After the successful exhibition City Metro in December 2018/January 2019 at the Cologne-based Galerie Bene Taschen, the gallerist was pleased to launch of the same-titled book on May 8, 2020. Jamel Shabazz has long been recognized as a leading figure in the New York street photography scene. Born and raised in Red Hook, Brooklyn, he has spent the past four decades documenting the rapidly changing social fabric of New York City. Active humanism drives Shabazz in his image making, as he has consistently sought to show and preserve the city’s many populations, regardless of their age, class, race, or occupation, with the New York City transit system serving as the backdrop to many of his most iconic images. Just like the exhibition, the book City Metro, curated by Bene Taschen, showcases Jamel Shabazz’s keen eye for capturing the integrity and beauty of the city’s communities and the extent to which the NYC transit system serves as a fundamental component of urban life. Since its inauguration in 1904, the subway has become an essential part of the city’s identity with several millions of journeys carried out every day. As the favored means of transport for New Yorkers over the last century, it has historically been recognized as a source of artistic inspiration, with notably Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, and Bruce Davidson each turning their lenses to the crowds that have populated its carriages.

On 8 October 2020, the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin will open its new exhibition “America 1970s/80s” with works by Evelyn Hofer, Sheila Metzner, Joel Meyerowitz, and Helmut Newton. After taking a full-time position with the French edition of Vogue in 1961, Helmut Newton worked in parallel for the fashion magazine’s American edition as well. During this time, he produced images in both Europe and the USA. In New York, Newton delivered his photographs directly to Alexander Liberman, who was the editorial director of American Vogue from the 1960s to the 1990s – not to mention a successful painter, sculptor, and photographer himself. Newton liked the United States and the sense of freedom it offered, and he regularly commuted between the Old and New Worlds. In the 1970s, most of Newton’s American fashion and nude photographs were shot in New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Los Angeles for various magazines; Newton included some of these in his second photography book, Sleepless Nights (1978). After 1980, when Helmut and June Newton began traveling regularly to Los Angeles to spend the winter months at Chateau Marmont, he made numerous portraits of the “famous and infamous” in and around Hollywood for magazines such as Egoïste, Interview, Vanity Fair, and New Yorker, as well as some nudes for Playboy. The images presented in this exhibition clearly show how Newton’s pictorial language changed during his time in the USA and that portraiture became increasingly important for him...