WASHINGTON, DC.- Irvine Contemporary presents Image/Fame/Memory, an exhibition of works by four major portrait and documentary photographers, Curtis Knapp, Gerard Malanga, Billy Name, and Kate Simon, who worked mainly in New York City from the mid-1960s to the present and are known for the iconic power of their images in circulating fame and contributing to the cultural memory of the past four decades. Two of the photographers, Billy Name and Kate Simon, have also recently collaborated with Shepard Fairey in the creation of new images that extend the memory and symbolic power of the original photographs in a new medium and new cultural moment.
Fame, celebrity, and memory are inseparable from the photographic image as it circulates in all forms of media. As Madonna herself famously said in her 1991 movie, Truth or Dare, "what’s the point of doing anything off camera?" Most of the people represented in these images are known through many years of conventional celebrity photo genres--magazine spreads, staged promotional shots, and media coverage. The photographs in Image/Fame/Memory were selected to show photographers working in more personal, reflective, candid, and interpretive ways with their subjects, creating images that compel us to reconsider the people known only through multiple streams of photographic imagery.
Curtis Knapp is an award-winning photographer who began his career in New York in the 1980s, including shooting for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine. He has photographed some of the greatest artists, musicians, actors, writers, and celebrities of our day, including Madonna (first magazine cover), William S. Burroughs, Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and many others. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including TIME, Rolling Stone, Zoom, Vogue, GQ, Esquire, and Cosmopolitan. Knapp’s portraits of Andy Warhol appeared in the Irvine Contemporary exhibition, Celebrity Portraits from the Warhol Factory Years (2006). Curtis Knapp now lives and works in New Orleans, LA.
Gerard Malanga, photographer, filmmaker, poet, and archivist, was Andy Warhol’s first studio assistant and worked closely with Warhol in the 1960s. His collaborations with Warhol on the famous "Screen Tests" series, shot in the Factory, are internationally recognized as major works of the era. This exhibition includes Malanga’s Thermofax Portfolio, a unique signed book edition and print series using the original Thermofax copier process for the photographs that Malanga sourced for Warhol's Death and Disaster series. Malanga’s portrait photos also appeared in the Irvine Contemporary exhibition, Celebrity Portraits from the Warhol Factory Years (2006). Gerard Malanga now lives and works in upstate New York.
Billy Name (born William Linich) is known as Warhol’s main “resident photographer” from 1964-70, and is the creator of the look and design of Warhol's famous "Silver Factory." Name photographed most of the celebrities and artists who visited the Factory in the 1960s and is largely responsible for communicating the intimate visual memory of the era. His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and publications, including a Retrospective of his photography at the Institute of Contemporary Art , London , in 1997, and the book, All Tomorrow's Parties (1997). Name’s portrait photos also appeared in the Irvine Contemporary exhibition, Celebrity Portraits from the Warhol Factory Years (2006), which has since become part of a private collection exhibited at the Ludwig Museum in Germany and the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel. Billy Name now lives and works in Poughkeepsie , NY .
Kate Simon is internationally known for her intimate portraits of many of the leading musicians, artists, and writers of our time. Simon began her career in photography in London where during the rising punk scene in the 1970s, and photographed the members of The Clash and their first album cover. Simon returned to New York City in 1978, and since then has created iconic images of Bob Marley, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, William S. Burroughs, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Louise Bourgeois. Simon’s widely recognized personal portraits of Bob Marley have been published in a limited edition book, Bob Marley: Rebel Music (2004). Shepard Fairey has recently collaborated with Kate Simon on three screenprint and stenciled images based on her photographs of Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of The Clash. Kate Simon lives and works in New York .
Shepard Fairey is known internationally as a leader in street art and many forms of post-Pop composition, graphic design, and printmaking. He gained international recognition in the early 1990s with his Obey Giant campaign, seen on streets around the world on countless posters and wall murals. In 2008, he became widely known for creating the iconic Obama “Hope” image that swept the globe. His hand-stenciled and collaged version of the Obama Hope portrait is now in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, acquired from the exhibition at Irvine Contemporary in October, 2008. Over the past 20 years, Fairey has created works that cross all boundaries and categories—on the street, studio-produced panels and canvases, editioned prints, commercial collaborations, and gallery and museum installations. His Retrospective, Supply and Demand, traveled to US museums in 2009-2010. He has created many collaborative works with photographers in making new images, including Glen Friedman, Billy Name, and Kate Simon. This is the first exhibition of Shepard Fairey’s collaborative images with the source photographs by Billy Name and Kate Simon, and the first exhibition of his new Rebel Waltz composition with a collaborative image from a photograph of Paul Simonon of The Clash by Kate Simon. Shepard Fairey lives and works in Los Angeles , CA .
