Women: Portraits 1960-2000 by Susan Wood

Women : Portraits 1960-2000 is a  new book of photographs by Susan Wood. The book  features fresh looks at some of the most prominent and influential women in the latter part of the 20th century. Long-unseen photographs of icons including Helen Gurley Brown, Julia Child, Nora Ephron, Diane von Furstenberg, Jane Fonda, Betsey Johnson, Jayne Mansfield, Yoko Ono, Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem, Martha Stewart, Cheryl Tiegs, Alice Waters, Gloria Vanderbilt, and many others are featured. A lively essay by Wood, entitled “Women Was My Beat” introduces the book.

Wood’s photographs were made during years of great social change, and her own career followed a similar trajectory. A born and bred New Yorker, she was involved with the original “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue and later won a Clio, the most sought-after award in advertising.  In 1954 her photographs appeared in the premier issue of Sports Illustrated. Mademoiselle chose her as one of their “Ten Young Women of the Year” in 1961. Throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, her photographs could be seen in Vogue, Life, People and New York magazines. She was a regular contributor to Look magazine, most notably for a 1969 cover story on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Wood is also noted for her movie stills. Under contract to Paramount Pictures, United Artists and 20th Century Fox, she was on set during the filming of movies that defined the 1960s such as Easy Rider and Hatari.

L’Oeil dela Photographie

Writes Wood, now 84, in the book’s introduction, "I’m a working woman from an age when women still wondered if we could and/or should work. I remember a woman scientist’s graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College in 1953 recommending we graduates keep some part of our brain actively engaged in an intellectual project even if we visited it only occasionally. 'Picking up knitting' was her analogy. Can you imagine the catcalls and boos someone today would get in response?"

Susan Wood's iconic portraits of the most influential women from the 1960s onwards. By Katy Cowan.  Creative Boom , August 15, 2018. With a fine selection of photos

Although I was getting work from such fashion magazines as Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and McCall’s, and did human interest and working women stories for Mademoiselle, Glamour, Ladies’ Home Journal, and other women’s service magazines, my goal was to do picture stories involving people, places, and events. This was being done almost exclusively at Look and Life. I kept bringing around new portfolios, had no luck with Life (which was run like a boys’ fraternity house), but I was pulled into Look by a woman editor, Betty Leavitt. She was the picture editor who dealt with freelance photographers, and when I came to her with my portfolio and story suggestions, she came through with assignments. Look was not a self-satisfied Old Boys‘ culture. Gardner Cowles, Jr., owned it, and he was supportive of women’s creativity. Evidence is in the graphically advanced magazine, Flair, he created for his very talented and creative wife, Fleur Cowles. The top editorial position at Look was held by Dan D. Mich, a sympathetic, thoughtfully free-spirited man who had put a woman—Patricia Carbine—into a high executive position as managing editor. Patricia, Betty, and I interacted well, and they assigned me to some wonderful stories.

I became a regular contributor to Look, my most notable work being a 1969 cover story on John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their home in England. Betty Rollin, a good friend, and a writer with a dry wit and a sharp tongue who was a friend of Yoko’s at Sarah Lawrence, made the connection, and the art director at Look whom I called to suggest I be the photographer accepted my offer. My first photographs of Yoko were in a hospital, John staying with her while she rested quietly as she was trying to stave off a miscarriage, or was recovering from one. The rest of our story took place soon after, while Yoko was taking it easy at home, with John.

For me, they were a couple in love doing ordinary things. I did some photographs of them shopping and then arranged to come to their house in the country the next day and see what could be done to take varied and interesting pictures that would make the editors at Look want to give them lots of space. As I was living in London at the time, I could meet them for an event when it was actually happening.

At their house, they got creative, getting into the bathtub together, while the bedroom seemed natural for a bed scene, “Why don’t we do a picture of you in bed?” I asked. So I was the first to photograph them in a bed and they went on to do a bed-in for peace and so on. They had fun with the idea and began to enjoy making pictures. I wanted to give a sense of them as a loving couple. I met Yoko and John a few more times and, with their cooperation, creativity, and John’s impish sense of humor and body language, we made an interesting cover story for Look. Like most of my photo sessions, making the story relied upon the joint effort and contributions of the subjects as well as my ability to draw out the creative spirit in making the shoot lively.

[…]

                                                                    

It turned out that Women had become my “beat.” Beat as in a police officer on his or her beat. Beat as in a drumbeat, because this thread of subject matter—women—had grown from a pulse beat into a resounding and insistent drumbeat for women’s rights to opportunity and achievement. It is also my beat, as in heartbeat, as I am heartened by how far we have come. It wasn’t something I planned. I saw my photography as a mix of art form and journalism, and women one of its many subjects. But in going through my archives, I came to discover that women were my main subject matter for more than 60 years. These were the noteworthy women of the Sixties and into the first 15 years of the 21st century: Achievers, trailblazers, glass-ceiling breakers, femme fatales, or individuals whom I chose to photograph or was asked to do so by the editors of magazines, the companies who hired me, or the friends who chose me to take their portraits for their book jackets or for other personal reasons. Was I a feminist? At the time, I thought of myself simply as a working woman pursuing a career. I knew many feminist leaders, and I was friends with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. While I was uneasy with the label of feminist, I eventually accepted it with pride.

Betty could be abrasive, pugnacious, imperious, and grumpy. She might scream and seem to consider decorum bourgeois. But she was never like that with me. Well, maybe once, but that was when I disputed a medical fact about women and she interpreted it as making women look weaker than men—and she would have none of that.

Right or wrong, I backed off. I didn’t want this minor detail damaging our friendship—a friendship that was of the old-fashioned girlfriend sort. We gossiped, talked about men and love, drank together, and laughed at the absurdities of life. We liked going to parties, especially A-list ones. Sometimes we barely touched down. Betty had a slight vision problem so I drove. She loved my second husband, Joe Haggerty, and came to keep him company in his final days, and spoke at his funeral. Her opening line was, “I loved Joe.”

For the first 10 years of my career, despite having the big names of feminism as friends, I never thought that being a woman, and getting assignments to photograph women, had anything to do with being a woman photographer. But it did, because men dominated hard news. And though men controlled most editorial jobs, the few women editors among them were as macho as the guys. Nevertheless, the handful in “soft” news, and the good art directors, men or women, would give a talented woman a break, an assignment here and there. Working women, subjects associated with women, and home life such as food, fashion, children, marriage, family, and home furnishings, were “soft news” for ‘the women’s page’ of newspapers and women’s service magazines.

                                                                        

Unseen Pictures of Female Icons: An Exclusive Excerpt of “Women Was My Beat” by Susan Wood.  A Women’s Thing ,  August 16, 2018

“The 1960s and 70s were a pivotal time for women,” recalls veteran photographer Susan Wood, who has spent decades immortalising some of the world’s most prominent female figures, capturing their nuances and singularity in the process. “It was a period when women were starting to come out of their shell; they were no longer background figures. Celebrating their inherent strength and poise has always been my primary focus.”

The feminist ethos has always been at the core of Wood’s practice – yet, she admits, her affiliation with the movement wasn’t set in motion by personal struggle as much as by a deep sense of solidarity. “I’d always been aware of all the limitations that women were facing, but I was lucky enough to get work and decent opportunities despite the general climate,” Wood remembers. “Knowing Gloria [Steinem] and Betty [Friedan] really changed my perspective and made me understand how deep and systemic the discrimination actually was. I’ve been involved in the feminist fight for equality ever since.”

Wood unapologetically channeled her sociopolitical sympathies into her visual work by capturing strength, humour and wit while at the same time embracing sensuality. “There is a lot of sensuality, beauty and sexiness in these images, but none of it is obvious,” the photographer concludes. “When men are behind the lens, they are so taken with the female beauty at face value, that they don’t notice all the small details that come across through her personality, the charisma, the intelligence… Women photographers find sensuality in so many different places. There is this unspoken recognition of something that we women know, a certain empathy and understanding that really come across in the imagery. Unearthing this has always been my motivation.” 

The Photographer Celebrating her Luminary Circle of Female Friends. By Irina Baconsky

Another Magazine , August 17, 2018

Figuring out the right way to depict women, to emphasise their strength, was always complex. It was a battle between showing them looking “desirable” and showing them looking professional (her images mostly veer towards the latter). “Many women have college degrees from fine institutions,” she notes, “but it seemed as though that wasn’t important to the men.”

Wood chose a photograph of supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, for her book’s cover. It was taken in California in 1970, for a spa story in Vogue. “It’s not a ‘feminist’ point of view,” Wood says of the shot, which shows the model and fashion designer dressed in a satin robe and idling among newspapers and fruit on a hotel bed. “But it grabs the attention. You want someone to pick up the book and look at it.” It is also worth mentioning that Tiegs’ burly husband, who spans the other half of the photo, is relegated to the book’s back cover.

                                                                             

(…)

Has much changed since 1967? In the age of #MeToo, Wood’s portraits still have plenty to tell us about how women are portrayed, how they think about themselves, the opportunities they’re presented with, how they overcome deeply sexist odds to make it in the professional world.

One of the great pleasures of the book is how mischievous Wood can be. She is asked to portray a certain subject “as a Marie Antoinette – a ‘let-’em-eat-cake’ rich bitch”. But instead, she puts the woman in a man’s three-dollar T-shirt, and has her communing with a snake. This, she muses, “was far more interesting”. Quite.

The high-fliers club: how Susan Wood captured the original rebel girls. By Sarah Moroz. The Guardian , September 28, 2018. 

Her website

                                                                                
                                                                                

Also of interest :

Susan Wood: from Easy Rider’s difficult shoot to clicking with John and Yoko. By Una Mullally. The  Irish Times , February 7 , 2014. On photographing John Lennon and Yoko One and as on-set photographer during the shooting of Easy Rider. 

A collection of Susan Wood's work, on exhibition in association with the Irish Georgian Society and curated by Deirdre Brennan, represents a number of milestones in American photography over a period of more than 30 years. 

Although her most famous magazine cover is an iconic photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, she is best known for her movie stills. Under contract to Paramount Pictures, United Artists and 20th Century Fox, Ms Wood was on set and on location during the filming of movies which defined the 1960s, like Leo the Last, Easy Rider and Modesty Blaise.  Her assignments allowed her to capture remarkable, unrehearsed shots of some of that era's most unforgettable actors like Peter Fonda, Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn -- on display as a group, here for the first time ever.

Close Up Susan Wood  Movie stills from the sixties. 

Dublin International Film Festival. Published on February 10, 2014

Girl on scooter

I am sixty years old. “In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the dark wood where the true way was wholly lost”, to quote the poet. Health prevailing.

I must admit this last year I’ve experienced something I’ve not known before. No, no one could forget  such an experience. I’ve known melancholy, sadness for loss. But this sadness is a totally new experience. The sense of not knowing what to live for. What’s ahead.

It happened a week ago. Tears came to me. Whilst I was riding my bike, on my way home. It was a hot day in June. One girl on a scooter passed me, then another.  Two girls on a scooter, later on.

These are images dear to my heart.

Independent, graceful, canty.  All qualities I lack. They know where they are going.  Look at their stature, absorbed in thought, how they sit, backs straight, their knees almost touching, their hair blowing in the wind.

[Four stages of a Dream : Behold Appropriate Transform Escape]

Araki, Erotomaniac

                                                                             

Sex is, of course, an endlessly fascinating subject. Araki’s obsessive quest for the mysteries of erotic desire, not only expressed in his photographs of nudes, but also in lubricious close-ups of flowers and fruits, could be seen as a lust for life and defiance of death. Some of these pictures are beautifully composed and printed, and some are rough and scattershot. One wall is covered in Polaroid photos, rather like Andy Warhol’s pictures of his friends and models, except that Araki’s show a compulsive interest in female anatomy.

Genitalia, as the source of life, are literally objects of worship in many Japanese Shinto shrines. But there is something melancholy about a number of Araki’s nudes; something frozen, almost corpse-like about the women trussed up in ropes staring at the camera with expressionless faces. The waxen face of his wife Yoko in her casket comes to mind. Then there are those odd plastic models of lizards and dinosaurs that Araki likes to place on the naked bodies of women in his pictures, adding another touch of morbidity.

But to criticize Araki’s photos — naked women pissing into umbrellas at a live sex show, women with flowers stuck into their vaginas, women in schoolgirl uniforms suspended in bondage, and so on — for being pornographic, vulgar, or obscene, is rather to miss the point. When the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima was prosecuted in the 1970s for obscenity after stills from his erotic masterpiece, In the Realm of the Senses, were published, his defense was: “So, what’s wrong with obscenity?”

The point of Oshima’s movie, and of Araki’s pictures, is a refusal to be constrained by rules of social respectability or good taste when it comes to sexual passion. Oshima’s aim was to see whether he could make an art film out of hardcore porn. Araki doesn’t make such high-flown claims for his work. To him, the photos are an extension of his life. Since much of life is about seeking erotic satisfaction, his pictures reflect that.

Displayed alongside Araki’s photographs at the Museum of Sex are a few examples of Shunga, the erotic woodcuts popular in Edo Period Japan (1603–1868), pictures of courtesans and their clients having sex in various ways, usually displaying huge penises penetrating capacious vulvas. These, too, have something to do with the fertility cults of Shinto, but they were also an expression of artistic rebellion. Political protest against the highly authoritarian Shoguns was far too dangerous. The alternative was to challenge social taboos. Occasionally, government officials would demonstrate their authority by cracking down on erotica. They still do. Araki has been prosecuted for obscenity at least once.

                                                                     

One response to Araki’s work, especially in the West, and especially in our time, is to accuse him of “objectifying” women. In the strict sense that women, often in a state of undress, striking sexual poses, are the focus of his, and our, gaze, this is true. (Lest one assume that the gaze is always male, I was interested to note that most of the viewers at the Museum of Sex during my visit were young women.) But Araki maintains that his photographs are a collaborative project. As in any consensual sado-masochistic game, this requires a great deal of trust.

Some years ago, I saw an Araki show in Tokyo. Susan Sontag, who was also there, expressed her shock that young women would agree to being “degraded” in Araki’s pictures. Whereupon the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was there too, said that women were probably lining up to be photographed by him. Interviews with Araki’s models, some of which are on view at the Museum of Sex, suggest that this is true. Several women talk about feeling liberated, even loved, by the experience of sitting for Araki. One spoke of his intensity as a divine gift. It is certainly true that when Araki advertised for ordinary housewives to be photographed in his usual fashion, there was no shortage of volunteers. Several books came from these sessions.

But not all his muses have turned out to be so contented, at least in retrospect.

Earlier this year, Kaori wrote in a blog post that she felt exploited by him over the years (separately, in 2017 a model accused Araki of inappropriate contact during a shoot that took place in 1990). Araki exhibited Kaori’s photos without telling her or giving her any credit. On one occasion, she was told to pose naked while he photographed her in front of foreign visitors. When she complained at the time, he told her, probably accurately, that the visitors had not come to see her, but to see him taking pictures. (The Museum of Sex has announced that Kaori’s statement will be incorporated into the exhibition’s wall text.)

These stories ring true. It is the way things frequently are in Japan, not only in relations between artists and models. Contracts are often shunned. Borderlines between personal favors and professional work are blurred. It is entirely possible that Araki behaved badly toward Kaori, and maybe to others, too. Artists often use their muses to excite their imaginations, and treat them shabbily once the erotic rush wears off.

One might wish that Araki had not been the self-absorbed obsessive he probably is. Very often in art and literature, it is best to separate the private person from the work. Even egotistical bastards, after all, can show tenderness in their art. But in Araki’s case, the distinction is harder to maintain—this is an artist who insists on his life being inseparable from his pictures. The life has dark sides, and his lechery might in contemporary terms be deemed inappropriate, but that is precisely what makes his art so interesting. Araki’s erotomania is what drives him: aside from the posing and self-promotion, it is the one thing that can be called absolutely authentic.

Ian Buruma on  “The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki”  at the Museum of Sex, New York.

New York Review of Books

‘He’s not easy; he’s much more complex than the cuddly persona he projects,’ says New York’s Museum of Sex artistic and creative director Serge Becker, who first encountered Araki’s work in the 1990s. ‘Beyond the hype and controversies, there’s actually a real artist and thinker of substance. He’s on the level of Andy Warhol in regards to his prescience about art and culture.’

‘He ventures in his work and private life into areas that many of us are uncomfortable with,’ Becker suggests. ‘Some of the discomfort is not necessarily because we disagree with him, but because he touches us and shows us aspects of ourselves we tend to cover up. He’s brutally honest, but he gets to do it, because he shows us love and beauty too.’

‘We live in many ways in a world he helped shape, and we have adopted his language. The creation of the personal brand, the ceaseless documentation of one’s lives, the lack of privacy and sharing of personal moments, the high and the low of it all,’ Becker reflects.

From : The complicated and ‘incomplete’ legacy of Nobuyoshi Araki by Charlotte Jansen

Wallpaper

More here : Tracing the roots of Araki’s obsession with the erotic image, Joseph Delaney.

Dazed

Vitamin D

The sun is out. I always envy people who delight in the sun. Relaxing on  the beach, sitting at a cafe terrace, drinking and watching people go by. My vitamin D deficiency compels me to go out. Give me a solitary ride on my bike, anytime,  dreaming another life. Yesterday I went to the roof of my office building and took in a shot of sunshine. And I took these two photos.