I am extremely excited to present a GAQ feature interview and photo spread with incredible photographer and artist, Sophia Wallace. Wallace merges narrative, documentary, fashion, and performance strategies to create dialogue around notions of gender and identity. And it’s beautiful work. Perhaps the most striking thing about Wallace’s work for me is her ability to create imagery as crisp and fashion-forward as those in your latest issue of Vogue, while simultaneously offering cultural commentary and bringing thought provoking themes to the fore.
I asked Wallace some questions about her work, her process and the ideas behind it all. Click the photo for the entire spread, or click HERE to download.
Marcel Bednarz (via Marcel Bednarz)
aloha (by paul (dex))
life:
Whoa: Lightning bolts race through the ash cloud — a view of lightning during Chile’s 2011 volcanic eruption.
see more — Outrageous Lightning Strikes
Amazing, beautiful and terrifying
I was accompanying Mrs. Ford as she strolled around the West Wing of the White House. I took pictures as she said goodbye to the staff members who had worked for her husband, President Gerald R. Ford.
As she finished her brief tour of the executive offices, we passed by the Cabinet Room. Mrs. Ford poked her head in for one last look. Nobody was there. A mischievous grin appeared on her face; a look I had seen many times, one that usually spelled trouble of the delightful variety. “You know,” she said, “I’ve always wanted to dance on the Cabinet Room table.” I instinctively reached for my camera. This was no idle threat.
The first lady removed her shoes, bounced up on a chair, then gracefully leaped onto the middle of the oblong table. She deftly dodged the meticulously placed ashtrays and notepads. The Martha Graham dancer inside her unfolded. Mrs. Ford stood dead center beneath the chandeliers, one hand on her hip, the other extended forward. It was a real ta-da! moment. I fired off a few frames. As quickly as she had gone up, she came down, put on her shoes, brushed her hands together and said, “I think that about does it.”
(via Intimate Pictures of Betty Ford by David Hume Kennerly, the White House Photographer - NYTimes.com)
You MUST click this link and view the other 22 pictures. Then go buy the book. Seriously.
SPOMENIK BY JAN KEMPENAERS During the 1960s and 70s, thousands of monuments commemorating the Second World War called ‘Spomeniks’ were built throughout the former Yugoslavia; striking monumental sculptures, with an angular geometry echoing the shapes of flowers, crystals, and macro-views of viruses or DNA. In the 1980s the Spomeniks still attracted millions of visitors from the Eastern bloc; today they are largely neglected and unknown, their symbolism lost and unwanted. Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers travelled the Balkans photographing these eerie objects, presented in the book Spomenik as a powerful typological series. The beauty and mystery of the isolated, crumbling Spomeniks informs Kempenaer’s enquiry into memory, found beauty, and whether former monuments can function as pure sculpture.
(via 23 Fascinating and Forgotten Monuments from Yugoslavia)
