DD: Do you think Instagram, smartphones and digital cameras have changed the definition of photography from printed imagery to now include ephemeral pixels?
Nick Knight: I think we have to forget and put aside the term photography. It no longer applies to the image we see and consume. We need a new term and I consider myself an image maker.
P: Tell us about some of your influences, artistic or otherwise.
Bailey Roberts: I think adventure is my primary influence. I use photography as an excuse for life experience. It is my enabler to go out into wherever it is that I happen to be and to have a point of entry. I guess when applying that tangibly, it draws me to people who seem to reflect that audacity in their work.
This translates into anything though; directors, painters, musicians, surfers, authors, and just general people I encounter on a daily basis. I get really inspired and influenced by people who I feel are really living the way they want to be living, really challenging themselves. Those types of people are the ones that become your muses, your lovers, your friends, they push you to continue to be that type of person. I hope to always be lucky enough to have them around, people with passion, you know? I think that’s why I love portraiture so much, because I love stories; hearing peoples journeys from point A to point B.
“To gain even an unpaid internship or a barely paid entry-level position in journalism, publishing, museums, or higher education, dedication is a must. Many jobs that used to be meal tickets for starving artists are now considered covetable and require “love.” A college freshman recently told us: “I have a passion for marketing.” A journalist friend recounts how, when she was still in college, a magazine editor approached her at a party with the line: “Yo, you should be my intern.” We imagine her smiling, as if to flatter his delusion that there were any print-media jobs still worth sleeping your way into; in any case, she did get a gig there.
Women’s long history of performing work without its even being acknowledged as work, much less compensated fairly, may account for their relative success in today’s white-collar economy. This is, at least, the story of the heroine that the new Mancession Lit has created. Call her the Grown Woman. A perpetual-motion machine of uncomplaining labor, shuttling between her job and household tasks, the Grown Woman could not be more different from either fat-year brats like Carrie Bradshaw, or Judd Apatow’s lady Man-Children. The Grown Woman holds down her job and pays for her own dinner. The Grown Woman feels like a bad mom when she sees the crafts and organic snacks that other moms are posting on Pinterest. She wonders whether feminism lied to her, but knows she will inherit the earth. Could this be because she is better than the Man-Child at performing what current economic conditions demand? She is certainly more practiced. Who among us hasn’t faked it, if only to make him stop asking?”
Sometimes really amazing things exist, and then they collaborate with other cool, existing amazing things. The result is a melting pot of creativity, or, Nirvana covers sung with a girlish lilt. And I’m not talking about Lana Del Rey’s live version of Heart Shaped Box.
Girl Crisis is a cover band from New York, and includes members from Chairlift, Au Revoir Simone (!!!), Class Actress and Apache Beat. They sing cover songs in peoples’ lounge rooms and have refused to ever play live. Shame.
File under lo-fi alt-internet buzz.
So, this exists. GF/BF team Claudia Sinclair and Edward Quarmby produced an A3 sized book of posters. Featuring one cheeky looking girl and a boy (whom we’re not privy to see but I’m certain is as equally charming), AnOther magazine describes the series of images film-like stills oozing with adolescent angst and a dream like quality.
“Girls and Boys is a product disguised as a magazine,” explains Sinclair. “The products are posters by interesting photographers of beautiful people. We want people to put these posters up on their walls; it’s about creating idols. Gabe and Flo, have this style and confidence that stands out, they are like the cool kids in the class, they are the perfect ‘crush’ material.”
Perfect pin-ups. Find it here.
In February this year, Gucci lost a lawsuit alleging that Guess had infringed on their trademarks, while in May, Louis Vuitton lost the right to trademark its Damier checkerboard pattern. The design was ruled to be in the public domain, as “a basic and banal feature”.
LV, a heritage fashion house, reduced to the status of a coffee shop board game.
This pattern — women can dress like men, but men don’t dress like women — suggests that there is, in fact, something demeaning, ridiculous, or subordinating about presenting oneself to the male gaze. Most men feel stupid, gross, or vulnerable when they do it. This isn’t just about conformity to different gendered expectations. If it were just about difference women would feel equally weird dressing in men’s clothes. Instead, when women adopt masculine ways of dressing and moving, they often feel empowered.
So, when men do femininity they feel ridiculous and when women do masculinity they feel awesome. This is what gender inequality looks like.
A talented friend of mine is doing a series of portraits. A curious 18-year-old painter who’s in love with an SLR, she’s one of those wide-eyed creatives drawn to concepts of self-actualisation, deception and revelation. Since she’s exploring identity, fluidity and disguise through employing masks, veils and other blurring techniques, I recommended she check out the work of photographer Thomas Devaux for inspiration.
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Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that…
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked
•••
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night …”
—Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” 1955–1956
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