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Harry Bowers
Rare Harry Bowers Vintage C Print Photograph From Ten Photographs Fashion Shot

1984

About the Item

HARRY BOWERS T E N P H O T O G R A P H S I DON'T LOOK FOR PHOTOGRAPHS I INVENT THEM I recall my first meeting with Harry Bowers in California a few years ago. As he produced his large-scale prints, I was at first flabbergasted, not only by their size, but by their seamless perfection. Technique appeared to be everything but then technique as technique simply vanished. After the first moment, tech­nique was no longer an issue, but rather a passageway to the imagery. Suffice it to say about Harry Bowers' working style that he is an obsessive man. Trained as an engineer, he has turned that discipline to art. His lenses, equipment and darkroom, much of it exactingly manu­factured by himself to answer certain needs, serve the desire of the artist to take photographic tech­nique to its ultimate perfection in invisibility and transparency. I respect obsession in art, and particularly in photography, because obsession in photography passes beyond the easy, middle ground of image making to a more demanding, more difficult, yet more rewarding end. Bowers' obsession is to eliminate "photography as technique." No grain, no decisive moments, no journalism, or, seemingly, direct auto­biographical endeavors appear in his work. Bowers is an artist of synthesis who controls his environment if only in the studio exactly to his liking. The images he creates are formal structures, saucy stories on occasion, which may offer hints of a darker, more frightening sexuality, but what you see is the end product of an experiment in which nothing save the original insight perhaps is left to chance. We seem fascinated with the idea of replication of reality in art. Popular painting frequently reproduces a scene "with the accuracy of a photograph," and photographs may "make you feel as though you were right there." The very invisibility of the photographic medium is important to Bowers, in that it allows him to maneuver his subject matter without concern for rendering it in an obvious art medium which would interfere with the nature of the materials he uses. The formal subtleties of Bowers' recent work are as delicious and ambiguous in their interrelationships as the best Cubist collages, yet while those col­lages always suggest their parts through edge and texture, these photographs present a structure through a surface purity. Bowers' earlier works, for example, the Skirts I Have Known series, were formed of bits of clothing belong­ing to Bowers and his wife or found at local thrift shops. These works fused an elegance of pattern and texture, reminiscent of Miriam Schapiro or Lucas Samaras fabric paintings, with a sense of theater and, on occasion, high eroticism. These clothes are not simply mashed like baled rags into the glass fronted box which fronts the picture plane, but are actors in a subtle dumb show. Early on, Bowers was sur­prised that so few people took notice of the erotic element in his work, for it forms a distinct and im­portant component of his images, and one which he has continued to exploit, albeit in different ways. In the last few years Bowers' work has divided into two parallel modes; one continues his fascination with patterns, textures and stuffs pressed into the transparent picture plane, while the other is more directly anthropomorphic. In this second body of work, Bowers frequently uses articulated shadow figures in black or white, carefully adjusted within the image in a provocative way that is often sexually unset­tling. But for all their explicit arrangement, these works may be less suggestive than his earlier clothing tableaus. These newer works are more about space, texture, and the extensions of photography, as well as being a comment on sexuality. Bowers has always been fascinated with space, and recognizing that it cannot be rendered on a flat sur­face through the camera, he has set about to create an illusion of space on a shallow plane, a true trompe l'oeil achievement. Within these works, the space is still constructed upon the glass panel of the printing frame, but with elements collaged to its front surface as well as pressed within it. The forms, frequently large black and white photographs (a photographer's conceit on the use of photography), often include a seated or crouching figure dressed only in socks and cutoff dungarees, which add an element of per­sonality. The figure and the way in which it is posed also add a quality of vulnerability to his images, not heretofore seen. One of the best of these images, HB-28-80, uses a photograph of a figure crouching in a fetal position on a chair. The figure has been cut from its background, and the background, in turn, has been taped to the front of the glass pane while the figure, in perfect register with the background, is laminated behind the glass. One of Bowers' articulated shadow figures, one hand trying to hide its genitals, has been placed on top of the figure, also under the plane of glass. The shadow figure follows the curve of the spine of the photographed figure. One cannot help but feel not only the nakedness and tense embarrassment of these two figures, one real and the other schematic, but the anomalous suggestion of a man carrying a fetus within his body. Bowers' images extend their power in several ways. They are photographs, which are so pure in their technique as to be clear as water. They deal with precise replications of reality, but a reality which has been recontextualized into episodes of both formal and visceral ambiguity. The best of them are wonderful .. contrivances" -his word-and are as frightening in their psychological implications as they are elegant in their visual form. Thomas H. Garver, Director Madison Art Center "I follow fashion. I have closets literally full of clothes. I am a full-blown Comme des Garçons and Prada freak. I love clothes themselves as objects, and I also love the glossies – my love of fashion is how I discovered Wallpaper magazine."
  • Creator:
    Harry Bowers (1938, American)
  • Creation Year:
    1984
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 20 in (50.8 cm)Width: 16 in (40.64 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Surfside, FL
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU38210688002

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Vintage Silver Gelatin Print Photograph Marcus Leatherdale Shrouded Figure Photo
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Marcus Leatherdale (1952 - 2022) Silver gelatin print with copper leaf mount 1987 Titled: High Priest. From the Demigod series. Hand signed and dated and bears artist studio stamp verso. Provenance: Greathouse Gallery (with label & information verso) Edition: 1 of 10. Dimensions mage measures 12" x 5", total measurements are 24" x 13" Marcus Leatherdale was a Canadian portrait photographer. Marcus Andrew Leatherdale was born on 18 September 1952, in Montreal, Canada, to Jack Leatherdale, a veterinarian, and Grace Leatherdale, a homemaker. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Leatherdale arrived in New York City in 1978, where he attended the School of Visual Arts. started his career in New York City during the early eighties, setting up a studio on Grand Street. Leatherdale first served as Robert Mapplethorpe office manager for a while and was photographed in the nude by the master, grabbing a rope with his right hand and holding a rabbit in his left. Thereafter he worked as an assistant curator to Sam Wagstaff. He soon became a darling of the then vibrant club scene and the fashionable media: Interview, Details, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Elle Decor presented his work. Later on he was featured in artsy publications as Artforum, Art News, and Art in America. Leatherdale was the Cecil Beaton of downtown New York, He photographed a not-yet-famous club kid named Madonna in her ripped jeans and his denim vest. The performance artist Leigh Bowery was majestic in a tinseled mask, a corset and a merkin. Andy Warhol was a Hamlet in a black turtleneck. Susanne Bartsch, the nightlife impressaria, was a towering presence in red leather. He documented the New York City lifestyle, the extraordinary people of Danceteria and Club 57 where he staged his first exhibits in 1980. Leatherdale was an acute observer of the New York City of the nineteen eighties. His models were the unknown but exceptional ones – like Larissa, Claudia Summers or Ruby Zebra – or well known artists – like Madonna, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Winston Tong and Divine, Trisha Brown, Lisa Lyon, Andrée Putman, Kathy Acker and Sydney Biddle Barrows, otherwise known as the Mayflower Madam, Jodie Foster, and fellow photographer John Dugdale. He Married Claudia Summers, theirs was not a traditional marriage, but they were best friends, and he was Canadian, so it made life easier if they wed. His boyfriend for a time was Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photography studio Mr. Leatherdale also managed. He and Mapplethorpe were a striking pair, dressed like twins in leather and denim, their faces as if painted by Caravaggio, and they often photographed each other. Jean-Michel Basquiat was often hanging out there, playing his bongo drums; so were friends like Cookie Mueller, the doomed, gimlet-eyed author and Details magazine contributor who was for a time Mapplethorpe’s and Ms. Summers’ drug dealer, and Kathy Acker, the performance artist and novelist. For quite a while Leatherdale remained in Mapplethorpe's shadow, but was soon discovered as a creative force in his own right by Christian Michelides, the founder of Molotov Art Gallery in Vienna. Leatherdale flew to Vienna, presented his work there and was acclaimed by public and press. This international recognition paved his way to museums and permanent collections such as the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, the London Museum in London, Ontario, and Austria's Albertina. He was included in the MoMA exhibit New York/New Wave along with Kenny Scharf, William Burroughs, John Crash Matos, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Lawrence Weiner and Stephen Sprouse. Above all, his arresting portraits of New York City celebrities in the series Hidden Identities aroused long-lasting interest amongst curators and collectors. In 1993, Leatherdale began spending half of each year in India's holy city of Banaras. Based in an ancient house in the centre of the old city, he began photographing the diverse and remarkable people there, from the holy men to celebrities, from royalty to tribals, carefully negotiating his way among some of India's most elusive figures to make his portraits. From the outset, his intention was to pay homage to the timeless spirit of India through a highly specific portrayal of its individuals. His pictures include princesses and boatmen, movie stars and circus performers, and street beggars and bishops, mothers and children in traditional garb. Leatherdale explored how essentially unaffected much of the country was by the passage of time; and it has been remarked upon that this approach is distinctly post-colonial. In 1999, Leatherdale relocated to Chotanagpur (Jharkhand) where he focusing upon the Adivasis. Later Serra da Estrela in the mountains of central Portugal became his second home base. Leatherdale's matte printing techniques, which adapt nineteenth-century processes and employ half black, half sepia colorations, reinforce the timelessness of his subjects. Tones and matte surfaces effectively differentiate his portraits from the easy slickness of fashion photography. In 2019, Mr. Leatherdale compiled his work from 80s in a book entitled “Out of the Shadows”, written with Claudia Summers. During his time in New York City, he dated Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photography studio Leatherdale managed. 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