Directed by Zachary Levy
[via LITA]
According to Wojnarowicz, he was “playing with ideas of compression of ‘historical time and activity’ and fusing the French poet’s identity with modern New York urban activities, mostly illegal in nature.” From Times Square to the abandoned Hudson River piers, the Rimbaud figure’s wanderings mirrored Wojnarowicz’s own transient life in the city. Published in the Soho Weekly News in June 1980, this series marks Wojnarowicz’s first serious effort in photography and his first publicly exhibited artwork.Downtown Pix is up through April 3rd – click here to read the review and see a slideshow, and visit the Grey Art Gallery's website for more images and info.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), the former slave who in December 1803 defeated Napoleon's colonial forces on the island of Hispaniola, and the following year established the independent nation of Haiti.
Venice Beach Rock Festival, 1968, by photographer Dennis Stock, who died last night at the age of 81. Stock apprenticed with W. Eugene Smith and Gjon Mili before being invited by Robert Capa to join Magnum Photos, where his contemporaries included Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Visit NPR's excellent photo blog The Picture Show to listen to an interview with Dennis Stock on the occasion of a recent exhibition of his work in Woodstock, NY, and see much more of his work (and an audio slideshow) at Magnum.
Photographs by Billy Name, resident photographer of the Factory from 1963 to 1970: (Left) Edie Sedgwick during her 1965 screen test at Andy Warhol's Silver Factory; (Right) Andy Warhol with, clockwise from top, Mary Woronov, Nico and International Velvet, in 1966. Billy Name's archive of negatives has tragically gone missing, the result of a dispute with his former agent. Here's hoping that the article in last Friday's New York Times helps to expose and correct the situation.
Artwork by Drew Christie, part of a series of paintings inspired by photographs from the now-defunct Gourmet Magazine. Every time I visit Drew's blog I become a bigger and bigger fan of his work.
A short article ran in Friday's New York Times about Daniella Romano, who runs the Brooklyn Navy Yard's archive.For the last six years, while [Romano] has been running the yard’s archive and collecting artifacts for a museum scheduled to open next year, unexpected gifts have been arriving at her office in a former electronics workshop. Velvet-lined boxes of naval architects’ drafting tools have turned up, as well as 1860s gunpowder pouches, sailors’ vintage uniforms, rusted guns and a World War I-era ID badge with a photograph of a pale, somber shipbuilder, labeled Q496 51631.Read the rest at nytimes.com; info on the forthcoming Brooklyn Navy Yard museum can be found here. See also: The Brooklyn Navy Yard's Flickr Stream, where I snagged the image above.
The archive has also received a 1909 postcard showing the yard paymaster’s house; on the back an enraged shipyard worker scrawled to his girlfriend, “What kind of a gin game you giving me, taking me for a damn fool?”
Ms. Romano has even been handed a can of cremated human remains; the deceased, Eugenia Farrar, an opera singer, performed a pioneering 1907 radio broadcast that was picked up by Navy Yard radio operators.
“We try not to move that can, because the ashes shake out,” Ms. Romano said while giving a tour of an archive storeroom a few weeks ago. She had to step around some rusted horseshoes that were dug up at the yard and a recently donated, eight-foot-long model of a 1940s battleship with miniature sailors swabbing the deck.