TURBULENT AMERICA

From the exhibition: Protestor outside the 1972 Republican National Convention, Miami, FL.

TURBULENT  AMERICA  presents  three  decades  of  work  by  photojournalist  Jean-Pierre  Laffont  covering  American  culture  and  history  from  the  1960s  to  the  1980s.

Bronx, New York City, NY. July 20th 1972. Members of the New York street gang Savage Skulls. The trademark of the, primarily Puerto Rican, gang was a sleeveless denim jacket with a skull and crossbones design on the back. Based around Fox Street, in the popular South Bronx neighborhood, the gang declared war on the drug dealers that operated in the area. Running battles were frequent with rival gangs Seven Immortals, and Savage Nomads.

Bronx, New York City, NY. Summer of 1966. An abandoned car becomes a place for kids to play in Fox Street. From the mid-1960s to the late-1970s, quality of life for Bronx residents declined sharply.

Manhattan, New York City, NY. October, 1975. Two homeless men squat below the recently constructed World Trade Center. New York was bankrupt, in shambles and the building was not occupied.

Manhattan, New York City, NY. September 28th, 1972. Hands from behing the bars at Toms Prison. Standing on Center Street at Leonard Street, and was built in 1840 with granite from the old Bridewell Prison in City Hall.

Watkins Glen, NY. July 28th, 1973. Couple kissing in the middle of the crowd. The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen was a 1973 rock festival which once received the Guinness Book of World Records entry for “Largest audience at a pop festival.” An estimated 600,000 rock fans came to the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway outside of Watkins Glen, New York on July 28, 1973, to see The Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band perform. Similar to the 1969 Woodstock Festival, an enormous traffic jam created chaos for those who attempted to make it to the concert site. Long and narrow country roads forced fans to abandon their vehicles and walk 5–8 miles on that hot summer day. 150,000 tickets were sold for $10 each, but for all the other people it was a free concert. The crowd was so huge that a large part of the audience was not able to see the stage; however, twelve huge sound amplifiers, installed courtesy of legendary promoter Bill Graham, allowed the audience to at least hear.

Jean-Pierre Laffont has always been a free spirit and a gifted, singular photographer, loyal to his own insatiable curiosity and uninterested in assignments. He sought to tell the stories of his era with a tender and compassionate gaze. Upon arrival in the United States in 1965, he quickly became a privileged witness to a nation embroiled in controversy and for three decades photographed its political, social and cultural mutations, observed the fate of its leaders and documented the tragic divisions of its civilization. This Turbulent America is above all his: brimming with spontaneity and humanity. In the intense canvas he paints for us, we find an abundance of the events that left their marks from the 60s to the 90s; the heroes and heroines; the captivating parade of social outcasts and fanatics, and the daily life of a people who live by the rhythm of their country’s failures and its moments of euphoria, harsh as well as  liberating. Today, his photographic odysseys, filled with iconic images, bring history back to vibrant life in the form of a personal archive of events, which helped chisel the  multiple facets of his adopted homeland.
– Jonas Cuénin

AMERICA AS I LIVED IT

“I was born French in Algeria, grew up in Morocco, and studied photography in Switzerland, before finding work as a photographer of movie stars in Paris. What I wanted to be, however, was a photojournalist and it was the United States that fascinated me. I arrived in New York in 1965 and for more than 3 decades, I traveled trough the country trying to capture the spirit of the times. In the Sixties, New York was dirty and dangerous. The country was going through profound changes and it looked like everyone was in the streets protesting. In the Seventies, the American dream seemed to be disintegrating. The American people no longer trusted their government. I covered the rise of the Black power movement and the Ku Klux Klan. During President Carter’s years, I did photo essays with the poor in his home state of Georgia. The American spirit was down. Still, the war in Vietnam had ended and through the hippie movement, the American youth found its voice and optimism. In the Eighties, Americans were ready for a new beginning. When I look back at the individual photographs I took during this quarter-century period, the images at first seem to depict a ball of confusion… riots, demonstrations, disintegration, collapse and conflict. Taken together, the images show the chaotic, often painful, birth of the country where we live in today: 21st-century America. They do what photographs do best: freeze decisive moments in time for future examination. These photographs form a personal and historical portrait of a country I have always viewed critically but affectionately, and to which I bear immense gratitude.”
-Jean-Pierre Laffont

SPECIFICS

The show includes 118 images ranging in size from 20.5×30.5cm (8″x12″) to 180.5×120.5cm (71″x47.4″).

PUBLICATION

PRESS QUOTES

“Jean-Pierre Laffont’s America is a land of poverty, corporate greed, racism and violence. But it is also a land of optimism where hard work, sheer will and following your dream can lead to almost anything. It is so vast that it can contain both the quiet desperation of fifth-generation farmers struggling to remain on their family land and the hopes of a new immigrant searching for a better life.”
– New York Times

“Laffont joined the long tradition, beginning with de Toqueville, of Frenchmen who were able to see what it was.”
– New York Magazine

“Even if you are familiar with the best photojournalism of that time, Laffont’s eye for the surreal and the surprising is almost uncanny. (…) As his turbulent America unfolds, you see a singular vision emerge: fearless and darkly poetic.”
– The Guardian

“Jean-Pierre Laffont’s extensive photo archive seems almost mythological: How could one photographer cover so many seminal events with such a unique vision?”
– Slate

“Through Laffont’s lens we see the emergence of a brave new world, one that allows the youth to follow their dreams, for better or for worse. The result is a remarkable monograph that is a work of significant art history, revealing an astonishing breadth, detail, and scope as profound and compelling as the man who took the photographs himself.”
– Crave

“Paging through Photographer’s Paradise is like watching a nation grow and crumble under its own weight. His images record the vast diversity of communities, societies, and often people on the fringes of those groups. Laffont’s photojournalism becomes a historical record of the times.”
– Advocate

“Laffont might just be the greatest photojournalist you’ve never heard of. The Algerian-born Frenchman covered nearly every story of importance in America during the transformative decades of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s with provocative clarity, intellectual honesty and emotional resonance.”
– Black & White Magazine

“There’s spiritual balm in the images of what Laffont calls the rural crisis. His poignant pictures are reminiscent of the fortitude and grace immortalized in Dorothea Lange’s images of the Great Depression.”
– Sir Harold Evans, from the foreword of Photographer’s Paradise: Turbulent America 1960-1990