Pierre Molinier

Pierre Molinier (April 13, 1900 - March 3, 1976) was a painter, photographer and "maker of objects". He was born in Agen (France) and lived his life in Bordeaux (France). He began his career by painting landscapes, but his work turned towards a fetishistic eroticism early on.














Molinier began to take photographs at the age of 18. When Molinier's sister died in 1918, he is alleged to have had sex with her corpse while left alone to photograph it. "'Even dead, she was beautiful. I shot sperm on her stomach and legs, and onto the First Communion dress she was wearing. She took with her into death the best of me."


Molinier started his erotic production around 1950. With the aid of a wide range of specially made 'props' – dolls, various prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, dildos and an occasional confidante – Pierre Molinier focused upon his own body as the armature for a constructive form that ultimately produced a large body of photographic work. Most of his photographs, photomontages, are self-portraits of himself as a woman.

He began a correspondence with André Breton and sent him photographs of his paintings. Later Breton integrated him into the Surrealist group. Breton organized an exhibition of Molinier's paintings in Paris, in January-February 1956.

Pierre Molinier's enigmatic photographs have influenced European and North American body artists since the 1970s, including Jürgen Klauke, Cindy Sherman and Ron Athey, and his work continues to engage artists, critics, and collectors today.

In the 1970s, Molinier's health began to decline. Like his father before him, Pierre Molinier committed suicide at 76 years of age by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

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Nan Goldin

Nancy "Nan" Goldin (born, September 12, 1953, Washington, D.C.) is an American photographer.












Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts suburb of Lexington, to middle class Jewish parents whose ideas, moderately liberal and progressive, were put to the test when on April 12, 1965 their eldest daughter Barbara Holly, at the age of eighteen, committed suicide. After attending the nearby Lexington High School, she enrolled at the Satya Community School in Lincoln, where a teacher introduced her to the camera in 1968. Goldin was then fifteen years old. Her first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transsexual communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1977/1978, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints.

Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the Bowery's hard-drug subculture; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. These snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years." In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: "I'll Be Your Mirror" (from a song on The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico album) and "All By Myself."

Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45 minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public.

Goldin's work since 1995 has included a wide array of subject matter: collaborative book projects with famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki; New York City skylines; uncanny landscapes (notably of people in water); her lover, Siobhan; and babies, parenthood and family life.

Goldin lives in New York and Paris—one reason the French Pompidou Centre mounted a major retrospective of her work in 2002. Her hand was injured in a fall in 2002, and she currently retains less ability to turn it than in the past.

In 2006, her exhibition, Chasing a Ghost, opened in New York. It was the first installation by her to include moving pictures, a fully narrative score, and voiceover, and included the disturbing three-screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils. The work involved her sister Barbara's suicide and how she coped through a numerous amount of images and narratives. Her works are developing more and more into cinemaesque features, exemplifying her graviation towards working with films.

She was presented the 2007 Hasselblad Award on 10 November 2007. She has been represented in America exclusively by Matthew Marks Gallery since 1992 and Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris.

Criticism
Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear glamorous, and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D. However, in a 2002 interview with The Observer, Goldin herself called the use of "heroin chic" to sell clothes and perfumes "reprehensible and evil."

Portrayal in film
The photographs by the character Lucy Berliner, played by actress Ally Sheedy in the 1998 film High Art, were based on those by Goldin

Nan Goldin talks about her work...

Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun (25 October 1894 – 8 December 1954)
was a French artist, photographer and writer.
Her work was both political and personal,
and often played with the concepts of gender and sexuality.


















Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in Nantes, she was the niece of writer Marcel Schwob and the great-niece of Orientalist David Léon Cahun. Her mother's mental problems meant that she was brought up by her paternal grandmother, Mathilde Cahun.

She began making photographic self-portraits as early as 1912, when she was 18 years old, and she continued taking images of herself through the 1930s.

Around 1919, she settled on the pseudonym Claude Cahun, intentionally selecting a sexually ambiguous name, after having previously used the names Claude Courlis (after the curlew) and Daniel Douglas (after Lord Alfred Douglas). During the early 20s, she settled in Paris with her life-long partner and stepsister Suzanne Malherbe. For the rest of their lives together, Cahun and Malherbe (who adopted the pseudonym "Marcel Moore") collaborated on various written works, sculptures, photomontages and collages. She published articles and novels, notably in the periodical "Mercure de France", and befriended Henri Michaux, Pierre Morhange and Robert Desnos.

Around 1922 she and Malherbe began holding artists' salons at their home. Among the regulars who would attend were artists Henri Michaux and André Breton and literary entrepreneurs Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier.

Cahun's work encompassed writing, photography, and theater. She is most remembered for her highly-staged self portraits and tableaux that incorporated the visual aesthetics of Surrealism.

Her published writings include "Heroines," (1925) a series of monologues based upon female fairy tale characters and intertwining them with witty comparisons to the contemporary image of women; Aveux non avenus, (Carrefour, 1930) a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages; and several essays in magazines and journals.

In 1932 she joined the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, where she met André Breton and René Crevel. Following this, she started associating with the surrealist group, and later participated in a number of surrealist exhibitions, including the London International Surrealist Exhibition (New Burlington Gallery) and Exposition surréaliste d'Objets (Charles Ratton Gallery, Paris), both in 1936. In 1934, she published a short polemic essay, Les Paris sont Ouverts, and in 1935 took part in the founding of the left-wing group Contre Attaque, alongside André Breton and Georges Bataille.

One of Cahun's last works, "The Path of the Cats," shows her blindfolded as she is led by a cat. It deals with "a fundamental questioning of reality and appearances," the curators write. "Cahun cherished cats, which symbolized the intercessor par excellence, ensuring intuitive contact between the visible and the invisible, opening the door to worlds of the senses both unknown and perfectly close."

In 1937 Cahun and Malherbe settled in Jersey. Following the fall of France and the German occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands, they became active as resistance workers and propagandists. Fervently against war, the two worked extensively in producing anti-German fliers. Many were snippets from English-to-German translations of BBC reports on the Nazi's crimes and insolence, which were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh criticism. The couple then dressed up and attended many German military events in Jersey, strategically placing them in soldier's pockets, on their chairs, etc. Also, fliers were inconspicuously crumpled up and thrown into cars and windows. They were arrested by the Gestapo and almost put to death, before being spared at the eleventh hour. But the Germans pillaged their house, destroying a large number of their photographs. Partly due to this significant loss, Cahun's work was not rediscovered until the late 1980s, and since then it has provided fertile ground for art historians, cultural critics, and queer theorists alike. In many ways, Cahun and Malherbe's resistance efforts were not only political but artistic actions, using their creative talents to manipulate and undermine the authority which they despised. In many ways, Cahun's life's work was focused on undermining a certain authority, however her specific resistance fighting targeted a physically dangerous threat. In 1944 they were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentences were never carried out. However, Cahun's health never recovered from her treatment in jail, and she died in 1954. She is buried in St Brelade's Church with her partner Suzanne Malherbe.

In many ways, Cahun's life was marked by a sense of role reversal, and her public identity became a commentary upon not only her own, but the public's notions of sexuality, gender, beauty, and logic. Her adoption of a sexually ambiguous name, and her androgynous self-portraits display a revolutionary way of thinking and creating, experimenting with her audience's understanding of photography as a documentation of reality. Her poetry challenged gender roles and attacked the increasingly modern world's social and economic boundaries. Also Cahun's participation in the Parisian Surrealist movement diversified the group's artwork and ushered in new representations. Where most Surrealist artists were men, and their primary images were of women as isolated symbols of eroticism, Cahun epitomized the chameleonic and multiple possibilities of the female identity. From her bold self-portraits to her Surrealist collages, Cahun had a poetic, fiercely intuitive sensibility that was unhampered by convention.Her photographs, writings, and general life as an artistic and political revolutionary continue to influence countless artists, namely Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin.

Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie (born 1961) is an American artist specializing in issues within documentary photography. Throughout her work she has investigated aspects of community, making portraits of many groups including LGBT community; surfers; and most recently high school football players. She is also interested in how identities are shaped by our surrounding architecture. Opie is currently a professor of Photography at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Her works are displayed in both museums and galleries internationally.

Opie's work was featured in a mid-career survey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York from September 26, 2008 till January 7, 2009 curated by Jennifer Blessing. It included an encyclopedic exhibition catalogue of all of Opie's almost 200 works since 1988, loosely divided into two sections: portraits and landscapes. Her works balance personal and political. Her assertive portraits bring queers to a forefront that is normally silenced by societal norms.


Opie has photographed high school football players throughout America, creating both landscapes and portraits. This body of work is a continuing look at American identity through iconic images and a redefinition of landscape in a photographic practice.

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Leigh Bowery

Born
March 26, 1961
Sunshine, Victoria, Australia

Died
December 31, 1994 (aged 33)
London, England, United Kingdom

Occupation
performance artist, fashion designer, club promoter, actor and model

Years active
1980–1994


Bowery is considered one of the more influential figures in the 1980s and 1990s London and New York art and fashion circles influencing a generation of artists and designers. His influence reached through the fashion, club and art worlds to impact, amongst others, Alexander McQueen, Lucian Freud, Vivienne Westwood, Boy George, Antony and the Johnsons, John Galliano, the Scissor Sisters, David LaChapelle plus numerous Nu-Rave bands and nightclubs in London and New York which arguably perpetuated his avant garde ideas.


After attending Melbourne High School, and one year of a fashion course there, he abandoned Australia and moved to London for good in 1980, initially to make his career as a fashion designer. Although this was a financial failure, it did garner him a small cult following and media interest. Eventually he was making a name for himself by dramatic performances of dance, music, and extreme exhibitionism, while wearing bizarre and very original outfits of his own design.

Up until 1986 Bowery would describe himself as a fashion designer and club promoter. Although his early fashion career is often ignored, he had considerable artistic success and it included several collections in London Fashion week, shows at the ICA, The Camden Palace, New York, and Tokyo.

In January 1985 he started the now infamous polysexual Thursday disco club night "Taboo".

In 1993 Bowery formed the band Minty with friend and former 1980s knitwear designer Richard Torry, Nicola Bateman and Matthew Glammore. Their single "Useless Man" "Boot licking, tit tweaking useless man..." which was remixed by The Grid along with their twisted onstage scatological performances caused The Sun to describe them as the "sickest band in the world".

Bowery was the nude subject of several of Lucian Freud's later portraits, and travelled internationally to the opening events of his exhibitions.

He became known to a wider audience by appearing in a Post-Modernist/Surrealist series of television and cinema and commercials for the Pepe jeans company, MTV London and other commissions such as stage work for rock band U2. He also appeared regularly in articles, vox pops and as cover star in London's i-D magazine. Bowery was also Art Director for the famous video for Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy".

Johnny Rozsa's photographs of Bowery have been exhibited in several museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the Kunsthalle in Vienna, and the Kunstverein in Hanover.