Jon Naar

Graffiti Art Photograph Silkscreen Print Park New York City 1970s Pop Art

1974

Genre: Photographic Subject: Cityscape Medium: Silkscreen of Photograph Surface: Paper Country: United States Dimensions: 20.5" x 28" Street Art, Urban Jon Naar is a British-American author and photographer celebrated for his pioneering images of New York City graffiti in the 1970s. Still active in his nineties, Naar has had a multifaceted career as an intelligence officer in World War II; a globe-trotting executive during the postwar years; and an environmentalist, with nine published books to date. Born in London in 1920, Naar graduated at 15 from the private Mill Hill School. Too young to attend an English university, he crossed the Channel to study French and German at the Sorbonne. At this point, Naar had yet to develop a special interest in photography, but his artistic and design sensibilities were being shaped by his Parisian influences, particularly the street photographs of Brassaï. Four years later, his matriculation at the University of London cut short by the outbreak of World War II, Naar was conscripted. Thanks to prior experience in the Officers' Training Corps at Mill Hill, he would spend the next six years on intelligence work, including service with the British Special Operations Executive, on clandestine assignments that took him through the Middle East and Italy. At war's end, by-then Major Naar emigrated to New York City and secured American citizenship. Through the 1950s, armed with a Super Ikonta rangefinder camera and later a Praktica single-lens reflex, Naar was developing his eye as a "weekend" photographer, roving his Greenwich Village neighborhood and seeking out subject matter while on foreign corporate assignments. It was not until Naar's early forties, after influential photographers Nickolas Muray and André Kertész—both impressed by his hobbyist portfolio—offered encouragement, that he resolved to seek wider exposure as a photographer. A series of street scenes Naar shot in Mexico City in 1962 was featured in a 1963 solo exhibition in Coyoacan titled "El Ojo de un Estranjero." His 23-page photo essay on Germany, 20 years after the death of Adolph Hitler, appeared in the Italian design magazine Domus. New York Times critic Joseph Deschin, reviewing Naar's 1965 one-man show at New York University's Loeb Student Center, extolled his "flair for design and an eye for the unexpected, his pictures generate the kind of excitement that one associates with discovery of newness in the familiar." The striking image "Shadows of Children on Swings" was selected by Ivan Dmitri for the Metropolitan Museum's "Photography in the Fine Arts" exhibition, and for its permanent collection. Within the span of a few years, Naar had not only transformed himself into a professional photographer, but was in demand as a contributor to major publications like The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, Fortune, Elle, and Schöner Wohnen. If Naar had a specialty at that time, it was photographing artists and architects amidst their creative (and created) surroundings. One of his earliest and most enduring images featured a young Andy Warhol sprawled on a red plush...

K-narf, French (b. 1970) Collage photo artwork (Graffiti Vans) (2011) Tape-o-graph photography Signed lower right, numbered 1/5 16 x 12 7/8 inches K-NARF was born in 1970 in Saint-Etienne, France and now lives in Tokyo. K-NARF invented PHOTOGRAFFITI a contemporary way of making street photography that lead him to develop his singular Tape-o-Graphy technique. It involves the application of adhesive tape strips on developed photographs in order to manually process the photographs giving them a unique surface texture and extraordinary appearance. Open to influences from street art and video, he uses the medium of photography as a toy to create and play. Both conceptual and experimental, definitely non-conventional, his work documents, recycles and collects the visual anachronisms of a world in a perpetual mutation. Through the years, K-narf often got support from key figures of the art world such as Teruo Kurosaki (Idee, Tokyo), Rotraut and Daniel Klein-Moquay (Yves Klein Estate), Joel Meyerowitz (pioneer of contemporary color photography), Jacques Attali (French writer), Olivier Gay (Architect & Art collector) and Yoichi Nakamuta (curator & Art producer). He collaborates on regular basic with...

Photograph (Framed in white frame) 11 x 17 with 1-inch border Signed by photographer, Matthew Eller & Ron English

Photograph (Framed in white frame) 11 x 17 with 1 inch border Signed by photographer & Ron English