Tag: Books
Whitney Houston Wembley Arena, London | 1988 “I first heard African drum rhythms and chants at the movies, and they weren’t too different from the old Negro spirituals I grew up with in the South. There was a relationship. Though I didn’t know anything much about Africa, it felt familiar,” Isaac Hayes writes in the […]
Cover of Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond (Damiani Books, 2024). Photo by Chris Stein. It’s been said that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, which may be true among those who trade only in words but, for an artist the cover is paramount. It is the single […]
Dancehall: The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture cover With the arrival of the Windrush Generation in the decades following World War II, the style and sound of Jamaica made an indelible impact on generations to come. As the diaspora took root in London, Toronto, and Brooklyn, an international network was forged, bringing the music of […]
Barreto’s on Stanton Street (1987) | 📷: Tria Giovan On May 28, 1984, New York Magazine announced the death knell of the Lower East Side (LES) with a cover story declaiming the arrival of gentrification. “There Goes the Neighborhood,” the weekly warned, above a photograph of white hipsters in front of a graffiti-covered wall that’s […]
📷: (L) Slick Rick by Sophie Bramly (R) Slick Rick by Janette Beckman | Courtesy of TASCHEN Picture it: Detroit, the late 1980s. High school student Vikki Tobak awaited her turn to speak as the teacher asked the class: “What do you want to do when you grow up?” The teen, who first arrived in […]
There are many, many reasons to dislike Kim Kardashian, breaker of the internet, purveyor of selfies and symbol of mind-numbing, soul-crushing millennial vanity. But it was over her predilection for fur that a group of activists bombed her Tuesday signing for Selfish at a Midtown Barnes & Noble. A group of about 10 protesters, some […]
For several years, Danish photographer Søren Solkær has been hunting down urban artists from all across the globe and shooting their portraits for his new exhibit/book SURFACE. It all started in 2011, when renowned street artist Shepard Fairey went to Solkær’s hometown of Copenhagen to do a mural. The lensman snapped his photo and then […]
When speaking out against ISIS earlier this month, President Obama attempted to rein in those who maligned the entire religion of Islam based on the actions of radical groups. “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed […]
Nate “Igor” Smith is a NYC-based photographer who mostly conducts photo shoots with porn stars and other Suicide Girls-type models. He posts lots of those results on website Driven By Boredom, which has been warehousing his images and adventures for over a decade, like this entry from 2002 via the WayBackMachine. “Yeah, I am on […]
Artist Addie Wagenknecht (Webcam Venus, Prism Break Barbie, PUSSYDRONES) has just published Technological Selection of Fate — a “fragile, glitchy” book of old, private LiveJournal entry excerpts. I used my livejournal account from 2000-2009 as a place I defined as a private space where I shared mostly my relationships failures to my ‘online only’ friends. This group of people knew more about my […]
