In

20 24 30

HUGH HOLLAND: Locals Only

MICHAEL JANG: The Jangs

NAN GOLDIN: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

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Intro: Everything was moving As a title, it sounds vague, but also disturbing: after all, if everything was moving, which way was a poor photographer to look? 1970’s photography is as inclusive as that famous hippy gathering of tribes in 1967, the Human Be-in, embracing as it does many photographers hailing from across the world. They photograph their homelands, except when they don’t: Larry Burrows was a British photojournalist in wartime Vietnam, while Sigmar Polke’s eerie, deliberately damaged photographs were taken in Afghanistan. But then, of course, a hippy be-in wasn’t quite as inclusive as it first appeared, and here, too, if we paw through the passports, we find a predominantly leftist world-view that decries colonisation and dictatorship (or, in the case of apartheid, both at once).

David Goldblatt may reject any labelling as a political photographer, but nobody looking at his photographs of South Africa’s mining country could believe that apartheid was beneficial – and that’s before you reach Ernest Cole’s furtively captured images of police swooping on young blacks for ID checks, or a white man striking a begging black child, or tsotsis (black gangsters) mugging a white on payday. Another image shows a railway station at rush hour: a thicket of black workers with, in the foreground, a few floating whites waiting, presumably, for the ‘European Only’ part of the train.

And so it goes, round the world, except when it doesn’t. Shomei Tomatsu looks at American colonisation in post-war Japan; Boris Mikhailov uses double exposure to stick two fingers up at the

prescriptive Soviet regime; Li Zhensheng’s extraordinary images, furtively taken, long hidden, often as tiny as stamps (he was, in fact, a stamp collector) display the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s murderous purge, and his ‘composite panoramics’ give a real sense of the tyranny of the obedient majority.

But – wait a minute. Raghubir Singh’s beautiful colour-saturated pictures don’t seem to have much to do with the British legacy in India. And Malick Sidibé is positively joyous about the cultural colonisation of Mali, with his images of an elegantly curved yé-yé boy (the name, from a pop song chorus, is itself an import) or female James Brown fans. There’s certainly movement here, although it’s hard to see where that leaves the increasingly confused viewer. After all, if William Eggleston – formalist, colourist, teller of beautiful, plotless stories – can be included, then who can’t? Is he here as a photographer of the racially divided American South, like New Yorker Bruce Davidson? Or as someone who rearranges his problematic homeland into sheerly lovely imagery, prioritising colour over black and white in every sense?

If exhibitions had stuck to different facets of the civil rights movement, then Eggleston’s Delta Kream café stop juxtaposed with Davidson’s images of Freedom riders braving redneck wrath, or Goldblatt or Cole’s pictures, would make simple sense. If it were focusing on style, then Mikhailov’s experimentalism (lost as the nuances are to anyone who doesn’t get anti-Soviet in-jokes) and Polke’s chemically altered depictions of Afghans setting dogs on

a bear in the Hindu Kush, would make intriguing comparisons to the lushness of Eggleston’s iconic images or the sensuality of Singh’s India.

But in photography, usually, more is less; for oppressed majorities, more is meaningless. No matter how many great works the curators packs in, they can’t make this title’s premise true.

Everything wasn’t moving in the 1960s and ‘70s: some things were and others weren’t, and in neither case was the touchpoint at the start of the decade.

One thing, however, really was in flux then: photography itself.

Eggleston was making it acceptable to take art photographs in colour; Davidson was bringing a fierce emotional engagement to American politics. Cole was South Africa’s first black freelance photographer (if, admittedly, only by lying to the authorities); Graciela Iturbide was padding into the desert to document the indigenous populations (although some of her work feels included more for geographical or gender reasons than anything else).

The counterculture was never as inclusive as it liked to claim: in fact arguably it’s self-regarding in every sense and as keen on self-aggrandisement as any vested interest. But then, photography’s endless preoccupation is inevitably, understandably, photography: where to look. In that sense, nothing ever moves.

In this issue, Topho takes a dive into the works of various influential and relevant artists during the seventies.

Cover photo: Michael Jang, Aunts and Uncles, 1973

Excess & Androgyny The early 1970s weren’t all Woodstock afterglow and flower power; these years played host to the Glam era and the rise of a new kind of excess. Glitzing its way from British fine art schools into the wardrobes of David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, Glam represented liberation via sartorial escapism and the blurring of gender lines. Glam! The Performance Of Style at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt delves into the era’s pop culture archives – from Roxy Music to the works of Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton – in a union of art, music and fashion. Having kicked off the show, curator Darren Pih gave Topho an insight into a world that truly indulged the senses.

Topho: So what defined the glam era?

Darren Pih: Glam was lots of things. On the one hand, it was a style that was theatrical, visually excessive and artificial. It exhibits ideas of camp, androgyny and irony, as reflected in the work of Jack Smith, for example, and Steven Arnold, who feature in the exhibition. Of course, at the front face of pop culture it was evident in the work of David Bowie and the New York Dolls.

Glam was also sophisticated in the sense that in synthesizes and collages past styles. But glam was more than an aesthetic. It’s more like an attitude, a particular way of thinking about visual culture, identity, and personal style.

T: What tied fine art and Glam together?

Darren Pih: Well, I think we need to look at the emergence of Roxy Music, for example. The band evolved from a British art

school educated milieu. During the 1960s and early 1970s, there was convergence between the realms of fine art, fashion, and music. It was a context that produced people like Antony Price, a graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, who was the image-maker and stylist of Roxy Music. Roxy Music’s leader Bryan Ferry studied fine art under pop artist Richard Hamilton.

T: How did Glam manage to go from the college art scene to global pop phenomenon?

Darren Pih: Gender debates were important at this time. During the early 1970s ideas of androgyny and gender ambivalence were pushed into pop culture. But these were also art ideas explored, for example, in work of artists such as Katharina Sieverding and Ulay. I do think, in fact, that glam was meaningful then – and still relevant today – because it revealed how identity and gender could be performed. It was portal for personal transformation.

T: What would you say Glam working in reaction to?

Darren Pih: I think […] that Glam was a reaction to the 1960s.

The 1960s was a time of utopian, idealism and authenticity. It was the age of the protest song and the counter-culture. In counterpoint, Glam was a period of artifice. The early 1970s was a time of social and political unrest in the UK, and Glam seemed to offer an escape to fantasy.

Glam! The Performance of Style runs until September 22 at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Römerberg, 60311 Frankfurt.

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07 ↑Nan Goldin, Kenny putting on make-up, 1973

More Nan Goldin at page 30

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09 ↑Ulay, Sh’e, 1972

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: POLAROIDS Topho presents ‘Polaroids: Mapplethorpe’, the early instant photography of Robert Mapplethorpe (b.1946, d.1989). The collection of 92 polaroids, selected from a body of over 1500, taken between 1970 and 1975, offers a compelling insight into the controversial photographer’s formative years and the development of his artistic identity.

Mapplethorpe first started taking images with a Polaroid camera he borrowed from Sandy Daley, a filmmaker. He quickly embraced the gay fashion, lifestyle and culture from the early 1970’s and started taking photographs for his homoerotic collages. Yet, from the very beginning, he also photographed Patti Smith: lover, friend and muse. The immediacy of the results and the small size of the prints were the primary appeal for Mapplethorpe. The medium reflected the fast speed of the times, enhancing interaction, spontaneity and freethinking. He became an expert in composition, suggestion and the use of natural light by playing with the depth of field, throwing the foreground out of focus, framing silhouettes delicately, creating diagonal poses spilling out of the frame.

The images taken of Sam Wagstaff, later lover, benefactor and mentor, reflect the explicit admiration and intimate connection with his lover, as opposed to Smith’s images, which are rarely sexual or lustful. From shaving in the bathtub to sexual scenarios, he was paying now more attention to the action than the lighting or composition as he used to. He was therefore

using the camera as a channel for experience, as a document of lovers’ diaries.

Mapplethorpe would entertain and photograph the bodies and faces of the men, women, gay or straight, that he would meet at parties. At times explicitly sexual, they range in tone from tender to provocative. His Catholic upbringing would influence him to mix the sacred and the profane, sexualizing the spiritual and expressing this contradictive devotion through portraits of his lovers in religious iconographic poses or posting crosses over the images.

Through contacts with curators, Mapplethorpe gained access to the social circle he was looking for. He shot portraits of celebrities, society snapshots to self-portraits, classical nudes, provoking sexual acts… and although during the 1980s, his focus shifted to exploring more formal codes of classical beauty, with flowers and still lifes, as well as statuesque male and female nudes, portraiture became the central point of Mapplethorpe’s career and the best means of earning a living.

With the Polaroid shots, Mapplethorpe not only revealed the evolution in his thinking and seeing but also a unique spontaneity that defined his artistic persona and his psychological identity. Polaroid provided immediate gratification, and they allowed him to penetrate the subjects’ appearances and minds as well as to shape himself as an artist and a man.

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11 ↑Patti Smith, 1975

↑1973

12 ↑1975

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13 竊全am Wagstaff, 1973

Pablo Bartholomew Outside in:

14 ↑Pooh in bed at home, Bombay, 1975

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After being kicked out of school for having drugs on his person, Pablo Bartholomew’s photograpic carreer began with Outside In - A Tale Of Three Cities, documenting the streets of Dehli, Bombay and Calcutta. These early photographs are at the core of Bartholomew’s other ‘outsider’ images taken in the years between 1972 and 1982. His reach expands from gentle dereliction to harsher realities: “a grim portrayal of a junky friend, a Danish woman”, shooting up in one of central Delhi’s opium dens where he himself hung out after school; eunuchs in the neighbourhood and, in Bombay a little later, film extras, prostitutes, ragpickers and, at the end of the road, human leftovers abandoned to the metropolitan street.

generic reading of human suffering, precursors to his subsequent career of international photojournalism, tracking natural disasters and political conflict across the globe: always on the road, fast on the draw and supplying dire images formatted for a story-cumphoto-essay to the avid world of news magazines.

He continued with self-assigned projects, including a fine series on Chinese working-class migrants in Tangra (Calcutta) that confirmed his affinities beyond the self-exiled to marginalized communities and classes. These are, of course, classical genres of photography - the socially erased figure being integral to, almost immanent in, the camera’s eye.

Those of us who have dated photographers who didn’t take pictures like these of us would probably want to kill the ex-s or just imagine themselves in the pictures, instead of lovelies like Pooh. You can’t get to press your eye any closer to the keyhole than these photographs.

If in Bartholomew’s oeuvre this body of work claims a special place, it is because it is part of his teenage self-making: seen in conjunction with his images of love and friendship, it acquires a keen vulnerability. It is special because he was among the earliest Indian photographers to realize and expose social circumstances within an existential continuum - as figures of abjection, alienation, intransigence and struggle. And they are also, in a more

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The 70s are frozen in to gorgeous, smoke–ridden life in these photographs. His world is made up of heavy–lidded women who puff on joints and scrawny men who dance wearing bell bottoms and argue about vaguely–leftist ideology. It’s tough to believe these outstanding photographs are taken by a kid playing around with his camera.

↑Solar eclipse on TV, New Dehli, 1979

16 ↑Juhu Beach, Bombay, 1977

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17 ↑Nommie Dancing a at party at Koko’s, New Delhi, 1975

↑A friend asleep, Bombay, 1976

↑Lavatory, New Dehli, 1976

Hugh holland: Locals Only

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Self-thaught Hugh Holland began experimenting with photography in the late 1960’s, but didn’t discover his definitive subject until his move to Los Angeles from his native Oklahoma. Shot with a special colour film and often taken during late afternoon, everything is bathed by the soft illumination of the low-lying sun.

Special attention is paid to line and form, transforming the snap shot images to appear like carefully composed film stills.

The empty pools, schoolyards, and parks featured in the photographs are the stuff of skaters’ dreams – huge, vacant expanses made even more deluxe by Holland’s ultra-wide lenses. The lines and shadows created by the curved and cut-out landscapes make for beautiful, trippy compositions that glorify the skaters – simultaneously capturing the speed and poise of their movements.

Compared to the graphic, fat-shoe, ankle-twisted skate photos of today, these works have a laid back, unaffected quality that speaks to a time when the sport was more about personal feats of gravity and unmeditated risk-taking than triple endorsement-seeking one-upsmanship. Locals Only is a chance to see skateboarding the way it once was – unembellished, hazardous, and imperative; truly skate or die.

These seminal images document the classic era of the early skateboard scene in California in the early 1970’s, with many of the images featuring the now legendary names of the sport, such as Jay Adams and Stacy Peralta. Holland began documenting the

21 ←1975

burgeoning phenomenon in 1975 after becoming instantly captivated through a chance encounter with a group of skateboarding kids whilst driving up Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Fervent enthusiasm for the energy of the counterculture quickly certified Holland’s acceptance within the community. Every spare moment was spent capturing the everyday social interactions of groups, such as the notorious Z-boys from Santa Monica and Venice and the skaters of Kenter Canyon, Paul Revere and Brentwood.

“My first experience I had with skaters was on the street, but I remember driving up the Laurel Canyon Blvd and seeing them really bobbing up and down in and out of sight in this little drainage pool up in the Hollywood hills. I had my camera with me so I pulled over to the side of the road and started taking pictures.

I was welcomed right away – because they all wanted pictures recording the tricks they were doing.”

22 ↑1975

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↑1976

Michael jang: The Jangs Topho is pleased to present The Jangs by Michael Jang, an exhibition of photographs taken of the artist’s immediate and extended family during the 1970s. Unseen in an exhibition context for 40 years, The Jangs has been newly mined for contemporary viewership.

unique approach. By delving deeply into the daily lives of his own family and relatives, he captured sharp, spontaneous, and intimate images that reveal a singular view of America, one in which issues of suburban dystopia and clashing cultures are overwhelmed by his family’s joyful embrace of the American experience.

The series began in 1973 while Jang, then a student at Cal Arts, was on summer break and taking a workshop with Lisette Model in San Francisco. Living at the Pacifica home of his relatives, Jang had familial access to agreeable subjects in his Uncle Monroe, Aunt Lucy and his three cousins. Taking pictures in the spirit of casual family snapshots, Jang responded to ordinary moments in the daily lives of his extended relatives. We see them in the living room watching television, dancing at parties, watering the garden, and setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July.Collectively and retrospectively, his photographs operate within a larger social and historical context, offering a warm and often humorous portrait of one family’s ongoing assimilation into American culture, evinced with optimism, wonder, and wit. In them, Jang goes beyond documenting the Chinese-American experience to show us a family that is almost prototypically American.

Jang grew up in the Gold Rush town of Marysville and received his BFA at Cal Arts and MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute.

At the time, Jang was largely influenced by the street photography of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Works from The Jangs series were recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. According to Jang, “For most of us it’s really hard to photograph our own family. You’ll get the hand with a ‘don’t take my picture.’ Plus, things become invisible when you’ve lived with them your whole life. So I found that photographing relatives was a profoundly different experience. Every day was a new visual discovery. I saw things fresh for the first time and responded voraciously.”

The Jangs presents a look into the lifestyle of a Chinese-American family in the context of the American mainstream of the 70s, a cultural view largely unseen in the photography of the era.

While other photographers were critically investigating American suburbia as a crucial subject, Jang responded with his own

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25 ↑At Home with the Jangs, 1973

26 ↑Lucy Watering, 1975

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↑Monroe and Cynthia Watching T.V., 1973

27 →Chris, 1974

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

竊全elf Portrait, 1979

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A large colour photograph of an artist staring directly at the camera. Intense red blood in the white of her swollen left eye mirrors the shade of her lipstick. Dark bruises colour the skin around it and below her right eye. In contrast to the physical damage she defiantly offers to the camera, she appears well groomed. Her hair is glossy and well brushed and, in addition to the bright red lipstick, she is wearing dangly earrings and a necklace. She has photographed herself against a piece of dark wooden furniture and a white embroidered curtain that appears bluish in the artificial night-time light. The dark shadows behind her head indicate the use of a flash bulb. As a photographic print, this image exists in an edition of twenty-five. It marks the end of a long-term relationship and a particular period in the artist’s life and provides the emotional climax of her slide show and book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

Goldin’s photographs, of herself, her lovers and her friends, have a diaristic function. They combine a spontaneous, snapshot aesthetic with social portraiture in the genre of Hungarian born, French photographer George Brassai (1899-1984) and American photographer Diane Arbus (1923-71). While many of the subjects of the photographs are glamorous, their circumstances are emotionally raw and gritty. She has said ‘I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorisation, without glorification.This is not a bleak world but one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection’ (quoted

in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, p.6). She began showing her photographic portraits as slides when she did not have access to a darkroom and could not afford to have prints made.

The first public presentation of her images occurred in the New York clubs and bars where she worked and played in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Through repeated showing the series of slides was edited and developed a narrative. In 1981 Goldin titled it The Ballad of Sexual Dependency after ‘The Ballad of Sexual Obsession’ in The Threepenny Opera (1928)

by Bertholt Brecht (1898-1956) and Kurt Weill (1900-50).

The work has continued to be added to over time. In 1986 an abridged version of it was published as a book by Aperture Press, New York. The slide show has been digitised and linked with a sound-track collated using blues, reggae, rock and opera music. Lyrics, rhythms and tunes underscore and influence the narrative sequence of the photographic images.

“I often fear that men and women are irrevocably strangers to each other, irreconcilably unsuited, almost as if they were from different planets. But there is an intense need for coupling in spite of it all. Even if relationships are destructive, people cling together … The tension this creates seems to be a universal problem: the struggle between autonomy and dependency.The Ballad of Sexual Dependency begins and ends with this premise … I’m trying to figure out what makes coupling so difficult.”

31 →The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1977-1980

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