5 Minutes With Russell Young

It was 20 years ago that British photographer Russell Young first lent his eye to celebrity culture. The assignment was photographing George Michael for the sleeve of an album called “Faith”. That job launched a career and soon Russell was shooting musicians like Morrissey, Bjork, Springsteen, Dylan, REM, New Order, The Smiths, Diana Ross, Paul Newman and many other celebrities. The next natural step was directing music videos; Russell directed a hundred music videos during the heyday of MTV.

Ten years into his career, Russell started painting, but his work remained private. Until 2003, when Young showed his first series of paintings called Pig Portraits, this first show sold out. Young has risen to be an internationally acclaimed pop artist, creating larger than life silkscreen paintings of images from history and pop culture.

“My work is sort of soundtrack to my life, loves, experiences and influences. My method of working is to search, destroy and create. The images of this series have been collected from newspaper cuttings, e-bay, long correspondence with police departments throughout the world or even given by celebrities themselves. The idea to create "anti-celebrity" portraits was probably a reaction to my former career. However, they turned out to be even more beautiful and iconic. There is undeniably this attitude that is very real, in your face, a beauty that is hard to ignore. My art is a sort of soundtrack to my life, loves, experiences and influences. These would be my heroes that are missing from Art History.”

Russell Young has risen to become one of the most collected and sought after artists of our time. Celebrities and the most discriminating collectors like Abby Rosen, the Getty's, Elizabeth Taylor, David Hockney, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, David Bowie and President Barack Obama have added Russell’s works to their collections. His larger than life screenprint images from history and popular culture are compelling, daunting, and undeniable.

Russell is married to actress and presenter Finola Hughes, they have three young children Dylan, Cash and Sadie, Russell lives and works in New York and California.

Q1. What was the first record you bought and did it change your life?

Jimi Hendrix Purple Haze. My Father had just brought me a record player, this was the first record I played on it, I was 8, it blew my mind.

Q2. Early in your photographic career you shot the sleeve for George Michael's iconic “Faith” album and soon you were shooting musicians like Morrissey, Bjork, Springsteen, Dylan, REM, New Order, The Smiths, Diana Ross, Paul Newman and many other celebrities. What drew you to photographing musicians?

I thought I was going to be a War photographer, but found it almost impossible to get to into any war zone. I had always had a love of music, so it seemed an obvious choice.


Q3. From a successful photography career you began directed a hundred music videos during the heyday of MTV. Can you share a funny story from that part of your career?

I was filming a stunning girl, as she danced provocatively, one of the grips shouted out "good god I must be married to a man".

Q4. What was your inspiration for creating larger than life silkscreen paintings of images from history and pop culture and your move into the art world?

After 15 years as a photographer, I really grew tired of the unprofessionalism in the music industry.

Q5. What's next for Russell Young?

In February 2010, I was admitted to Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara and diagnosed with the H1N1 virus, the Swine Flu. I endured an 8-day induced coma with doctors and loved ones skeptical of recovery. After a three-month stay in the hospital, I emerged from his near-death experience with severe memory loss and an incredibly weak body. Little by little, I built back my strength and began examining my life and my surroundings in a whole new way. I left the hospital and I had to learn to breath, write, draw, think, and walk for the second time in my life.
During this process of recovery, I have began to explore the nature of trauma and its effect on both the individual and cultural psyche. Embracing and utilising a new more visceral and animalistic process I attacked and dissected the imagery within the canvas, resulting in a body of work that speaks of feral hope in the face of adversity. The series is called "Helter Skelter".

http://www.russellyoung.com/

5 Minutes With Laura Levine

Steven Kasher Gallery is pleased to present Laura Levine: Musicians, an insider's look at the artists at the forefront of rock, punk, indie rock, post-punk, hip-hop, New Wave, and No Wave. This is the first one-person gallery exhibition featuring Levine's photography, including her vintage gelatin silver prints - many one of a kind. The show will feature over 35 vintage and modern prints, and is being presented with our exhibition Rude and Reckless: Punk/Post-Punk Graphics, 1976-82.

Exhibition: July 21 - August 19, 2011 Reception: July 21, 6-8pm


Q1. What was the first record you bought and what effect did it have on you?

As a kid of course I loved The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, etc. but the first record I specifically remember buying was Diana Ross and the Supremes Greatest Hits, when I was about ten. I'd just met them in person when I appeared with them on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1968. I was one of a group of NYC Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts invited to sing "God Bless America" (with Irving Berlin) and "Happy Birthday" (with Ethel Merman, to Irving Berlin) onstage in honor of Berlin's 80th birthday. It was a celeb-packed show - Bing Crosby, Steve & Eydie, Robert Goulet, Ethel Merman, Irving Berlin, and Diana Ross and the Supremes. Pure 1960's prime time Americana. I remember meeting the three Supremes - they were incredibly glamorous and seemed about ten feet tall, like endless willowy trees covered in sequins. The first thing I did after the show was to run out and get that album.


Q2. Luc Sante said; "Laura Levine's photos are as vividly alive as the music of her subjects. Sometimes when you catch them out of the corner of your eye you'd swear they actually move." What inspired you to photograph the music world?

I always loved music. Perhaps I photographed that world because I had no talent as a musician, but so deeply admired people who did. Even as a teenager, when I first started to shoot, I'd sneak my camera into concerts, staying up all night to develop and print the film in my parents' bathroom. I started out as a street photographer, and then worked as a photojournalist, first in college for The Harvard Crimson, then the The Washington Post and the wire services, but once I started to work as a freelancer it made sense to narrow my focus, and truthfully, music was what I'd been shooting most of the time anyway. That was my social scene, my friends, my true love.



Q3. How has the digital world changed art of photography?

I feel very fortunate that digital photography had not yet been invented when I was actively shooting in the 80s and early 90s. All of my images exist on film, as negatives or transparencies - not as pixels - and for that I am very grateful. I can make beautiful silver gelatin prints of my work.

Now that people can shoot with their cell phones and digital point-and-shoots, I feel that some of the preciousness (I mean preciousness in the best sense) of photography has disappeared, i.e. the thought and planning that goes into every shot is largely gone. In addition, there's so much manipulation of images now, it's hard to know what is "true" and what was created afterwards on the computer screen. Don't get me wrong, there are some interesting images being created these days making use of the digital tools, but I'm still very much a purist and a traditionalist.

In some ways the digital world has made my life easier. For example, I can now send scans to magazines for repro as opposed to actual prints or slides. But it also endangers the integrity of the work. Once an image appears online, viewers can grab it, copy it, alter it, and re-post it, and I've lost control of my work. I want to be able to decide where my work is used, and how. So it's a double-edged sword.

Q4. Rock photography seems to have reached a new level of acceptance by the mainstream. Your work has been featured at The Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and is currently travelling to six other museums across the U.S. Why do you think this has happened?

I always thought it was inevitable; the art world just needed to catch up with what the rest of us already knew. I suppose there was (and still is) some resistance to labeling such work "fine art" photography by those who think of "rock & roll photography" as nothing more than snapshots of performers onstage. But if you look a little deeper into the work of some very fine "rock photographers," you'll find powerful, artistic, emotional portraits (of subjects who happen to be musicians), dramatic images of live performances, and documentation of subcultures that only a few captured so lyrcially with their cameras. There has always been a core group of intensely serious and creative artists who have made their life's work photographing rock musicians and whose work most certainly belongs on museum walls.

Who Shot Rock and Roll, the Brooklyn Museum show curated by Gail Buckland, was a huge step towards bringing the work to a new level and wider audience. There are a few serious collectors out there - Michael Zilkha, certainly - who understand the significance and beauty of the images, and have devoted years building a world-class collection of important rock & roll photographs. Barbara London at MoMA has consistently forged new ground at the museum, reaching out to artists who have never shown there before, and recognizing important creative subcultures such as the hip-hop and downtown worlds.

It's the result of a handful of visionary curators, dealers and collectors following their own instincts, and of course, we photographers never losing faith in the importance of our work and continuing to work for recognition and respect in the art world.

Q5. If you had to pick one favorite shot from the exhibition, which one and why?

Oh my. Just one? I have a particular fondness for the portrait of Tina Weymouth and Grandmaster Flash, taken in 1981. At the time I was the chief photographer/photo editor of the New York Rocker, an early and very influential downtown music paper. They asked me to shoot the two of them together for the cover. The hip-hop scene was just starting to get noticed by the downtown scene, and vice versa. There was a lot of cross-pollination taking place. Tina and Chris Frantz's new band Tom Tom Club had just released their first album, which incorporated rap and hip-hop beats, and Grandmaster Flash had just released The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.

Tina and Flash had never met before, and they got along like a house on fire. I'd asked them to bring their boom boxes along for the session. They danced, sang, traded records - the energy on the shoot was wonderful. In fact, Tina recently told me that after the shoot she brought Grandmaster Flash back to the studio where the Talking Heads were working on their new record The Name of This Band is Talking Heads to play him some tracks, and later on Flash used the Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love in his song It's Nasty. I love the fact that a musical connection came out of the shoot.

From a visually formal point of view, I love the contrast of the light and dark, black and white, the symmetry of the boom-boxes, and quite simply, I really liked Tina and Flash.



http://stevenkasher.com/html/home.asp

Steven Kasher Gallery
521 West 23 Street
New York, NY 10011
212 966 3978