Artist talk by Marc H. Miller, with Leonor Faber-Jonker
Sunday, April 21 – 2:30pm
Immersion Room (7th Floor) NYU Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
RSVP by emailing ss162@nyu.edu
Starting in 1975, Dutch-American couple Bettie Ringma (d. 2018) and Marc H. Miller took what they called Paparazzi Self Portraits at CBGB and across downtown New York – sweet, tilted snaps of them with the likes of Angela Davis, William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Richard Hell. Later in the decade they moved to Amsterdam but found themselves broke and living on a cold barge. Then an idea: Camera + Alcohol = Money.
Bettie and Marc hung out in the city’s red-light district – its brown bars, migrant haunts, jazz joints, queer clubs, They offered its floating cast of characters – drag queens, sex workers, Swedish sailors, toothless and extravagantly bearded men, Turkish guest workers, Surinamese newcomers, Indonesian dancers – a Polaroid portrait for the price of a couple of beers. Their subjects were happy, sad, elusive, off their faces, up for a laugh, wanting to be seen.
That demi-monde Amsterdam barely exists these days, but it’s captured in a mysterious, often-moving new book Selling Polaroids in the Bars of Amsterdam, 1980. So odd: in these lush lives and performances there are so many echoes of the tavern scenes found in 17th-century Dutch painting…
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Copies of Selling Polaroids in the Bars of Amsterdam, 1980, only a few of which are in circulation in the United States, will be available for signing and purchase.
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MARC H. MILLER is an artist, curator, writer, and publisher. From 1981-1985, he worked with Paul Tschinkel on the ART/ new york video series; his column ‘Miller’s Memorabilia’ appeared in the East Village Eye from 1983-1985; he was a curator at the Queens Museum from 1985-1991. His publications include the ‘Punk Art’ exhibition catalogue issued by the Washington Project for the Arts (1978) and ABC No Rio: The Story of a Lower East Side Gallery (1985). He also runs the art ephemera specialists Gallery 98.
LEONOR FABER-JONKER is a historian, author, artist, and curator. Her books include No Future Nu/ Punk in Nederland 1977-2012 (2012), and More Than Just An Object (2018) – based on human remains in the context of the 1904-1908 Namibian genocide. She is the editor of Selling Polaroids in the Bars of Amsterdam, 1980. She has curated exhibitions at Melkweg Expo, WORM, and Mémorial de la Shoah.
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THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE (est. 2007): falling and laughing…
