Richard Corman Art

Basquiat, Jean-michel; Corman, Richard. Vintage silver gelatin photograph of Jean-Michel Basquiat Large, limited vintage silver gelatin photograph of Basquiat from 1984. One of o...

Basquiat, Jean-michel; Corman, Richard. Vintage Silver Gelatin Photograph of Jean-Michel Basquiat Large, limited vintage silver gelatin photograph of Basquiat from 1984. One of o...

The original, Unique Polaroids of Madonna from Photographer Richard Corman’s 1983 photoshoot presenting the future cultural icon on the Precipice of Fame, six weeks before the release of her debut album. We are offering the complete set of 66 Polaroids, as featured in Corman’s new limited edition fine art book “Madonna 66”. “I think the Polaroid is this little jewel that, in some ways, is just untouched... They’re not manipulated, they’re raw, as the subject matter was... I just feel that they’re important. I feel that this is a piece of pop-culture history.” -Richard Corman, as quoted in the New York Times Corman’s Polaroids “prove with utter certainty that Madonna was destined for icon status...” -Harper’s Bazaar On the history of the photoshoot, as featured in Vogue (November 28, 2016): “Madonna has remade herself so many times in her 30-plus-year career—Hollywood vamp, urban cowboy, new-age hippie—that it’s easy to forget that once, at the beginning of things, she wasn’t all that different from so many other city kids: a cool New York City girl who had fled her hometown of Detroit for the East Village. Photographer Richard Corman knows this version of Madonna well. In the early 1980s, when the singer was just getting her career in music and film off the ground, Corman spent months taking pictures of Madonna for several sittings in New York. This was at the behest of his mother, a casting director who saw potential. He caught on right away. ‘I called from across the street, and when I looked up, she yelled to come upstairs, and I saw these cat eyes looking over the railing of her four-story walk-up. I knew then and there that this was somebody special,’ says Corman of their first meeting at her apartment on East Fourth Street. ‘She was funny in the most beguiling way. As soon as I walked up, she served me espresso and bubblegum on a silver plate and tray’... “The 66 images—taken at Madonna’s brother’s house in Manhattan—were taken as test shots for a movie his mother was casting that never got made. Madonna did her own styling. ‘She was wearing white lace leggings under torn jeans... a jean jacket with graffiti on the back and the sleeves cut off, with these rubber bangles, more like friendship bracelets, that she would give away to friends. Her makeup was just so brash—these red lips, and she created that mole on the side of her face,’ he says. ‘You’d say now that it was so chic—you walk into Opening Ceremony, Urban Outfitters, and this is what everyone is wearing—but she was a visionary. It was so bohemian and gritty and down-to-earth. She was going to vintage clothing shops...