FROM DARKROOM TO DAYLIGHT at The Center for Creative Photography

I screened an unfinished version of my feature "From Darkroom to Daylight" at The Center for Creative Photograph in Tuscon at their special "Next Conversation" event for an audience of photographers, museum curators, artists, publishers, collectors and gallery owners.  The reaction was wonderful, and a lively hour-long Q&A followed the screening.

Adam Bartos by Harvey Wang

David Goldblatt by Harvey Wang

Howard Hopwood, Ilford by Harvey Wang

Artist Lecture and Sneak Preview - March 12, 2013

I will be doing an artist lecture at the Center for Alternative Processes  discussing and sharing segments from my current film project, From Darkroom to Daylight, about the transition in photography from chemical to digital processes.   For the film, I’ve had conversations with over 40 photographers and others, including Sally Mann, David Goldblatt, George Tice, Elliot Erwitt, Eugene Richards, Taryn Simon, Jerome Liebling, Susan Meiseles, Platon and Alex Webb. I’ve visited the Ilford factory in England to talk to their chairman about film production, and I’ve interviewed Steven Sasson, who invented the digital camera while at Kodak, as well as Thomas Knoll who created Photoshop.

Date: March 12, 2013

Price: Free and open to the public –  RSVP: info@capworkshops.org

Location: 36 East 30th Street

Time: 7:00 – 8:30 pm

Lecture offered through CAP/ICP Partnership

Sally Mann

George Tice

  

 

"Come Closer" at New Museum

Three of my photographs of Adam Purple and The Garden of Eden are featured in the New Museum exhibition “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969–1989.”   The show runs from Sept 9, 2012 until January 6, 2013.

The exhibition features original artwork, ephemera, and performance documentation by artists who lived and worked on or near the Bowery in New York. During these two decades, the Bowery was commonly identified with the furthest extremes of metropolitan decline—municipal neglect, homelessness, and substance abuse. As landlords and civil services abandoned the neighborhood, the subsequent cheap rents and permissive atmosphere drew artists downtown. The Bowery’s lofts provided a social network where painters, photographers, performance artists, musicians, and filmmakers exchanged ideas and drew inspiration from this concentration of creative activity.  

In those years, I was living in a loft in Chinatown with five other artists.  I began documenting Adam Purple's remarkable Earthwork in 1977, and was there in 1985 when the city began destroying it to build low income housing.  Adam started the garden in 1975 on the crime-ridden Lower East Side.  By 1986, The Garden of Eden was world famous and had grown to 15,000 square feet, spanning five lots.  For Adam - a social activist, philosopher, artist and revolutionary - The Garden of Eden was the medium of his political and artistic expression.

This exhibition also includes works by Barbara Ess, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Keith Haring, John Holmstrom, Marc H. Miller, Adrian Piper, Adam Purple, Dee Dee Ramone, Joey Ramone, Marcia Resnick, Christy Rupp, Arleen Schloss, Eve Sonneman, Billy Sullivan, and Martin Wong.  It was curated by Ethan Swan.

The film Amy Brost and I made about Adam has been seen in film festivals all over the US, and won The Neighborhood Award at the first Lower East Side Film Festival.

"Life, Nature and Hope in Africa"

"Life, Nature and Hope in Africa"
Louisa Gould Gallery
54 Main Street
Vineyard Haven, MA Martha's Vineyard Island July 19 - August 1

Five of my photographs are included in this exhibition on Martha's Vineyard.  Other photographers include Carlo Mari, Guillaume Bonn, and Beth O'Donnell.  Proceeds benefit the “Nets for Life” campaign, a global partnership which provides education on malaria prevention and distributes treated mosquito nets to seventeen countries in Africa.

Lunch Hour exhibit at NYPL

Chef at Delhi Heights, 37-66 74th Street, Jackson Heights, NY

Samosas on 74th Street, Jackson Heights

My photographs from Jackson Heights, Queens are part of  the exhibit Lunch Hour NYC which  runs from June 22, 2012-January 13, 2013 in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall of the New York Pubic Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (on 5^th Ave and 42^nd Street).  Lunch Hour brings together materials from NYPL’s collections to tell stories of street foods, lunch counters, the Automat, lunch in the home, school lunch, power lunch and more. 

The conclusion of the exhibition will be devoted to contemporary photographs of people in New York at lunchtime.  I was one of twelve photographers asked to spend two hours shooting lunch hour in one neighborhood.

Brooklyn Youth Orchestra

  

A short film I made about the Brooklyn Youth Orchestra was shown for the first time at the Brooklyn Youth Music Project's 1st birthday celebration in Brooklyn Heights.  The Brooklyn Youth Music Project is a nonprofit organization that serves young musicians age 5 to 18 from all over Brooklyn. Their mission is to provide young musicians with a high standard of training and performance, in ensembles large and small. They provide opportunities for students to perform a wide variety of music, including classical,  contemporary and jazz.

Keith Haring at Brooklyn Museum

Seven of my photographs from the early 1980s are included in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition of Keith Haring's work from 1978-1982.

Lady Wrestling Night, Club 57, 1980

Barbie & The Heftones

Tseng Kwong Chi, Elvis Night at Club 57, 1980

Keith Haring & Tseng Kwong Chi at Club 57, 1980

Entrance to Club 57, St. Marks Place, NY, 1980

Klaus Nomi at Hurrah's, 1980

New York Places-Jewish Spaces: Life in the City, 1700-2012

Photographs I made of Jewish neighborhoods and Jewish structures along Ocean Parkway--from Kensington to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn are part of the exhibition New York Places, Jewish Spaces: Life in the City, 1700-2012 at the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th St. NYC.) The exhibit runs until August, 2012.

Brighton Beach

Washington Cemetery

Congregation Shaare Zion-2024 Ocean Parkway

Ocean Parkway Jewish Center-550 Ocean Parkway

Caretaker, Kavkazi Jewish Center-347 Ocean Parkway

Ghana

I traveled to Ghana for Episcopal Relief & Development, to photograph and film the many programs they support in the northern regions of the country.  I visited remote villages, accompanying community volunteers as they distributed malaria nets, a trade school that teaches women to sew, and micro-finance cooperatives that support women to make goods for sale in the markets.

Alfred Gescheidt-1926-2012

Photograph by Harvey Wang

Alfred Gescheidt died this past Sunday, peacefully in his apartment on Lexington Ave. I had the honor of interviewing Alfred last year for my documentary film about transition in photography from a chemical process to a digital one. Alfred began his career as documentary photographer in New York in the late 1940s. He was most known as a photo satirist and photographic montage artist, creating images that were outrageous, experimental, funny and erotic. His work seemed photoshopped, long before Photoshop was invented.






His erotic photomontages were exhibited at Higher Pictures in 2009.

Flophouse: Life on the Bowery (Random House, 2000) is featured in a recent post on Joe Bonomo's blog No Such Thing as Was.   Joe is an author, essayist, cultural historian and professor in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University.

"While reading East of Bowery I was put in mind of Flophouse: Life on the Bowery, published in 2000, a terrific collection of Harvey Wang's photos of soon-to-be-gone Bowery transient hotels, David Isay's and Stacy Abramson's historical commentary, and edited monologues of folks barely if stubbornly hanging on in those residences. After Joseph Mitchell's New Yorker essays and James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—and predating the boomlet of blogs such as Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, EV Grieve, It's All The Streets You Crossed Not So Long Ago, and many others—Flophouse documents the city in vivid and precise nonfiction, telling true stories as those stories leaned and dissolved in dire times. I've long been fascinated by the Bowery and its place in popular culture, careful to leaven what could become dangerous and irresponsible nostalgic romance with the painful reality of the street's history and its untold broken denizens."

Photo Essay in UK's Life Force Photography Magazine

An early photo essay of mine about Madison County, North Carolina has been published in Life Force the acclaimed magazine of the photo-essay. The magazine's goal is to "show the work of the best photographers in the world." Life Force Magazine is designed to tell stories in pictures and to explore the unique power of the photo-essay. The only writing in the magazine is by the photographers themselves and is there to add context, color and understanding. The BBC's Culture Show have described Life Force Magazine as the Picture Post of the 21st Century'

Make + Model

I am happy to be represented for commercials and film projects by the Culver City based production company Make + Model. REEL

New York Bound Books

Nice Post on the New York Bound Book blog about "Out Harvey Wang's Window" at the Tenement Museum.

Out Harvey Wang's Window

"Out Harvey Wang's Window," opens at The Lower East Side Tenement Museum's newly completed Sadie Samuelson Levy Immigrant Heritage Center. This will be the first exhibition in the Tenement Museum's new building at 103 Orchard Street.

The museum's press release writes that the exhibition "explores the ongoing evolution of the Lower East Side through 22 black-and-white photographs. Taken between 1979 and 1993, Wang’s images tell the fascinating and often-forgotten stories of immigrant and working class New Yorkers.  The traditions, homes and everyday lives of Wang’s subjects are captured with tenderness and clarity, revealing powerful glimpses of the neighborhood’s complex history." Annie Polland, Vice President of Education at the Museum said, “Harvey Wang’s photographs are beautiful and historically important. They echo the mission of the Tenement Museum and extend the stories we tell into the late 20th century.

Harvey Wang on NY Times Lens Blog

The New York Times Lens Blog featured a slide show from my upcoming exhibition at The Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Club 57 at Royal/T- Pacific Standard Time

Royal/T’s Pacific Standard Time installation features Ann Magnuson and Kenny Scharf’s East Village West exhibit. Scharf and Magnuson met in NYC and became key figures in the East Village art scene in the eighties.  The show honors an era of art that was directly inspired by Hollywood dream factories during the Atomic Age. Featured in the installation are over 20 photographs by Harvey Wang, as well as ongoing slide show of his documentation of Club 57 and the East Village in the 1980s.

In additon to work by Scharf the exhibit include work by other East Village luminaries such as Keith Haring, John Sex and Jean Michel Basquiat.  Located in Culver City, Royal/T, LA’s first Japanese- style cosplay café, gift shop and art space, is a little piece of Japan dropped right into LA. The Harajuku waitress maids surrounded by Murakami and Hello Kitty make this unique gallery café a playful experience not to be missed. Gallery owner, Susan Hancock’s intention is to make everyone feel like, “Alice in Wonderland, gone down the rabbit hole.”

East Village West runs through 1/10/12

Royal/T
8910 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
T 310 559 6300