Tag: lifestyle

Last year, when Dazed Digital spoke to the photographer/curator Laurence Von Thomaswho was releasing the second book of photographs from his blog If You Leave-the blog had little more than 3,000 followers. A year later, the numbers have hit 100,000, and Von Thomas is back in London to launch his third and final book - with a selection of the best images from 95 global contributors.

TheIf You Leaveblog started in 2009 as a platform for young photographers to submit their best work. The name, If You Leave, is inspired by three words Von Thomas scribbled down on a piece of napkin, and seems to have consequently become an apt guideline for the stream of submitted photographs, as they incorporate similar themes and aesthetics drawn from the title. Loneliness, vast landscapes, distance and intense expression have all been inevitably present on If You Leave over the years.

Dazed Digital: Tell us a bit more about this year’s selection. How is it different from previous books?


Laurence Von Thomas:I've learnt to always believe what my mom says is true when it comes to intuitive exploits... last year's selection was "more positive" than the first... she hasn't seen the new book yet. This said.. thank fuck there's no more comment box or she'd retort with a full blown Baudrillardian essay about colours and frequential energy.



DD: Can you list a couple of words or phrases that would characterise the selection?


Laurence Von Thomas:I'll leave that up to personal interpretation, but I would like to try and define the style of If You Leave, since it has often been asked and I never felt able to accurately respond. Me and Berlin-based photographer Lena Grass spoke about this during the summer and we felt there was a definite style/subculture going on and that maybe it was time to create some sort of manifesto and then give it an eccentric name... alas, in the absence of this glorious pamphlet, I think the term neo-romanticism might come close, since a lot of the imagery seems to relate to many of the characteristics of Romanticism in terms of mood, composition, theme or even technique. Turner and Friedrich return frequently as a source of inspiration.



DD: With so many submissions, is your selection just instinct based? Are there any guidelines?
Laurence Von Thomas:

There are no guidelines. I prefer it this way. My selection is not based on objective parameters, so it wouldn't make sense to dictate any.



DD: Do you know how many submissions you had overall?


Laurence Von Thomas:I had to look it up, but it seems over 4000 since the start of the blog, though I would say 1/3 of these are images I invited.



DD: I can’t help but notice there are a lot of soft coloured images of women in a certain type of mood. Do you think that is a natural reaction to the theme and title of the blog?


Laurence Von Thomas:Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that, in general, women like to explore the visual in a different way (and at a different pace) than men. I think a lot of the photographs you refer to are in fact self portraits or images of close friends serving as study objects.



DD: Can you pick a song that would suitIf You Leave Vol III?


Laurence Von Thomas:Today it would be 'One more cup of coffee' (the White Stripes version). 

But over the last 2 years I've been putting together a playlist for each book launch. The list is a collection made out tracks from Spotify playlists by If You Leave photographers, so in a sense you could say it's the soundtrack to the book. 

Here's one for Volume III (though it seems to only show the first 30 tracks).




DD: You started If You Leave in 2009 on both Flickr and Tumblr. Have you sensed some kind of retreat from the Flickr community in general? Are artists moving to their own blogs, tumblrs, websites?


Laurence Von Thomas:Flickr has most definitely suffered some fall-back since Tumblr has boomed. For me personally, they have their individual qualities... Flickr still has many groups, is very useful as an archive and feels less curated, blogs work better chronologically or as a diary and a website still works well as a showcase.



DD: You mentioned this would be "the third and final instalment of If You Leave". Does that mean this is the last book for If You Leave? What’s next for the blog?


Laurence Von Thomas: I don't want to give the impression I'm milking it. I've been exploring the aesthetic you've come to expect of If You Leave for almost 4 years now, and while I still really enjoy it, it feels like it is time for something new. The blog will still run on and a few 'established' galleries, and more recently museums have been showing an increasing interest in the blog, but none of this will happen before the next season. Maybe we'll put on some sort of retrospective in combination with new images.

DD: 

Do you think If You Leave has influenced your personal photography? Or vice versa?


Laurence Von Thomas:Undeniably yes and yes.


DD: Any future projects you’ve been working on?


Laurence Von Thomas: I've been working withArthur-Frank, the publisher of If You Leave, and we have two magazines in the pipeline. One is purely visual reference, based on a pop-up project I ran during the summer. The second one is a heavily content-based concept. That’s all I can say for now! Maybe by this time next year I will publish some of my own work, take it on the road and hopefully combine it with a film project I've been working on for ages.

Books are available to pre-order online exclusively viaif-you-leave.tumblr.comand will hit London and UK stores by December 16th


cover image Matthew Lief Anderson

The Contemporary Wardrobe is a resource in the address book of every London stylist who gives a damn about their craft, its proprietor Roger Burton archiving an exhaustive collection of 20th century style and streetwear on packed floor-to-ceiling rails.

Now, as part of vintage clothing website Byronesque, Burton has shared previously unseen footage of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in conversation, the only time they were ever filmed together discussing their legacy, at punk exhibition Burton opened in 1993.

Westwood and McLaren's contrary contribution to youth culture in the 70s can't be overstated, their World's End shop Sex/Seditionaries changing the course of fashion through pieces seen here like the Anarchy shirt and Chicken Bones t-shirt – as relevant a cultural document of their time as anything you'll find in a glass case at a museum, these clothes are emblems of fashion at its most arrogant and ambitious.

Here, we run an extract from the footage of Westwood talking about punk rock and ideas.

"The real word, I mean apart from the word anarchy, of the punk rocks was this idea of 'destroy' and I think it was the most heroic attempt as an exercise to see if rock and roll really could live up to what rock and roll was supposed to be about. Malcolm once said to me 'rock and roll is the jungle beat that threatens the white civilisation.' And like I was saying at its sweetest, it's like 'see you later daddy and don't be square and everything.' But it is supposedly, according to people like Patti Smith who used to go 'peace and love, rock and roll,' if you're getting off on rock and roll, it's going to change the world in some sort of way.

Now looking back on it, I would say that someone like Sid Vicious was very intelligent, because he was saying 'I'm brain damaged, I don't have anything to say or to put in its place but I do want to destroy.' And what he did was an attack at the older generation to say 'we don't accept anything that you have to tell us, we don't accept any of your advice, we don't accept any of your taboos and we are going to put Swastikas on; you've mismanaged the world horrifically. And alright, maybe we can't do any better.'

...I don't have to say it in that way but it was like, you know, 'you've tried to put all your hypocrisy under the carpet but we're going to wear your hypocrisy on our back.'

...And I do say that the only subversion lies in ideas. Not even in ideas but in unpopular ideas, because popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If you think about it there wouldn't be any art if you had to go along with popular ideas, it's only the fact that art was unpopular that it ever was supported by an avant-garde and very few people that constitute something we call civilisation. Something the Greeks discovered really. You know it's a sceptical point of view, that I mentioned before, 'establishment' in inverted commas. What I mean is that the establishment is not a word written in stone. In fact establishment is something that uses the energy of the token rebels and, so it's something that changes according to how much it wants to soak up. And I myself prefer to ignore it and to sort of concern myself with the cultural crisis that we have. I mean everyone knows we're in the middle of an ecological disaster and I don't think that you can disassociate the cultural one from that.

I mean Hitler burnt books, but you don't need to do that anymore today, most people don't read them anyway. The only ideas are in books. You can't have a conversation with someone that hasn't read something, cause that's where ideas are."

ClickHEREto see the film of Westwood and McLaren in its entirety.

The latest release from the Software Studios imprint is 'Instrumental Tourist', the collaborative LP of Brooklyn-based Oneohtrix Point Never and the Polaris Award-winning Tim Hecker, whose respective experiments have routinely teased at the boundaries of electronic music and the capacity for compositions to grow from decidedly non or anti-formalist beginnings. After being long-time fans of each others solo work, 'Instrumental Tourist' sees Hecker and Lopatin come together to not only explore the capacity for their music to find a common ground in a collaborative project and to push one another in the studio setting, but also to probe at the potential for ambient and drone music to delve deeper into new, unfamiliar sonic realms.

DazedDigital: What inspired you to work on a collaborative album together?

Oneohtrix Point Never:I approached Tim about collaborating with me for a series of 12"s that C. Spencer Yeh and I wanted to release on Software - bringing together electronic music producers working in a more or less improvisatory manner in the studio. The idea was partially inspired by my interest in Teo Macero and his sessions with Miles Davis' varying groups in the late '60s and early '70s. There is a dynamic between open ended jams and the logic of tape editing that I find really stimulating. I thought that Tim and I would be great in terms of both utilizing the studio as an instrument, but I also just had a hunch that we'd compliment each other well; like in a rhythm section, or the ways directors and DPs work together. Contrasting styles and struggles can often lead to fresh work and having admired Tim's solo stuff, I thought it was worth a shot.

Tim Hecker:I was deeply into Daniel's last recordReplicawhen he suggested the project. I thought it made sense on a bunch of levels. Instead of doing a collaboration which brings together the 'inert' digital composer with a 'lively' or 'physical' instrumentalist to spray fresh life on the mouse clicking tedium, I thought some other route was better and this project made sense. Anyways, the point of a collaborative effort shouldn't be visualizing a clear path in advance. I wasn't sure how it would work out, and was interested in how it might take shape - which was part of the pleasure.

DD: Your LPs are stylized regarding around "digital garbage", and the ambiguous evocations of drone and ambient music. How do you feel your respective aesthetics married on the LP?

Oneohtrix Point Never:I think we both do a fair amount of melodic manipulation. There are some procedural things we do with garbage that lead to sounds suggesting classical forms, and upon discovering some of the specifics oh how that works respectively, we were able to work out a shared language.

Tim Hecker:From way too high of a vantage point it could be argued that we occupy similar terrain of music, but I think we both agree there's significant variance in terms of our interests and approaches in composing sound. I honestly wasn't interested in 'marrying' our aesthetics in a kind of linear additive sense, but rather evaporating the self into a project that is more than just you.

DD: Did you begin the project with a particular conceptual direction in mind as a duo?

Oneohtrix Point Never:I'm not sure how it emerged, but we pretty quickly got into this idea that we could paint an extended portrait of a sonic world that is filled with stock musical motifs and sounds in there most vulnerable states. Like the subconscious fears and desires of azither- what might that look like? There was a lot of conversation like that. But what you're hearing are very loose portrayals of that idea. It's more an anchor to stimulate, but then we really do end up just jamming off of each other in a way that isn't conceptually didactic.

Tim Hecker:We didn't cut a path in advance. It sort of took shape very quickly in a non-contrived, almost unconscious level through joking around and talking in the studio. It may not seem apparent from the music but our studio time was filled with laughs and rapid-fire banter that kind of helped to morph the approach as things continued over a couple of days.

DD: Technically, how did you approach the recording process? You're both known to process samples of acoustic instruments and analogue synths in your productions, so how did you work out enough of a variation between the two of you to feel you had technically distinct inputs into the sound of the project?

Tim Hecker:I didn't care for delineating any sort of distinct input. I enjoy dissolving myself into an ether of Daniel's solo lines. For example, mixing or adding reverb to one of Daniel's phrases for me constitutes creative input that is better than being sonically represented in an obvious way. I'm still obsessed with the effect of electronic instruments being re-amplified in real space and capturing those environments. We used a lot of room microphones that gave a greater depth to things.

DD: The album is presented as largely improvisational, with a sort of free-jazz spirit to it. How do you feel you worked towards more structured elements over a prolonged period of time with this ethos in mind?

Oneohtrix Point Never:It's less about free-jazz and more about an open, improvisatory approach and deep listening. You can easily link that to all sorts of 20th century musical practices. There's no need to compromise because there's no hardcore parameters set until we're dealing with edits or having some macro level discussion about which tunes work and which don't. There's formal aspects to both of our styles but I wouldn't say there is a formal aspect to this project. We usually agree on what sounds good, and when we don't its easy - we just ice it and move forward.

"Let's begin at the beginning: I love Miuccia Prada.

I'd bend backwards/sideways/every way for her. I feel her. I love her observation, sensitivity, modernism; she's progressive with respect, taking it all in, playing with it. With humour, intelligence. She's my goal.

When I was invited to DJ as part of the-miumiu-london I was beyond myself. The event took over the Cafe Royal's beautiful and baroque surroundings for three days – I'd previously hung in a 40s club run there.

Across three floors there was The Club Lounge and Terrace, Conversation Room, Oyster Bar, The Restaurant, Cocktail Bar and Miu Miu shop/gallery.Nourishing the senses (and the mind) across architecture, food, aesthetics, conversation and sound, I like the fact that #themiumiu was a women's club, where men had to accompany as a guest – a clever reversal of archetype.But I wouldn't consciously call myself a feminist, I'm for equal rights, which was one of the themes in the Conversation Room I visited.

There were women from all walks of life with the odd male here and there. Discussion was of women role models, with Penny Martin and Shala Monroque leading. I'd have liked some more time to get real dirty with it, into the nitty gritty of deeper issues and diversity butI got my word in expressing my respect for Pina Bausch, inspired by her expression through various media as a pioneer for the invisible. The movement drawing on feelings and observation; the beauty and grace of the old age or a child, man or woman and all in-between. The joy, pain and delicacy of life all wrapped in a very beautiful uniform.

Afterwards, a friend and I took fancy to some simple pleasures, eating seafood in the surroundings of golden wall swirls and candlelight, and diving into champagne. The Miu Miu collection in the shop I knew off by heart, and I knew it'd speak to me.

Cleansed by the freshness of the sea fruit and taste of fine wine, I was ready to play. No rules, just musical passion for 3 hours. Stephen Jones came up to me saying 'I Only Have Eyes For You' was his favourite song ever. I think if Miuccia was there, she'd have had a dance.

I had a great evening and connected with my girlfriend. The eyes said it all: I want to go there again. But... all things must pass."

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Last week, we took to East London's The Vault to celebrate the relaunch of Dazed Digital. An extension of the 20-year-old print magazine, the site is already an influential platform with huge creative output, across a variety of disciplines from fashion, art, music, photography and film. The new Dazed Digital site was re-launched last week with the addition of exclusive new monthly & weekly features, columns and takeovers - to bring more exciting, carefully-curated content to Dazed readers than ever before.

For the event, the prestigious record label 4AD who were celebrating their 33rd birthday, brought down some in-house talent, with a live performance from INC, and Daughter as well as a DJ set from cult new band Purity Ring. Sponsors Jameson and Peroni kept the drinks flowing, whilst London-based photographer Lydia Garnett shot the party pics throughout the night...