Yearly Archives: 2012

David Armstrong (1954-2014)

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David Armstrong was born in 1954, in Arlington, Massachusetts, and graduated from the Satya Community School, an alternative high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he met Nan Goldin at the age of 14. He then enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a painting major, but soon switched his concentration to photography after studying alongside Goldin, with whom he shared an apartment. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Cooper Union from 1974–78, and earned a BFA from Tufts University in 1988.

During the late 1970s, Armstrong became associated with the “Boston School” of photography, which included artists such as Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and Jack Pierson. Armstrong first received critical attention for his intimate portraits of men. In the 1990s, he began photographing cityscapes and landscapes in soft focus to contrast with the sharpness of his portraits.

In 1981, Armstrong created a series of black-and-white portraits which he showed at PS1’s “New York/New Wave” exhibition. In 1996, Elisabeth Sussman, curator of photographs at the Whitney Museum, enlisted Armstrong’s help in composing Nan Goldin’s first retrospective. She gained such respect for Armstrong’s eye, she acquired work for the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection, and he was subsequently featured in the 1994 Whitney Biennial.

Dietmar Busse

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Resume

Dietmar Busse (b. 1966, Stolzenau, Germany) is a New York–based artist whose work transcends traditional photography through radical darkroom experimentation and chemical painting. He began his career in fashion and editorial photography before retreating from commercial constraints around 2006 to pursue deeply personal, process-driven work. Busse’s signature practice involves camera-less techniques and modifications to photographic surfaces—applying developer, dyes, inks, and bleaches directly to paper—which produce images that blur the boundaries between photography, painting, and memory. His series such as Flora and Fauna and My Life as a Flower transform portraits into dreamlike, symbol-laden compositions. Recent solo exhibitions include Fairytales 1991–1999 at Amant in Brooklyn and The Lives of Birds at Fierman in New York. His work has been featured internationally in publications like Time and The New Yorker and displayed in venues including the Museum Schloss Moyland, Invisible-Exports, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum.

Larry Clark

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Larry Clark first made a name for himself when he revolutionized documentary photography in his classic book “Tulsa,” released in 1971, in which he presented straightforward, autobiographical images of violence, drug use, and adolescent sexuality. While Tulsa earned Clark a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for use toward his next project, that work was delayed over a decade by the artist’s heroin addiction and a stretch in Oklahoma’s McAlester Penitentiary. Eventually, Clark completed his second and equally innovative body of work titled “Teenage Lust,” in which he largely shifted his focus from drug culture to sexual obsession.

Bill Costa (1944-1995)

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Bill Costa was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts—an important fishing port and artist colony. He showed artistic promise at an early age and studied drawing with a local artist and then at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He turned to photography after leaving a successful corporate career, and had his first show in New York City in 1975. Costa’s photographs have been featured in many magazines, and have been included in numerous exhibitions across the United States and Europe.