Tag: images

There are a lot of pretty girls in Norwegian photographer Torbjrn Rdland’s work. Yet his interest in melancholic eroticism is just one aspect of a complicated practice which touches on the meaning and process of photography. Much of his current work seems to be pushing the limits of the body – how it can be twisted and contorted, how skin can be drawn on, covered up, transformed. Working fluidly in colour and black-and-white, Rdland, like Ryan McGinley, has managed to create images accepted by both the “cool” press and art establishment. This January Rdland opens an exhibition in Copenhagen focusing on American landscapes and presidents, especially Reagan and Kennedy. “I’m fascinated by how quickly chaotic reality becomes mythologised. The Ronald Reagan I got to know through news media as a kid is not the same Ronald Reagan children today are introduced to,” he points out. Here Rdland talks to Dazed about his fascination with Americana and our Instagram world.

What do you find interesting about referencing and exploring ideas around Americana?

I’ve always felt connected to American vulgarity – in poetry, pantheism, rock’n’roll and hip hop. Studying visual cultures of Japan, Scandinavia and North America helps me figure out what I’m about and where I can take my photography.

Why did you end up in LA?

I gave up on all the alternatives. Los Angeles is a good mix of villages, cities and nature. And it’s founded on mythology. I don’t know how the place is influencing the work exactly, but I know myself better now than before moving here. I cannot promise that I’ll end up in California though.

Tell me about the role of construction in your images. Are things ‘found’ or are you more interested in creating things to feel ‘found’?

Probably both, but definitely the latter! One problem with so-called ‘staged photography’ is the look of these didactic tableaus, making it very clear that you’re studying a construction. It doesn’t really matter to me how the photograph came into being. The important question is how to see it: how the photograph asks to be read. I can be equally invested in an object I just found as one I waited six months to get or travelled from continent to continent with, but in general it helps to live with it for a while. I typically keep something around for months before dealing with it photographically. Situations with people are always sessions. I decide the clothes and so on. I never just pull out a camera and start ‘shooting’. You can wait around your whole life for something interesting to happen in front of you. I believe in forcing a more active approach.

Yet despite this there is a quietness to your work – is that something you strive for?

No, that comes naturally. My physiognomy is quiet. I strive for action and for the work to speak up.

How and why did you start working with people in contorted positions?

Well, maybe it’s an early sign of decadence if I tire of human figures in more relaxed positions. I hope not. I always try to stretch the medium, to push at the limitations of what I can do within straight photography. Having photographed people for more than ten years, maybe I had to push and bend more drastically to stay interested.

Tell me about your latest book. Why did you call it Vanilla Partner?

The title was free. There were no albums, books or even a kinky movie named Vanilla Partner. And it says something about a relationship I find myself in: photography is my straight partner. I try to introduce fantasy and religion to it, but it’s not easy.

You also seem to be really interested by texture at the moment – something sticky, fluffy, visceral. What is attracting to you to that tactility?

It’s all we have. A painter has the texture of the picture itself, the tactility of paint on canvas. In photography the focus is on how other surfaces are represented photographically. I always look at what painters do.

In a lot of your earlier images you represented women in nature – it’s a classic romantic concept. Were you interested in playing with that art historical heritage?

I don’t play with or reference art history; I see myself as adding to it. To photograph beautiful women in nature was a challenge, partly because it’s inflamed, both aesthetically and politically. I like to think that my images take active part in a discussion on how and what they mean. This was a central aspect of the project from the very beginning. To link a primate to nature makes perfect sense. The real problems start when you say she doesn’t also represent culture, and clearly I’ve never gone there.

What attracts you to depicting femininity in particular? Do you feel there's a tension there as a man?

Yes, the tension can be different – also in a wider sense. Everyone loves and hates pictures of young women. It’s intense! Most people seem so caught up in their own bodies and personal perspectives on this material that they cannot see it for what it is.

A number of the images in Vanilla Partner depict people being drawn or painted or tattooed on. How did this motif develope and what the idea was behind it?

I think it developed from black-metal corpse paint. Back in 2001 I photographed leading musicians on the Norwegian metal scene. Looking at my portraits of Frost (of Satyricon), Abbath (of Immortal) and Infernus (of Gorgoroth) started me thinking about the psychological implications of paint on skin. There’s also a smaller photograph from the following year... it has a German title: Goldene Trnen. This is a portrait of a young woman with lines of honey on her face. An art historian will probably see it in the Catholic tradition of the crying virgin, while a dude reading Dazed online is more likely to see a facial. I’m drawn to pictures that cannot easily be pinned down. I like conflicting readings – I think you find truth there. But to return to the question: there was no initial idea behind all this – maybe more of a longing. I now see painting on skin as an immediate escape from the confusion and boredom of everyday life. Hairless apes have always listened to music and painted their bodies to make life more real. It’s linked to a spiritual longing that is everywhere in my work.

How do you feel about the ubiquity of image culture today, compared to when you started working with photography?

Younger people today seem unburdened by the quantity of photographic images being produced. This, of course, is a healthy attitude. There will always be a need for subtle reformulation. The situation when I started was more anorexic. Reality seemed lost behind an excessive overproduction of photographs. The postmodern mindset saw no reason to make new pictures; we had already produced too many. Reappropriation was almost a moral choice. It’s funny; looking back, the early 1990s now seem like a calm period of libraries and magazines, before the online explosion of Instagram, Tumblr and TwitPics. Today I see Instagram feeds adopting strategies from critical art filtered through the Fail Blog perspective on commodity culture. It’s quite exciting and I’m not contributing.

Your approach has been emulated by a younger generation of photographers, including those working with fashion as much as within an art context. Is that a frustrating or interesting situation for you?

We both know that fashion photographers adopt anything that moves to a beat. I’m actually more puzzled by the massive number of educated young art-photographers who approach the world like an Alec Soth. I always saw my material as coming out of a culture just as much as being the product of my conflicting personality. So I do not claim full ownership.

What do you think the role of emotion is in photography? Is it something you strive to create in your viewer or your images?

That is a very good question – I’m still struggling with it. Asking for an emotional reaction is asking to entertain or to sell something. This, at least, is the standard view. My more emotional photographs are created to make the viewer reflect, but I’ve also seen them have an emotional effect on people and that didn’t seem all wrong. Actually, it didn’t seem wrong at all.

Vanilla Partner by Torbjrn Rdland is out now, published by MACK

rodland.net

A story in leather, lacquer, babycat, denim and pussy bows, Hedi Slimane’s first collection in five years takes a rock wardrobe and infuses it with the youth explosion that characterised Saint Laurent’s ready-to-wear line in the 60s, Rive Gauche. In many ways the tale here is one of genesis, as what the late Yves Saint Laurent did as the first couturier to propose luxury ready-to-wear with the spirit of the street, Hedi Slimane did from the late 90s to 2007, redefining menswear both in silhouette and attitude. Essentially, as Saint Laurent liberated women, Slimane did so for men.

Since 2007 the influential designer has concentrated on a parallel career in photography, introducing the monochrome illusive portrait – what the camera shouldn’t see – into contemporary culture. His images are charged with the ethos of what he began in fashion, demonstrating a talent for capturing the spirit of our time that goes beyond clothes, however sublime.

On his return to design, there is a notion of planets aligning. Slimane’s installation at Saint Laurent befits the wishes of both the late Monsieur Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berg, to whom the debut women’s catwalk show was dedicated.

As stores are reconceptualised under Saint Laurent’s original helvetica logo, Dazed heralds a new fashion epoch by heading to Stockholm to shoot a 2012 youthquake on a group of professional and street-cast models. Here we present an extended image edit from the magazine editorial and meet the boys from the shoot.

CinematographyMartin Rinman
Edited byInessa Tsulimova

PhotographyFumi Nagasaka
StylingRobbie Spencer
GroomingSharin at Link Details
ModelsAdam and Peder at Nisch Management, Daniel, Hugo, Kimie, Martin at Stockholmsgruppen
Photographic AssistantHannah Richter
Styling AssistantUlrika Lindqvist
RetouchingColor One NYC
Special Thanks ToJane Glandal, Meghan Scott, Hjalmar Klitse

All clothes Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane SS13 menswear

The stories' lead protagonist, Hugo, soundtracked the film with his band Side Effects. Visit theirofficial Facebook page

Matthew Stone is currently exhibiting his second solo show at the Hole Gallery, New York. Love Focused Like A Laser delves further into his exploration of spirituality, performance and the hope to attain credible conversations about love. In simple terms, his new works captures performers, using laser lights, on film and then engrave the images onto wood, using a computer. Already known for his beautiful photographs, which focus on the movement of the human body, captured by Matthew with intensity and passion, the artist talks to Dazed about how lasers feature in his new project and an upcoming collaboration with DJ MikeQ, as we show the pictures exclusively above.

DazedDigital: How did your exhibition at The Hole Gallery come about?


Matthew Stone: Well, it’s my second solo show at the Hole Gallery. About this time last year, November 2011, was when I did my first show there and I’ve been working with them since then. I’ve been making these new photographs, which are lit with club lasers, and Kathy Grayson (who runs the gallery) saw the photos and said, "Let’s do a show of just these!" Then I explained to them I wanted to try and develop this new technique..

DD: You use lasers, cameras and computers to engrave the images onto wood. What is it about the technique that inspires you?


Matthew Stone: Well basically, the idea for the lasers, came when I was in New York. I was in a nightclub and they had this laser, and I noticed it was doing interesting things when I photographed it. So that’s where it stems from. I then bought lasers and did a whole series of experiments. Played around with them. And because they were lasers, I was thinking about ways to present the images and I came up with the idea of laser cutting. I did tests with laser cutting and I wasn’t getting what I wanted. So the final images are cut with a computer controlled spinning drill head.

DD: So more of an engraving than a cutting?


Matthew Stone:Yes, like engraved paintings. It’s a spinning drill bit that cuts through the top layer of the wood and from certain angles, in the grooves, you can see the grain of the wood. It's hard to see them in a photograph though. You need to stand in front of it.

DD: How do you get the lasers to bounce off your performers?

Matthew Stone:I use long exposure, and I’m in front of the camera, drawing with the lasers, moving around and drawing on parts I want to be brighter. I guess it's like a light drawing. What I like about it is that it’s really physical, and a really different energy from the process of making it. There’s movement from the models and there’s movement from me, so the end result feels like documentation, a sort of performance of gesture. It’s shot in the dark, and there are just these dots everywhere, so there is this increased sense of freedom for the people that I’m photographing. Just because you feel less naked. It’s fun, I put music on, I recently realised how I had created this nightclub in my studio.

DD: Do you have a soundtrack?


Matthew Stone:Different shoots have different soundtracks, I was playing DJ Mike Q, he plays house and DJ’s a lot of balls in New York. I was playing his music, while I was shooting in London. We’re actually working on a project in Miami... it’s coming up at the beginning of next month.

DD: Performance does seem to feature throughout the series, and in a lot of your pieces. Do you see it as integral to your work?


Matthew Stone:In general I feel performance is important to my work, but in a way what I'm specifically interested in, is people and interaction. A friend of mine the other day said, “Yeah, but you love people”. Not as a bad thing, but as a reason.. I don’t know, I do love people, there’s always performative element just because people are involved

DD: Do you explore the performance of certain behaviors and spirituality in your work?


Matthew Stone:I mean, I understand if I think about performance and spirituality then I think about ritual. Ritual being something, an action, which allows us to step out of the everyday routine and become conscious of something else. Perhaps something more important. I think that those things occur in secular society as much as they do in religious society. In terms of the lighting, the works are lit so that when you walk in to the gallery you are met by the works that are dimly lit, in a big black space, so it has an almost church like feeling. The works are laid out in a symmetrical way as well, with three pieces on either side, and a large piece at the end, there is a feeling of entering a chapel like space.

DD: So the gallery space has the feeling of a church and a club all at once?


Matthew Stone:Basically the lights in the gallery space are set up on a timer, and we’ve had it on remote, so that I can switch between the kind of church like lighting, to literally all the lights are out and it's red and green laser dots everywhere. Sort of caressing the room. So that’s how the installation works. I think that nightclubs are in terms of transcendentalism, are spiritually more relevant places than churches.I mean I think that the kind of urges that draw people to dance, are the same things that took people into churches or into religiously conscious ritual.

DD: How do you feel this exhibition builds on your manifesto or links back to it?


Matthew Stone:We had a dinner for the exhibition and I read from it, I read the manifesto – I thought it would make the dinner more of an event - but as I read it, everything just seemed to fit perfectly with the show. The first line was reflected when I realized I was standing there in the dark with moving lights around the audience and me. Then also, as I read the end of manifesto, it was the title of the current show. I mean I don’t think I make artworks specifically to evidence and explain a set of clearly defined ideas, but I feel like it’s natural that the art that I make will be informed by the things that I’m thinking about

DD: All the artworks have a positive strain in them as well.. they come across as quite optimistic.


Matthew Stone:I think that hedonism is something that’s necessary sometimes, and something to celebrate. For me, realistically, when I look at all the things I’ve done, I don’t think it's that we oppose old ideas about performance and spirituality, but that we find new ways to communicate. Ones that are meaningful and sincere. To find ways to talk about aspects of humanity that are more linked. I think that those conversations are the most important.

I think there were a lot of ideas that were posed in the 1960s that seemed to fail, and I think now everybody understands, everybody experiences love, whether it’s the desire to be loved, or to love someone else, or to feel love, or loving someone... everyone experiences it. But for some reason talking about it or posing kindness, always seems weak or nave. I think at the moment, one half of me is taken up by creating propaganda for the idea that kindness can be a strength, and that it's not pathetic. And that it doesn’t mean we have to give up on exciting lives to communicate with people on a level that is respectful.

In a way the 20th century created a strong mythology for the idea of the artist or rebel, which is often based on the idea of rejecting ideas of morality. I think that was an important thing to happen, because it destroyed a lot of hypocrisy, and essentially destroyed a lot of cruelty. Now we’ve got to a point where we have to remind people that kind of violent rebellion was not about creating or validating through violence. It was a passionate attempt to destroy a morally corrupt or rotten society of Post-Victorian attitudes including misogyny, homophobia, and racism.

DD: Can you tell us more about your upcoming project with DJ MikeQ?


Matthew Stone:Well, the collaboration with MikeQ will probably take place onDecember 7th, in Miami. Basically we’re designing a performance. We’ll be presenting some more of the works that are in the show, with his music, but they’ll be music, dance, ballroom, work on the wall and an audience to watch it.

Love Focused Like A Laser will be at the Hole Gallery in New York from November 10 – December 31, 2012