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Navajo cowboys impersonating John Wayne: Roswell Angier’s best photograph

‘This was taken in the Indian Head Bar, a seedy place in Arizona. The men were fascinated by Wayne since The Hallelujah Trail was filmed around there. Yet Wayne wasn’t in it.'

Before I actually went there, I knew nothing about the town of Gallup in New Mexico. I was familiar with a Robert Frank photograph of a sombre Navajo cowboy, taken surreptitiously in a bar there in the 1950s that was published in his classic book The Americans. The picture stayed with me. The place did not. But I decided to go there because of an exchange I had with my father in 1966...

image: ‘An in-between place where people collided with each other’ … Indian Head Bar, 1980 by Roswell Angier. 

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What he saved for his family

As an artist nears the end of his or her life, in addition to working through the inevitable questions of how the estate will be managed in the future, it is often the case that the artist sets aside works for family, friends, and loved ones, so that they don’t get overlooked, inadvertently sold off, or lost in the shuffle. And in the years before he died in 2014, the British photographer Roger Mayne did just this, working with gallerist Tom Gitterman to box up a selection of the last vintage prints from some of his favorite and most noted images from the 1950s, which became known as Ann's Box (for his wife Ann Jellicoe and their family). This tightly-edited show is made up of works from that personal cache, the prints having now drifted down the generations.

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West London’s Working-Class

Roger Mayne’s pictures of London in the 1950s capture a city on the verge of change. In his images, you can see the destruction of the Second World War and the dullness of austerity mixing with the dynamism of migration and the rise of youth cultures. He shows a city that is alive, where the tarmac, the pavements, and the houses are part of a living culture that will come into full bloom in the decades to come.

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Gitterman Gallery will present a selection of vintage photographic works in the viewing room of Von Lintel Gallery from February 17th through 19th as a part of Photo Forward Los Angeles (produced by Photographic Arts Council LA). In addition we will be participating in the special event sponsored by FRIEZE Saturday, February 18th from 5–8 pm.
 
Gitterman and Von Lintel have had a long collegial relationship and share representation of several artists. We have a similar passion for both art historical and contemporary work and take great pleasure in seeing the dialogue between art from different periods and how each adds in their own distinct manner.

Strolling through North West London one weekend in 1956, British photographer Roger Mayne (1929–2014) happened upon Southam Street in the neighbourhood now known as Notting Hill. Captivated by the locals who had turned the street into their playground, Mayne found what he had been searching for – a community he could chronicle for the sheer joy of making art...  

"Because he lived in the neighbourhood, he saw many of his subjects frequently and they trusted him. The candid nature of his images comes out of his inherent honesty and decency.”...

“The photographer’s power to select…makes it possible for photography to be an art,” Mayne continued. “Whether it is good art depends on the power and truth of the artist’s statement.”

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...Mayne's photographs capture neighbourhoods still in war's shadow, but filled with the energy of the "sidewalk ballet"...

...Frame can turn a figure toward solitary contemplation, or add a layer of psychological tension or subtle romance to a passing encounter. In a sense, this control feels almost theatrical, with Frame orchestrating the scenes like stage sets; in practice, it was surely more improvisational than that, but the best of the moments feel elegantly synchronized, with action and atmosphere aligned in ways that support each other.

The more time I’ve spent looking at these photographs, the more I’ve become enthralled by their moods. Yes, this is a visual diary of sorts, with lives and friendships seen up close, but Frame hasn’t just made raw documentation for the sake of some misplaced adherence to authenticity and grit. Instead, he has allowed himself to infuse these pictures with serenity and longing, finding moments inside tumultuous young lives where something extremely subtle is taking place, and then opening up those instants into something freer. In this way, he’s made their spaces roomier and more unstable – cinematic, but also gently attentive to the things unspoken and only ephemerally visible.

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...Still, there is a precision to these images, a sense that Frame is deliberately investigating those liminal, transient moments in our lives. It’s hard not to look at these images and consider how they would have been taken and edited today, in a world in which our every moment is captured and shared. What is wonderful about the images in Whereupon is that we don’t need to know more. We have been given an introduction to the lives of these subjects, and that feels like enough.

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I first met Darrel Ellis in 1981. I was 30 and he was almost 23. He had just broken up with the actor José Rafael Arango and we were at an East Village neighbourhood gay bar called The Bar, at 2nd Avenue and East 4th Street, half a block from José’s apartment. The Bar had been in existence just a few years and had become a popular, low- key hangout with a pool table and jukebox, notable for the actors, artists, and writers who frequented it, including Peter Hujar, John Heys, Bill Rice, Jim Neu, Frank Franca, Bob Gober, Dieter Hall, Ken Tisa, Alvin Baltrop, Stephen Barker, and many others. That night at The Bar I brought Darrel home to my fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the West Village, which I shared with my roommate, an actress from Mississippi named Butch Walker. The bathtub was still in the kitchen. Our relationship started romantically but was very short-lived and quickly changed into a friendship..