GME News
THROUGH A LENS DARKLY: BLACK PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE EMERGENCE OF A PEOPLE, probes the recesses of American history through images that have been suppressed, forgotten, and lost. Directed by Thomas Allen Harris. The film features the late photographer Hugh Bell.
Read MoreOver the course of a career spanning more than half a century, Jack Mitchell (1925 – 2013) photographed dancers, artists, musicians, writers, and film and theatre performers, in more than 6,000 individual sessions. As part of GME’s ongoing commitment to further the legacy of photographers and their work, we are proud to announce an exclusive partnership with the Jack Mitchell Archives. Our goal is to place this unique and comprehensive collection with a major cultural institution, to secure high-profile exhibitions of his photographs worldwide, and to make available the licensing rights to these reproduced images.
Read MoreBILLIE, directed by James Erskine, is a portrait of legendary singer Billie Holiday based on more than 200 audio interviews conducted by journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl in the 1970s. A compelling look at the jazz legend who should never be forgotten. The film includes rare photos of Billie Holiday taken by Hugh Bell, licensed to the production by Gartenberg Media, the exclusive representative of the Estate of Hugh Bell.
Read MoreGME is proud to announce our partnership with the Jack Mitchell archive granting us exclusive representation of the Jack Mitchell archive for placement of the collection with a cultural institution and for high profile exhibitions of his work. Jack Mitchell achieved renown as a freelance photographer for The New York Times Arts and Leisure Section. His stunning portraits of virtually every major figure in the Arts graced the pages of the Times, as well as myriad other national and international publications. They include choreographers and dancers, musicians and composers, actors and writers, and stars of theater, film and television.
GME’s Fine Arts Curator David Deitch and company President Jon Gartenberg recently returned from a work trip to survey the Jack Mitchell archive and to view a recent exhibition of his work at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama.
Read MoreHugh Bell, born and raised in Harlem, was an American photographer of Caribbean descent. He became most well-known in the 1950s for his photographs of jazz musicians. Bell also influenced a generation of photographers, most notably of the Kamoinge Workshop. In the 1980s and 1990s, Bell photographed Gay Culture, creating stylish portraits of individuals and couples in both candid and posed moments of self-expression. Particularly noteworthy was his singular effort to depict African-Americans who participated in these celebrations, which include Gay Pride, Wigstock, and the Greenwich Village Halloween parades.
Read MoreWorking Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, a groundbreaking exhibition of overlooked Black photographers, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, establishes the importance of Hugh Bell's photography. While not a member of the Kamoinge Workshop, Bell is recognized by the curators of the exhibition as follows: “The Workshop’s artists have variously cited the influence of fellow photographers such as Roy de Carava, E. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Hugh Bell, and Dorothea Lange, all of whom combined observation with their own personal impressions.”
Read MoreIn 2021, Borea’s grandson, Adam Brown, accessed images of the the City is a Stage photo essay from GME to create this animated tribute to his grandfather.
Read MorePremiering March 30th, the PBS special series THE BLINDING OF ISAAC WOODARD presents the story of the horrific beating of a Black army sergeant during WWII that ultimately set the stage for the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which finally outlawed segregation in public schools and jumpstarted the modern civil rights movement. Pictured above, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark was an important expert witness in Briggs v. Elliott (1952), one of five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Read MoreBuzzFeed News features one of Hugh Bell's classic images from his series of Afro-Caribbean photos in their glowing tribute, "The Black Photographers Who Paved The Way For The World We Live In Now," appearing in the online magazine's Black History Month section.
Read MoreNow available on DVD and via streaming services from Kino Lorber, BILLIE (2020) is a documentary about the singer who changed the face of American music, and the journalist who died trying to tell her story. Directed by award-winning filmmaker James Erskine, the documentary is based on 200 hours of interviews conducted from 1970 to 1978 by journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl. Kuehl had intended to write a definitive biography of Holiday, and her research comprised interviews—taking up 125 audio cassette tapes—with Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Charles Mingus, and Sylvia Syms, among many other colleagues in the jazz world. She also spoke to Holiday’s cousin and childhood friends, as well as to her attorneys and the FBI agents who kept her under surveillance, due to both her drug use and her outspoken antiracism.
Read More
