Tag: photography

Tseng Kwong Chi

Tseng Kwong Chi, “Warhol at Table”, 1985, Digital Chromogenic Print

Photographer, performance artist and New York downtown personality, Tseng Kwong Chi was born in Hong Kong in 1950 and settled in the East Village of New York in 1979. He developed an artistic persona in the late 1970’s as a kind of Chinese dignitary or “Ambiguous Ambassador,” complete with the classic Mao Tse-Tung suit, dark eyeglasses and an identity tag stamped “SlutforArt”.

Traveling around the United States and the world, Tseng Kwong Chi posited himself amid stereotypical tourist sites, from the Eiffel Tower to Niagara Falls, from the Statue of Liberty to the Grand Canyon. He ricocheting between nature and culture to develop an extensive and now-famous series of 100 silver gelatin self-portraits, entitled the “Expeditionary Self-Portraits” or “East Meets West”. These prints possess wit and humor, as well as great formal beauty in their investigations of issues ranging from the nature of tourism, tourist photography, and cultural identity.

Tseng Kwong Chi soon met Keith Haring and other in the East Village scene who became central to his life and work. With best friends Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Ann Magnuson, Tseng became a much-touted documentarian and denizen of the spirited New York downtown scene. He was Keith Haring’s “official” photographer, creating an archive of over 40,000 images recording Keith Haring at work on public and gallery art, from his early subway drawings to his large scale commissions.

Tseng worked in black and white as well as in color, in both candid and formal portraits of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Peter Halley, McDermott & McGough, Francesco Clemente, among others of the 1980’s art scene. By the time of his death in 1990, at age 39, from an AIDS infection, Tseng Kwong Chi had evolved two major bodies of work. His photography is in many collections: San Francisco Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, New School in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, among others.

Reblogged with many thanks to http://snow1960.tumblr.com

Alice Lex-Nerlinger

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, “Racecar Driver”, 1926, Vintage Silver Print from an Original Photogram, Private Collection

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, was born in 1893 to the owner of a gas lamp factory on Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Between 1911 and 1916, she studied painting and graphic art at the Teaching Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts under painter and lithographer Emil Orlik and other teachers. 

Personal experience of the First World War and the atmosphere of artistic experiment in 1920s Berlin created provided a source of ideas for Alice Lex-Nerlinger’s artistic works: heroism versus the soldier’s death, man and machine, capital and labour, state and censor, and not least, the misogynist. She found stimulus and confirmation in groups of artists with similar attitudes such as the Abstrakten (the Abstracts) and the Association of Revolutionary Fine Artists in Germany founded in 1928. Like Alice Lex, these groups rejected Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism as bourgeois art. She expressed her political convictions by joining the German Communist Party (KPD) along with her husband Oskar Nerlinger in 1928.

Photographs, newspaper clippings and strikingly contrasted colors, such as red and blue, provided the ingredients for Lex-Nerlinger’s socially critical montages, specializing in photomontages and colored spray painting. Her work was often produced in sequential series creating rhythm and multi-dimensionality. Lex-Nerlinger succeeded in translating the complexity of political statements into simply structured individual images or compositions which prompted discussion and inquiry.

In 1933 Lex-Nerlinger was expelled from the German Association of Fine Artists by the National Socialists and banned from practicing her profession and from exhibiting her artwork. Censorship and this ban on her artwork drove her into engaging in underground political activities against the regime. 

Alice Lex-Nerlinger did manage to survive during National Socialism in Germany; but, fearful of persecution and house searches, she destroyed some of her artworks. After the Second World War, she worked in the German Democratic Republic primarily on official portrait commissions. She was honored with a honorary pension in 1960, which she received with the support of the Germany Academy of Arts, and was honored with the Patriotic Order of Merit of the GDR in 1974. 

Nancy Elwood

Nancy Elwood, “The Eye of a Gator”, 2015, Apopka, Florida

Nancy Elwood is a photographer living and working in Florida. She shot this photograph of a big alligator along the road of the Apopka Wildlife Drive in Apopka, Florida in October of 2015. It  was taken with a Nikon D81o. This photograph was entered in the 2016 Nature/Animal Category of the National Geographic Photography Contest.