A Rare Collection of Photographs by Eve Babitz
By Wim Langedijk for HURS
A Rare Collection of Photographs by Eve Babitz
HUR Reads is our definitive shortlist of the most prominent articles from around the web.
By HURS Team
1
‘Behind the Counter’ Reframes Women’s Labour
At Telegraph Gallery, Za Pultem (Behind the Counter) reframes nostalgia through a feminist lens rather than as a retro style. Bringing together works by artists Paulina Olowska, Caroline Walker and Adéla Janská, the exhibition examines images of women in service labour across socialist and post-capitalist contexts. By restaging cashiers, shop assistants and salon workers, it exposes how nostalgia mythologizes labour while obscuring its true precarity and oftentimes invisibility.
FRIEZE
With a pair of size 8 needles and £50 worth of yarn, Di Gilpin set out to reimagine what knitwear could be, and ended up reshaping couture, craft and community along the way. Revered by fashion houses and fibre obsessives alike, Gilpin’s radical approach treats knitting as design, mathematics and joy in equal measure. Now, as a judge on Channel 4’s The Game of Wool, she hopes to turn a lifelong obsession into a global movement.
THE GENTLEWOMAN
Fifty years after her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema reshaped how we think about looking, Laura Mulvey reflects on the political urgency that produced the ‘male gaze’ and its afterlives. As the BFI celebrates her work with a retrospective season, Mulvey revisits feminism, myth and avant-garde form, while considering how digital technologies have fractured spectatorship itself, undoing fixed positions of gender, desire and identification at the cinema’s core.
A RABBIT’S FOOT
Agnes Martin and Jay DeFeo devoted their lives to refining a personal vision while keeping the art world at a deliberate distance. Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea presents DeFeo’s late paintings (1982–89), dense, textured abstractions often inspired by landscape and memory. Nearby, Pace Gallery shows Martin’s final works (1999–2002), luminous horizontal lines in soft washes reflecting innocence and perception. Both artists wrestled with isolation, illness, and the pressures of fame, producing work of remarkable restraint, depth, and meditative focus.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
In 1969, before Eve’s Hollywood introduced her voice to a wider audience, Eve Babitz kept a journal and took photographs around her Hollywood home. Using a $7.98 Brownie camera, she captured palm trees, family and friends from her orbit, including Annie Leibovitz and Linda Ronstadt. Now held by the Huntington Library, the photographs reveal Babitz’s eye for intimacy, atmosphere and everyday glamour.