Flats photography collective developed film and community relationships for its latest exhibition “Interwoven,” a collection of Houston-based photographers’ perspectives on their shared home. Named for its origins of hosting traveling photography exhibition series in artists’ homes, Flats will fittingly showcase the work of Colby Deal, Lee Deleon, Sol Diaz-Peña, Mary Margaret Hansen, Adrienne Simmons and Briana Vargas in a community member’s residence in the historic Harwood Court complex this Friday, June 14 and Sunday, June 16.

The organization’s programming is sponsored by Fresh Arts, an artistic service-driven nonprofit, and is partially funded by the City of Houston’s Arts Alliance.

The setting of the showcase is a testament to the interconnectedness of Houston’s creative network as Harwood Court is named for its famous Houston-bred architect Harwood Taylor, known for popularizing the modern frame house. The complex is now owned by architect and art patron Palmer Schooley, who co-chaired Fresh Arts’ 2024 Gala.

Flats founder Jessi Bowman invited photographers from a wide range of backgrounds to participate in the exhibition to highlight different interpretations of the theme “the shared human experience.” After doing deep dives on each artist’s social media pages and considering how their pieces would complement each other, Bowman says that she and fellow photographer/curator Ryan Francisco built not just another exhibition, but a community. 

“I’m really looking forward to the connections and camaraderie that get made at these kinds of exhibitions,” Bowman notes. “We have a very diverse group of artists, including a wide age range, and seeing them meet and make connections through their art is a really fun thing to watch.”

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While some artists presenting their work interpreted the theme of community literally, incorporating images of loved ones, others went an abstract route, taking photos of cityscapes and nature.

“We wanted it to be a show about community, but just as community can look different we wanted that to be reflected in the show,” Bowman tells PaperCity.

For those looking to spruce up their social media presence, attendees will have the opportunity to have their portraits taken in the complex’s courtyard by photographers from Studio D-18 on Friday, June 14. Congregants who make their pilgrimage to see “Interwoven” on Sunday, June 16 can participate in Art Mass, a reflective experience involving meditation, conversations with the artists and communal crafting. 

Flats’ “Interwoven” will be on view this Friday, June 14 from 6 to 10 pm; and Sunday, June 16 from 11 am to 2 pm at Harwood Court (3262 W. Main Street). Click here to RSVP.

Additional reporting from Catherine D. Anspon.

Esiebo has chronicled how used tyres are being repurposed in Lagos in a photography series exhibited as part of the British Academy-funded Pneuma-City project. Esiebo’s photos are shown in the headquarters of the vulcanisers’ association in the Lagos neighbourhood of Mushin. The association’s motto is “no tyre, no movement”. The photos are simultaneously being exhibited in seven vulcaniser workshops across the city, curated by the Lisbon-based Inês Vallee.

THE GUARDIAN

The American photographer Daniel Kramer, who has died aged 91, was just beginning his professional career when by chance he caught a young folk singer’s performance on the Steve Allen Show on 25 February 1964. Until that moment, Kramer had never heard of Bob Dylan, but the 22-year-old singer’s stirring rendition of his stark protest song The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll caught his attention.

“He may have had a guitar in his hand, but the lyrics were poetry,” Kramer later recalled of Dylan’s delivery. “And, he had to be very brave because, if you said things like that you could get shot.”

Kramer was so impressed that he began repeatedly calling and mailing the office of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, with requests to photograph the singer. His persistence finally paid off after six months when Grossman himself answered the phone and, to Kramer’s surprise, gave him the go-ahead for a photoshoot. It took place a few days later at Grossman’s house in Woodstock, upstate New York, the planned one-hour session stretching to five hours.

In monochrome tones, Kramer captured Dylan posing on a swing on Grossman’s front porch, deep in concentration during a game of chess with a friend at a local cafe and, in one mischievous shot, pointing one of Kramer’s own cameras back at him. Months later, he accompanied Dylan on tour, creating memorable shots of the singer on and offstage, including one where the singer is lifted off his feet by Joan Baez following a triumphant concert at the Lincoln Center, New York.

With hindsight, the photographs are an intimate document of a brief interlude of calm before the storm of creativity and controversy that would follow. It was Kramer’s great good luck to meetDylan when the singer was on the cusp of a surge of creativity that would see him dramatically reinvent himself and, in the process, redefine what popular music could do.

Kramer was in attendance once again in January 1965 to document the New York recording sessions that produced the Bringing It All Back Home album, released in March of that year. It marked Dylan’s controversial move from an acoustic to an electric sound, and that shift was also reflected in Kramer’s cover image.

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It features a more consciously stylish Dylan staring intently into the camera, as Grossman’s glamorous wife, Sally, lounges, cigarette in hand, on a sofa behind him. The pair are enclosed by a blurred circle of light that renders everything on the edge of the photograph indistinct. “People think I used Vaseline to create that circular image,” Kramer said. “That’s not what I did. It’s two different pictures on one film. One is moved, and one is not. I wanted to simulate a record spinning or the universe of music.” Dylan, Kramer’s image intimated, was now at the centre of his own, singular, creative universe.

Bringing It All Back Home was Kramer’s first experience of shooting an album cover. From the cat sitting on Dylan’s lap to the plethora of symbolic objects scattered around him – including albums by Lotte Lenya, Robert Johnson and Ravi Shankar, a fallout shelter sign, various artworks and magazines – the cover image echoes the music therein by signifying a brave new beginning.

As Kramer later said of Dylan’s transformation, “On the first four albums, he’s a folk singer. He’s in folk singer clothes … On Bringing It All Back Home, he’s a prince in his blazer and his beautiful cufflinks, sitting with this beautiful cat and a ravishingly beautiful woman behind him in a red dress. It was a change. Everything was changing.”

In August of the same year, Kramer also shot the cover for another classic Dylan album, Highway 61 Revisited. This time, the session was more impromptu, with Kramer capturing the singer as he sat on a stoop of the building where Grossman lived in Gramercy Park, New York, wearing a Triumph Motorcycles T-shirt and a multicoloured shiny shirt.

The photo session, which lasted around 20 minutes, took place just after the recording of Dylan’s epochal song Like A Rolling Stone, and again the image reaffirms his defiant creative reinvention. “He looks hostile or at least moody,” Kramer said later. “He seems to challenge me – or whoever he looks at – ‘What are you going to do about it, dude?’”

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Daniel was the eldest of three children of Ethel (nee Berland), a hospital administrator, and Irving Kramer, who worked on the docks. Irving was also an amateur film-maker in his spare time, and may have been a formative influence on the young Daniel, who gravitated to photography early on. Aged 14, he hosted a solo exhibition of his own work at his junior high school. He later joined the army’s Military Police Corps for a time before becoming a student at Brooklyn College.

He was mentored for a time by the esteemed photojournalist W Eugene Smith, a pioneer of the editorial photo essay, and worked as a studio assistant for both Philippe Halsman and Diane Arbus before embarking on his solo freelance career. He had not long established his own studio when he made the fateful trip to Woodstock to photograph the singer who had so fascinated him on a TV variety show.

Although he made memorable portraits of other celebrities, including Muhammad Ali, Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash and Norman Mailer, Kramer’s name was for ever associated with Dylan.

In 2016, he published a 300-plus-page book, A Year and a Day, which included many previously unseen images of the artist. According to Kramer, it contained only a fraction of the photographs he shot during their fruitful creative partnership, which ended a year and a day after the pair first met.

In late August 1965, Dylan performed at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York. It was the first time he had played an entire gig with an electric band and Kramer captured Dylan at the soundcheck, in shades and holding his electric guitar, with an almost empty stadium behind him.

He looks preoccupied, maybe even a little nervous, his alert demeanour suggesting someone prepared to go to war with his audience for the sake of his art. It is a long way from the easygoing atmosphere that Kramer had captured just a year before in the leafy environs of Woodstock.

Back then, as Kramer later put it, they were “just a couple of guys taking some pictures that day to see what we could do”. What Dylan went on to do in the following months would alter the course of popular music. Kramer was there to document him do it and, in the process, photograph his way into history.

Kramer married Arline Cunningham in 1968. She died in 2016. He is survived by a niece and three nephews.

Streaks of red bunting zigzagging through Chinatown, tents for garden parties pitched in Buckingham Palace and secret roof gardens tucked into the tops of city skyscrapers. This is a side of London most people never see – unless they are hanging out of a helicopter.

Which is what the 75-year-old daredevil artist Donn Delson does, all to bring a fresh perspective on familiar places to people on the ground.

“Art is about creating a story and evoking emotion, giving people an experience they might not otherwise have had. I want people to feel like you’re in a helicopter with no door,” he said.

“I try to express a lesson I learned, that things aren’t always what they seem at first glance. It’s good when you take a beat to look at something and give a second consideration as to what it is and what it means to you as a person.”

Delson, based in Los Angeles, takes his photos by flying around for a couple of hours in a doorless helicopter until he identifies a target image. The pilot then turns the helicopter on its side, enabling Delson to suspend himself and angle his camera to capture an image taken directly overhead that needs to be “tack sharp”, despite buffeting winds. He then blows these up into large canvases that measure about 2.5 metres by 3.5 metres.

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London is one of his favourite cities to photograph thanks to its unusual urban topography – a mix of old and new architecture that has sprouted up in erratic, organic combination, and surprising bursts of colour in its plethora of parks.

When the Guardian joined Delson to get an insight into his work, flying around the city at about the height of the Shard (310 metres), London became a different, breathtaking place. Neighbourhoods that feel distinct on the ground merged into a chaotic mishmash of skyscrapers of varying heights, contrasting with orderly rows of Victorian terraces, punctuated by tower blocks and interspersed with the parks’ bright shocks of green and the blue-grey Thames snaking through.

“From above, buildings take on a whole different look – all of a sudden there’s lines, there’s patterns. In this city there’s even colour – people jokingly tell me London has no colour – London is extremely colourful from the air,” Delson said.

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Rather than documentary photography, he is looking to capture the unexpected that can be glimpsed only from this unusual vantage point. Familiar forms on the ground become abstract images when seen from the air, often resembling the explorations of colour and form contained in work by Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Mark Rothko and Bauhaus artists.

Delson has travelled around the world in pursuit of the perfect, “serendipitous” shot. Among his favourites are the “breathtakingly beautiful” Missoni-esque desert striations next to the teal Dead Sea, a shot of Mount Fuji perfectly framed by fluffy white clouds, and a rare capturing of a rainbow in a 360° circle in Molokai, Hawaii.

He is also interested in optical illusions, which are the subject of a forthcoming exhibition on shipping container art in Phoenix, Arizona, inspired by an earlier piece picturing rows of coloured shipping containers resembling keys, which he named Xylophone.

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Delson has also photographed rows of Japanese cherry blossoms for an image named Abacus, taken a shot of perfectly symmetrical parasols on a beach titled Space Invaders in homage to the arcade game’s aesthetic, and parked vans in the shape of a wine bottle, ironically titled Bottleneck.

“I’m kind of obsessed with the concept of perception and appearance versus reality, and a lot of my art, in my points of view collection, what I look for is a trompe l’oeil.

“I’m taking a photograph that is lifelike and I’m turning it on its side a little bit and making it something that tricks the eye and has a whimsical name to it. All of a sudden it’s something different than what you think it is.”

The photographer Muda Tomohiro’s work has taken him from Japan’s temples to the cathedrals of Europe; from the heights of the Himalaya to the tsunami-blasted shores of Tōhoku. In all these locations he has opened his eyes and heart to the messages sent out by the light and shadow in the scenes he captures.

(James Vestal/Stars and Stripes)

Tokyo, 1960: Service members George Rosenblatt and Leo Kuehnen take a photograph of a Japanese woman holding up her parasol. Touring Tokyo with his camera, Pacific Stars and Stripes-Korea bureau photographer James Vestal captured on film the impressions of the city that servicemen on Rest and Recuperation leave get. Vestal’s photographs show the visiting servicemen’s fleeting glimpses of the world’s largest city. Vestal joined other visiting staffs from Korea, photographing them as they covered the city.

Pictured here is a scan of the original 1960 print created by Stars and Stripes Pacific’s photo department to run in the print newspaper. The red marks indicate the crop lines. Only the middle part of the image would appear in the newspaper. As all pre-1964 Stars and Stripes Pacific negatives and slides were unwittingly destroyed by poor temporary storage in 1963, the prints developed from the late 1940s through 1963 are the only images left of Stripes’ news photography from those decades. Stars and Stripes’ archives team is scanning these prints to ensure their preservation.

Looking for Stars and Stripes’ historic coverage? Subscribe to Stars and Stripes’ historic newspaper archive! We have digitized our 1948-1999 European and Pacific editions, as well as several of our WWII editions and made them available online through https://starsandstripes.newspaperarchive.com/