“HUSTLERS” by Eve Fowler, Photo Book, 1990’s

“HUSTLERS” BY EVE FOWLER MALE PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK

 

Description:

First edition hardback published by Capricious, 2014. Photographs of West Village, NY, and Santa Monica Boulevard, LA, male hustlers taken between 1993 and 1998 by Eve Fowler. Text by Kevin Killian. Very good condition; measures 10.25″ x 8.25″.

Appraised at USD$375.

 

 

Eve Fowler was a clear influence on me, in becoming an art dealer. While I lived in New York from 1990 – 2000, I met Eve early on, & this particular series of photographs was what made me decide to become an independent art/photo dealer. I did grunt work in Soho & uptown galleries, which allowed me to have their clientele look at Eve’s work, at times, while I was even bartending their art openings. These moments resulted in a number of sales; my early beginnings as a dealer.

I consider this work the catalyst to my current career, and I thank Eve for setting me on this path.

– Guy Berube, 2014

 
  Eve Fowler is a photographer based in Los Angeles. Her pictures explore provocative subject matter — for instance male hustlers, lesbians, or transgendered individuals — but she deliberately supplies no explanatory titles or captions. In her early work, she photographed men who were loners — disconnected sex workers in New York and Los Angeles. She then began photographing androgynous men, which then moved into photographs of longhaired, shirtless androgynous men who resemble some of the transgender women she photographs today.
 
  When Fowler was first emerging on the scene in the mid ’90s, after getting her MFA in art and photography from Yale, the Philadelphia-born artist earned her stripes with a four-year portraiture project capturing gay male hustlers on the streets of New York and Los Angeles, some of which are now in the permanent collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in newsprint books sold at Printed Matter.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
GALLERY REPRESENTATION
 
 
PRESS
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  • NEW BOOK BY EVE FOWLER: Hustling on the streets of New York and Los Angeles
Street photography collides with sexuality and identity in this ’90s series from Eve Fowler
 
“I didn’t want to make a book that explained everything”, says LA photographer Eve Fowler when asked about Hustlers, her ’90s photo series on the male prostitutes of West Village, NY and Santa Monica Boulevard in LA out now via Capricious. The book is captionless, only prefaced with a short bespoke tale, Prosper Street from acclaimed LGBT poet, author and playwright Kevin Killian. The story sucks you in and shakes you up from the off with the matter-of-fact narrative of rent boy, Jesse and his musings on the victim stereotype in sex work and his lover/client Frank who comes bearing ominous news from a hospital check-up. “I didn’t want to have essays about me or my work in the book. So I asked Kevin to write something fictional because I like his writing and i thought his work made sense in this context. It makes the book more like an artwork and less about me”, says Fowler.
 
The lack of verbal prompts as you flick through the nameless faces of these boys jars at first, you feel cheated out of their stories somehow, but by the end it’s that same lack of backstory that frees these hustlers from categorisation, in the same way that Jesse rails against it in Prosper Street. A lot of Fowler’s previous works have also dealt with the crossroads between sexuality and identity – the titillitatingly titled Gloria Hole springs to mind – and with Hustlers there’s a similar sense of other-ness going on, “I think it probably had something to do with coming out of the closet”. The starkly shot portraits offer up a unique take on photography’s enduring fascination with sex workers, stripping away at the lurid glamour and leaving us with a surprisingly intense portal back to those hustling streets.
 
 
 
 

EVE FOWLER

Eve Fowler, expanding from a foundation in photography, creates work that coalesces art and language. Her two-dimensional works take the form of billboards, posters, prints, and signs, using mediums such as neon, paint, and vinyl. In addition, she also creates installations, films, and sound pieces, often resulting from collaborations with other artists, filmmakers, and writers. Fowler’s practice is concerned with the power of words, language, and cultural biases as those topics relate to gender politics and queerness, in a contemporary and historical context.

Eve Fowler (b. 1964, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. A graduate of Temple University (BA, 1986), and Yale University (MFA, 1992), Fowler has had solo exhibitions at DCA Scotland; Participant Inc, NY; and in Sydney Australia at ArtSpace. Her work was included in Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project organized by LAND, in 2014. Her book Anyone Telling Anything Is Telling That Thing was published by Printed Matter in September of 2013. Her second book, Hustlers, was published in May of 2014, by Capricious Publishing. Fowler’s recent film with it which it as it if it is to be screened at LA MOCA; the Lumber Room, Portland, OR; and at The Tate St. Ives, in 2018. Her work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The New Museum, New York; and The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. In addition to her studio practice, Fowler organizes Artist Curated Projects in Los Angeles. She is a recipient of a 2017 Art Matters grant, was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University (2018-19), and received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts – Roy Lichtenstein Award in 2022.

 

 

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