Dear Dave,
In the convulsions of this election year, with the hope that our first african-american president will be replaced by the first female commander in chief, we are honored to share Hilton Als’ thoughts on Shirley Chisholm. As a congresswoman, her historic canidacy for President in the Democratic primary in 1972 was fortified by her dignity, compassion and fearlessness, and in her words “to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo”. The occasion permits a tribute to her by virture of the work of Richard Avedon, whose own instinct for cultural and political shift has left a legacy of uncommon insight.
The work of Roe Ethridge has been of significant influence to a young generation of photographers in his supple endorsement of vernacular photography and his rummage through typologies of photographic style and pupose. Here, he and the curator Kevin Moore share some often droll thoughts on the medium and his work and processes.
One of the abiding qualities of photography as an aesthetic practice is the transformation of the familiar and emphemeral into something well worthy of contemplation and recognition, and the recent work of Sally Gall sustains that enterprise: rather than a figure of domestic dudgery, a simple clothes line becomes an opportunity for joy. Individually, the photographs occupy a range of outcomes all elbowing abstraction----melodic musical notation, an avian navigation, a bouquet of crimson, a brisk flotila of luminous form.
Bronx bred and based, Kevin Amato’s work deliberately shuffles cultural classifications of race and sexuality and class and gender, and in the words of the writer Alix Browne, “the machismo of thug culture is thoroughly disarmed”. The work pivots between documentary and style, stark realism and urban materialism that is familiar in fashion and pop music culture, and part of the work’s impact is its vividness as portraiture.
As an artist, Stacy Renee Morrision weaves a narrative web in which fact and fiction are negotiated, the past is interpretive, and photography, correspondance and historical artifact conspire.
Bill Cunningham has had a beloved presence in the social fabric of New York, documenting fashion on the streets, runways, and swank social events for the New York Times for thirty years, and the writer Philip Gefter has contributed a thoughtful and affectionate appreciation of Bill, both as a meticulous archivist of style, and as one whose modesty, work ethic and benevolence deserve acknowledgement and emulation.
The artist and writer Efrem Zelony Mindell has gathered a group of young photographers whose work, in diverse ways, proposes the body as a site of fluctuation, rearrangement, mutation and imagination (irregardless of sexual orientation or gender). His exhuberent essay posits the camera as the chaperone through this lush area of celebration, and the construction of identity in relation to the fabrication of form and the image.
November cannot come soon enough. With thanks and love,