A Democratic Eye On London: Dennis Morris @ the Photographers’ Gallery

 

Dennis Morris, Johnny Rotten, backstage at the Marquee club, London, 1977 © Dennis Morris.

 


text by Poppy Baring


Known mainly for his celebrity portraits and coverage of stars like Bob Marley, Oasis, the Sex Pistols, and other early punk and reggae icons, Dennis Morris’s new solo exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London also features his lesser known reportage work. Music + Life is a three-floor presentation of Morris’s life documenting everything from the pride and resilience of post-war Black British culture to the rarefied inner sanctum of the music industry. 

These pictures don’t have an angle they’re attempting to make plain. Instead, they provide us with a rare and personal glimpse into the lives of mega music stars in their youth. They are candid images taken between friends. Morris thereby reveals naturally occurring gems of moments that are refreshing, intoxicating, and remarkably at ease. His approach was nothing more than knocking on a door; the door would open, and he would go from there. 

 

Dennis Morris, Oasis Backstage in Tokyo, 1994 © Dennis Morris.

 

Starting at the age of eight, and landing his first cover on London’s Daily Mirror at just eleven years old, it is clear that Morris had a strong passion for photography early on, as well as the determination to take it places. His remarkable career started when St. Mark’s church in Dalston, where he sang in the choir, started a camera club. Influenced heavily by reportage photography, which was a favored style at the time, Morris began photographing his environment in East London. In 1973, this progressed into skipping school so that he could take photos of Bob Marley as he entered sound check. Almost straight after, when Morris was just fourteen, Marley asked him to join and document the Catch a Fire tour. Young Dennis Morris accepted and, as they did for several artists, his photographs became key to the marketing and making of Marley’s career.

Dennis Morris, The Abyssinians, outtake from the photo shoot for the album Arise, 1977 © Dennis Morris.

While these authentic photographs of famous musicians provide a behind-the-scenes look into the lives of stars past, his exploration into London’s Hackney in the 1970s surveys another fascinating world. Although areas like Dalston and Hackney are now sought-after places to live, the pictures taken in his early career show just how much London has changed in the last fifty years. Morris explains his approach, saying in his interview, “If I’m in the studio, it’s like I’m on the street; if I’m on the street, it’s like I’m in the studio.” Overall, this creates a nice balance to the exhibition—one which raises East London to stardom and renders celebrity as rather quotidian.

Music + Life is on view through September 28 at the Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London, W1F7LW

Dennis Morris, Untitled, 1970s © Dennis Morris.

Berlin's Schwules Museum Spotlights Germany's Modern Queer Movement in Photography as a Way of Life. Rüdiger Trautsch: 50 years of pictures

Rüdiger Trautsch not only carved a space for the documentation of Queerness, but also captured the beauty and artistry in his community’s everyday life: radical acts, during his career and still today, as Queer reality and history face continuing (but impossible) threats of erasement. His work includes photographs of the first gay protest marches in Münster and West Berlin in the 1970s up to the last Folsom events before Corona in Berlin. In between are celebrity shots of Warhol and Mapplethorpe, images of the legendary Hamburg house club Front, shots of bear parties, and his drag and couples series. Trautsch’s pictures move between documentation and art. They are indispensable visual material for queer historiography in Germany, but his work also offers moving individual shots that reflect a very special relationship to his subject. Photography as a Way of Life presents an overview of the five decades of Trautsch’s work, focusing on one motif: for photographer Rüdiger Trautsch, the camera was a means of making contact with people rather than just a device. In Rüdiger Trautsch’s life, photography became not only a cultural practice, but also a social one: taking pictures to make friends.

Photography as a Way of Life is on view through September 23rd at the Schwules Museum, Lützowstraße 73, 10785 Berlin

Isa Genzken 75/75 Celebrates 75 Sculptures & 75 Years of Life @ Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin

 
 

To mark Isa Genzken’s 75th birthday, the Neue Nationalgalerie is honoring the German artist with the exhibition Isa Genzken: 75/75, showing 75 sculptures spanning all phases of her oeuvre from the 1970s to the present. The presentation recalls displays of classical antiquity collections in its arrangement of individual sculptures in the Neue Nationalgalerie’s upper hall. In the configuration models, archetypes and assessments of the human and modern society emerge.

The sculptures are not hewn into form but rather embody in their heterogeneous materiality the technologies, plastic, concrete, decorations and functional objects that permeate daily life. Genzken transposes these reassessments and fluid framings into authenticity, beauty, absurdity and exaggeration. Her work derives from actualities, such as a window or the figure of an actor, which she then alters and distorts into her own realities and visual language. The individual, also her as an artist, and her biography are the instruments used in this scrutiny of Western culture’s ideals and types of production.

“The works are meant to function more as moving images than as sculptures, with a new view seen from every angle. Nothing is fixed or two-dimensional but rather cinematic,” said Isa Genzken in an interview in 2016. Visitors discover themselves being queried through the confrontation with familiar everydayness. Collages of personal worlds emerge. The viewers become participants, tools, and scales of measurement within the exhibition space, not least through reflections in the object surfaces.

75/75 is on view through November 27th at Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin.

Persons Projects Examines the Influence of The Helsinki School Perspective @ Both of Their Gallery Spaces in Berlin

Persons Projects’ summer exhibition, The Helsinki School Perspective, is presented in both gallery spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35, featuring a selection of artists, all of whom had pivotal roles in the beginning of the Helsinki School. The exhibition is dedicated to the historical aspect, exploring how these artists use the photographic processes as a voice for abstraction and a tool for interpreting their emotional landscapes. The Helsinki School platform was created by Timothy Persons in the 1990s, who became inspired by his experience with the Open Studio Concept that was popular during his graduate studies in the mid-1970s in Southern California. It grew to become the most extended sustainable educational platform of its kind consisting of six generations of selected MA students originating from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. There are now more than 180 monogram books and 6 volumes of the Helsinki School book that have evolved from this program. This exhibition is curated to reintroduce a new perspective on the conceptual roots that built The Helsinki School.

Part 1 features work by Niko Luoma, Ea Vasko, Mikko Sinervo, and Nanna Hänninen. In Part 1, we experience four different approaches to how these selected artists use the photographic process to abstract a moment in time, the passage of a day, a memory of a specific place, or the interpretation of a historical painting.

Part 2 features work by Anni Leppälä, Janne Lehtinen, Miklos Gaál, and Ilkka Halso, artists who form a unique image that transcends how we interpret our personal, social, and ecological landscape seeing through a Nordic approach to nature.

Niko Luoma
Self-Titled Adaptation of Le Rêve (1932), (2015)
From the series Adaptions
Archival pigment print, Diasec
193 x 155 cm
© the artist, courtesy: Persons Projects

Niko Luoma
Self-Titled Adaptation of Caryatid (1913), (2018)
From the series Adaptations
Archival pigment print, Diasec
128 x 103 cm
© the artist, courtesy: Persons Projects

The Helsinki School Perspective is on show July 1st to September 9th at Persons Projects, Lindenstraße 34-35, 10969 Berlin

Gus Van Sant: Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard @ Vito Schnabel Projects In New York

Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard is Van Sant’s first solo painting exhibition in New York. On view is a series of large-scale watercolors on stretched linen that collapse dreamlike impressions of urban Los Angeles with specific narratives inspired by the people and events Van Sant has observed since establishing his home in the city in the 1970s. Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard is on view through November 1 at Vito Schnabel Projects 43 Clarkson Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Vito Schnabel Projects

Rubbish And Dreams @ The Leslie-Lohman Museum Of Gay And Lesbian Art In New York

Rubbish and Dreams: the Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble, is an exhibition focusing on a performance artist who became iconic in 1970s New York for his disruptive interventions into galleries, public spaces, and financial institutions. Varble would engage in unauthorized and impromptu performance wearing elaborate drag costumes made from street trash, food waste, and stolen objects. His work was decidedly anti-institutional and he disrupted the business of art in the 1970s. For these reasons, he was soon written out of history, and no substantive piece of writing on his practice has been published for 40 years. This exhibition draws on a number of private archives in telling Varble’s story for the first time. RUBBISH AND DREAMS: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble is on view through January 6, 2019 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 26 Wooster Street, New York.