News
-
Gail Quagliata
Sometimes a Can of “Beanz” is Not Just a Can of “Beanz”
Chris Killip is a genius. Proof:
-
Gail Quagliata
Theoretical Family
Long winded Hallmark card later, one of the most impressive photographers I've ever encountered thus far in my life (full stop, not "in class" or "in Brooklyn" or "not in a gallery") just so happened to be one of my classmates, Seung Hun Lee.
-
Gail Quagliata
Bacalaitos & Fireworks
Bacalaitos & Fireworks introduces readers to a New York City long gone. This is the New York of broken televisions littered throughout the streets, burned-out abandoned buildings, neighborhood fiestas with pigs roasting on spits, and outcasts living in poverty. Gottfried offers first-hand testimony to the pain of alienation, neglect, drug addiction, and ultimately crime, prison,
-
Gail Quagliata
LUST
Granted, Arlene shoots a good deal of her work on 35mm (R.I.P., Kodachrome) and would probably look at me crooked for placing digital capture (regardless of its 37.5 megapizels or 30X45mm sensor) on the same stage, even in the same arena, as film, and, while my brain, eyeballs, and old-school vocational photographic education all concur emphatically, my heart and my, I don't know, ovaries? belong to this overpriced pixel-hog beast... Oh! Leica S2, you fancy vixen.
-
Gail Quagliata
Leonid Brezhnev’s Unused Villa
Soviet Brutalist architecture is beautiful and strange, much of it like some odd abandoned spaceship, long-forgotten Hollywood Sci-Fi set from the 60s, or perhaps the fevered product of a very rigorously-minded architect on a great deal of hallucinogenic drugs. Frédéric Chaubin, when not editing Citizen K, has been taken with documenting odd buildings for some time, thus it seems natural he'd be drawn to these secular icons while traveling through the former Soviet Union.
-
Gail Quagliata
She’s a Talker
it took almost a decade for me to be exposed to Neil Goldberg's full catalogue (or, more accurately, find out who the awesome "men with their cats" video guy was, and see what else he could do). Much of Goldberg's work is video based and largely silent, and it's the sort of work that describes a deep love for and understanding of the medium
-
Gail Quagliata
Casa Susanna (on epic finds)
What drew me to the work was the urgency to document the normal. As many who have written about Casa Susanna (the book) have stated, transvestites in pop culture are shrouded in a veritable haze of stage lights, glitter, and feathers, but these ladies are, more often than not, altogether domestic and grounded - posed demurely for Christmas cards, in near-matronly cocktail dress, simply living out roles as average women, hardly a Cher or Jayne Mansfield in the bunch.
-
Gail Quagliata
Bacalaitos and Fireworks
My friend Arlene Gottfried has been shooting in and around her hometown of NYC since the 1970s. Her latest book (which is just coming out), "Bacalaitos and Fireworks," tracks her 40 odd years documenting her time in and around the Nuyorican community. From the quiet portraits of her dearly departed Miguel Piñero to the crackling, color-saturated moments stolen during parades and everything in between (a pig roasting in a rubble-filled city lot, little girls in crisp communion gowns marching past the dystopian, surreal setpieces of a crumpled car and a battered tv, bizarre moments of city life that would seem staged if the characters caught therein weren't so irrefutably genuine), Arlene manages to make the viewer feel like he or she is with her in that moment, like a welcome participant in some grand secret, great spectacle, private moment, neighborhood function, or deep sorrow. She'll be presenting her work at 3pm today at B&H's Event Space on 34th and 9th.
-
Gail Quagliata
Allow me to introduce myself (with black metal and nightclubs)
Through the care and rigor taken with this series, Beste's bright images of humanity mid-celebration transcend mere glimpses of "debauchery after dark" to become something more culturally sublime and richly codified, in the way his Norwegian metal-men become sad warriors without a crusade when fixed in his lens.