Sophie Hackett – författare

From alt-rock bassist Melissa Auf der Maur—of Hole and Smashing Pumpkins fame—comes a photographic love letter to the last analog decadePublished with Art Gallery of Ontario.As the bass player for the iconic ’90s alternative rock bands Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, Melissa Auf der Maur toured the world, documenting life backstage, onstage and in the crowd. She instinctively turned the camera on herself as the most intimately available subject, as informed by her studies at Concordia University where her professor, Raymonde April, introduced her to the subjective self-portraits of Francesca Woodman. By the time she joined Hole for their Live Through This world tour, she requested a roll of 35mm film backstage at every venue. Her daily practice, continually documenting herself and her surroundings, expanded through her creative uses of self-timers and cable releases to take snapshots in the middle of performances. This dedication resulted in an extensive archive of over 10,000 photographs that go behind the scenes of rock-and-roll stardom—playing with Courtney Love's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain; hanging out with Pavement, Sonic Youth and Beck; riding in the back of a limousine with Drew Barrymore; and idling time on the set of the music video for Hole's song “Celebrity Skin.” She was even commissioned by magazines such as Spin to document Lollapalooza 1995 and the Tibetan Freedom Concert of 1996. Gritty and edgy, playful yet deeply personal, Auf der Maur's intimate photographs celebrate the independent spirit of the ’90s and offer an insider's view of the decade before smartphones and digital recording software. Through an extensive curatorial selection of more than 200 photographs, her memories create a moving self-portrait of a young artist living through the ’90s alternative music scene, and a time capsule for Generation X.Melissa Auf der Maur’s (born 1972) indie band Tinker had just opened for Smashing Pumpkins when Billy Corgan recommended her to Courtney Love as the new bassist for Hole’s grief-marked Live Through This world tour, beginning soon after the deaths of both Kurt Cobain and Kristen Pfaff. She played on the group's Grammy-nominated album Celebrity Skin. After leaving Hole, Auf der Maur joined Smashing Pumpkins as the bassist for their farewell tour from 1999 to 2000. Following the release of a few solo albums, she moved to Hudson, NY, became a mother and cofounded the multidisciplinary art center Basilica Hudson.

Brings together a wealth of research and an expansive selection of photographs to create an enduring account of America's first known trans network, Casa Susanna. In the 1950s and 60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed - dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalized for their self-expression. This book opens up that now-lost world. The photographs - mostly discovered by chance in a New York flea market in 2004 - chronicle the experiences of men who dressed as women, gender nonconforming people, and transwomen in states of relaxation, experimentation, connection and joy. All of this was made possible by Susanna Valenti who - on her own journey toward womanhood - created Casa Susanna, a protected space where others could crossdress and live freely as women. Supplementing the images are excerpts from Transvestia, a magazine that allowed those who had been cast out by a rigidly binary society to connect in a different medium. The people who came to Casa Susanna found a spot where they could explore and celebrate their own and each other’s femininity, as they could not do elsewhere. Their creations are also a reminder that there were, and still are, many ways to explore the boundaries of gender.

A richly illustrated presentation of the creative career of the acclaimed portraitist, documentarian and experimentalist frequently found in the pages of Life, Look and Harper's BazaarPublished with Art Gallery of Ontario and Museum Hanmi.American photographer Arnold Newman (1918–2006) is best known for his compelling portraits of artists, composers, actors and political figures of the postwar era. Newman's deliberately constructed compositions express biography, creative vision and professional expertise. By building each image and methodically planning his photoshoots, he developed a graphic visual style that was well suited to popular magazines, such as Life, Look, Fortune, Holiday and Harper's Bazaar.This book considers the full breadth of Newman's photographic practice, including his magazine commissions and advertisements, and highlights the crucial role magazines played in shaping his career. In three major illustrated sections, the authors explore the ways that Newman learned through magazines; how his career was propelled by magazine commissions during the 1950s and 1960s; and how mass media publications circulated his work and cemented his reputation. The photographs reveal Newman's many influences and chart his considerable impact on American visual culture. Tracing Arnold Newman's relationship with and within the popular press expands our understanding of his work, reveals the inventiveness of his craft and underscores his undeniable impact on American visual culture in the postwar period.

Marking the 25th anniversary of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s photography department, Collective States explores the museum’s rich history with the medium, the origins of its permanent photography collection, and the AGO’s evolving engagement with the art form. Focusing on the evolution of the act of collecting at the AGO since the department’s creation at the outset of the 21st century, this book includes the work of early innovators, 20th-century trailblazers, and contemporary artists, as well as significant collections of 20th-century press photographs, pop photographica, and photographic albums. Featuring over 200 images in five thematic sections, Collective States blends works made across time and place to reveal the rich and versatile uses and approaches to the medium. With a diverse range of artworks, and insightful essays by the AGO’s current curator of photography, Sophie Hackett, and the department’s founding curator, Maia-Mari Sutnik, the book explores the indispensable role photography plays in contemporary visual culture and the advent of galleries, magazines, and festivals that explored the photographic form over the last 50 years.

This powerful collection highlights the importance of snapshots in Black American life: as tools to challenge stereotypes, and as a way to document family and culturePublished with Art Gallery of Ontario.Thoughtfully illustrated, this volume highlights a selection of photographs of African American family life between the 1970s and the early 2000s—pictures that were lost by their original owners and then found by the artist Zun Lee on a street in Detroit in 2012, marking the beginning of the Fade Resistance collection of more than 4,000 Polaroids. Lee describes the collection as an important record of Black visual self-representation and a means to “reflect the way Black people saw themselves on their terms—without the intention of being seen, or judged, by others.” To Lee, these powerful photographs are an expression of "Black life mattering."These vivid images chronicle milestones such as weddings, birthdays and graduations, as well as quiet daily moments, offering contemporary views long ignored or erased by mainstream culture. Together, these works highlight the role snapshots have played in Black life, as tools to challenge stereotypical portrayals and as a means to memorialize family, culture and heritage.Topics such as self-representation, visual history and the social power of photographs are addressed in critical texts by Sophie Hackett, Stefano Harney, Zun Lee and Fred Moten, and an original contribution by celebrated poet Dawn Lundy Martin.