Somaly Mam by Douglas Kirkland

Somaly Mam is radiant, a light, a fire, a flame. She blazes a path, one woman set to change the course of the world so long as she walks the earth. Orphaned at a young age then sold into a brothel in Cambodia around age 12, Somaly Mam knows the truth about the slave trade. She not only escaped, but has liberated thousands of women and children from sexual slavery and aided tens of thousands more in having a voice and a choice in their life. She risks her life for the lives of others. To listen to her story, and to hear the stories of the women and girls she has assisted, is a lesson in honor, humility, and humanity.

Few speak on the sale of human beings, the outcomes of these transactions too illicit for polite company. But Somaly speaks, and when she does, people listen. Eyes are opened. Policies begin to change. But most of all, lives are saved. The slave trade runs rampant, crossing borders everywhere from New York City to Phnom Penh. It’s an international issue, but it does not receive the attention that it deserves. Yet when people meet Somaly, they feel charged to take action.

Price Arana, CEO of Press Cabinet, a Los Angeles-based branding and advertising agency, first met Somaly Mam in the fall of 2012, at a private gathering of friends organized by Angella Nazarian. As Nazarian recounts, “For the past few years I have been doing in depth research on women who have been the trailblazers—women who have dared to have a bold vision for change and have impacted their field in the most meaningful way. Somaly Mam has single-handedly brought sex trafficking on a global platform and has saved thousands of girls from sexual slavery. I was so touched by Somaly’s own life and work that I dedicated a chapter on Somaly’s life and work in my book, Pioneers of the Possible: Celebrating Visionary Women of the World [which was previously featured in Le Journal’s Book Review No. 39.]

Read the full story at LE JOURNAL DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE

Douglas Kirkland and Somaly Mam, photographed by Price Arana

Team Somaly ~*~

Just Chaos! Curated by Roberta Bayley

Marcia Resnick, Johnny Thunders, 1972

Books and photographs. Photographs and books. The historical record reflects the times as they were lived by those who were there. And here we are, some four decades later, reflecting on punk as it first came up on the streets of New York, along the Bowery, at CBGBs, a mélange of artists, performers, and personalities making for great photography, for stories that are shared and collected, for memories rediscovered and truths being told. For those who were there, and those who missed it, Just Chaos! takes us back to a time and a place where you damn sure better do it yourself, cause if you don’t ain’t no one else.

In the windows and intimate niches of BookMarc, New York, now through May 23, Roberta Bayley has installed selections from 13 photographers of the era:, many which have not been seen before this exhibition. Featuring the work of Bayley, Janette Beckman, Stephanie Chernikowski, Lee Black Childers, Danny Fields, Godlis, Julia Gorton, Bobby Grossman, Bob Gruen, Laura Levine, Eileen Polk, Marcia Resnick, Chris Stein, and Joe Stevens, the photographs featured here are curated with an eye towards style, inspired by the energy of the era as it manifested in the world at that time. “It’s all based in poverty,” Bayley reflects. Everything was D.I.Y., do it yourself.

Fashion, music, style, photography—all of it came as an expression of the truth: after the hippie movement sparked, it became mainstream and lost its edge. Punk came out of that void, all claws and fangs and guitar strings, spikes and torn clothes. It was street, strung out and sexy. It was the artist as anti-hero, a Romantic poem at the end of the second millennium AD. It was about the absolutes of individualism, of speaking your own voice and saying F the system.

Read the Full Story at
Le Journal de la Photographie

Janette Beckman, Punks, Worlds End, London 1978

it is always there when you look

White on White on White on White. I didn’t even mean to write any of that, but the words came tumblinn out after I looked—but could not find—a scan of the photograph I’m wanting to write about. So I hear Malevich in my head, Russians chanting in tongues and paint brushes stroking along reminding me of the Invisible Man, but that’s another story, for another time.

This one is begins, last night, speaking two men in from Mexico City, and they’re looking at the photographs on the wall, lined one after another after another in rows, becoming a lyrical poem, an ode, a sonnet of Shakespearean proportions only it’s all in photographs. Still images flickering at eye height. One after another, each like chocolates on a candy box and you think but you don’t know and you feel and you ask so I go, I flow into a reverie, the way it happened to me, it’s like poetry and I’m on stage and I like it like this because it’s natural, I hear the words and I am charged to write or to speak and if I could sang, lawdamercy but no, best I can do is dance .. but thas an aside.

Back to my point of alla this is yes, it was a photograph. I drew pictures in the spaces between the words, stringing along a little song that never spilled its secrets. Felt like it was a trailer, a preview, a fan dance, smoke and mirrors, except at one point i said something or other, and I saw the men draw their collective breaths ~

And oo ahh, success, yes it was mine, I could taste it, and I had forgotten how it had been only it had never been as good as this. Yes so I told them, how I heard the words, “Pull up a chair and sit down” as I felt myself like Alice going through the looking glass and standing at the kitchen door, and it was my moment, but still the story spun gold from my lips and I continued on, never finishing but I circle back to that photograph, and then I turn around, and there it is, right behind me on the wall, punctuating my sentence like an exclamation point.

And it’s this, of course. Of how it shall be, that you cannot see, but it is always there when you look ~*~

Angela Boatwright :: Summer

Summer is just about here. I know this because as soon as I publish this post, I’m going to hit tar beach, lay out in the sun, and soak up that good old Vitamin D. I’ve been thinking of summer as the full flush of rebirth, of a kind of freedom that comes from the completion of a cycle when it hits its heights. It is a time when we can be most alive, as Nature and the Universe intend us to be. It is a an energy that we feel when open the window and let the sun shine in. I was reminded of all of this as I perused Angela Boatwright’s website, newly relaunched and conceptualized as chapters from the pages of her life.

Miss Boatwright has graciously agreed to vibe with me on the work she has created for the pages of Summer, a few photographs featured here—and you best believe there is more where this came from!

Summer. It’s the season of full bloom, of when life is at its most alive, and the re is a freedom we feel to live out loud. Please talk about what summer means to you, about how it makes you feel…

I love the ability to go anywhere without a jacket, honestly.  When I lived in NYC it would get so incredibly humid – you would go outside and see people barely wearing anything at all.  I loved it.  And everyone from everywhere would come to NYC in the summertime to visit.  New York is the absolute best in the summer. The best.

Your Summer series is captivating. There is a feeling of energy, a vibrancy, a luxuriousness that I cannot fully articulate. Please talk about your inspiration to shoot this series. Where did it come from? What moves you to pursue it as a subject? How do you articulate this with these images?

The images were taken over a period of about 3 years.  During that time I was honestly just hellbent on hanging out with my friends.  I was working a lot but my friends were my priority, hands down.  I would follow them around and do whatever they did, it was almost co-dependent.  I absolutely adore every single person in those images.  And we partied quite a bit and then at some point I quit drinking so the camera became my vice. 

Miss Rosen: Where and when were these images shot? How does the time and place speak to your idea of Summer itself ?

Angela Boatwright: They were photographed between 2005 and 2008, mostly.  A few shots were taken in 2011 and 2012. As for locations, I’ll flip through them right now – let’s see…  ahh, there’s a lot of NYC/ Brooklyn and Rhode Island.  There’s also Los Angeles, Connecticut, Albany and one shot taken in Orlando, Florida.

Summer to me is fairly obvious – swimming, camping, hanging out.  Beer, too.  Cigarettes and weed for some.  I went to Rhode Island so, so many times during those years.  And all those Rhode Island kids, they’re water babies so there was a lot of swimming and cliff jumping.  And skateboarders are always free-spirited, photographing them is just so easy and fun.  I can dissect it all in hindsight but again at the time I was just following my friends.  I used the camera as a way to get to know them better.  Everyone I photographed – I thought they were so incredibly cool in one way or another.  I still do.

The photographs in this series appear to be of teens and young adults, those who have perhaps the greatest freedom of summer—two months off ! Please speak to this age, about how you were drawn to it, and how do you think it, itself, is a manifestation of Summer’s energy.

I didn’t come up with the idea to photograph summertime beforehand.  It was simply what I was doing at the time.  When I was putting together images for my website I came up with the title ‘Summer’ to showcase all of that particular work.  And it’s very appropriate!

If I were to analyze it now I would say that I desperately needed to understand the concept of ‘freedom’ and was therefore attracted to the people in my life that could afford it.  I was having a hard time un-crossing all the live wires left over from my adolescence.  And while I was photographing the ‘Summer’ series I was also documenting heavy metal bands on tour, all over the world. It’s only in the past year or so that I’ve started to settle down, so to speak.

I love talking about photography, about the ephemeral made eternal, about three dimensions flattened into two, about how we are becoming an increasingly visually literate society. Please talk about the way in which the photograph preserves the moment, perhaps not only preserving it but translating it into something that is at once a mirror of the world and a new means to consider it.

Personally, it’s hard for me to actively think about my work while I’m creating it, it’s probably that way for many artists, so I need to trust my gut.  Preparation is key but once I begin I get completely k-holed into my experience.  You do need perspective and a general understanding of what’s happening around you.  If you can combine raw emotion with that perspective and a basic understanding of your surroundings then you’re really onto something.

Visit ANGELA BOATWRIGHT

beauty is a sign of intelligence

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting.
The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

You have to do stuff that average people don’t understand
because those are the only good things.

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live
because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.

I never fall apart, because I never fall together.

They always say time changes things,
but you actually have to change them yourself.

Photographs by Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen
Quotes by Andy Warhol

Valentina Ilardi Martin: GREY Magazine

© Peppe Tortora

“The dress is the last thing that goes into the photograph. It must be like it was already there somehow. The photographs are of real families, realistic situations. It is not the fabulous, perfect, rich, pretty, successful—this is not contemporary. That is 90s, 80s, for the galloping economy. GREY makes sense today. It is younger, fresher, up to date,” Valentina Ilardi Martin says of her vision for Grey Magazine, a sumptuous compendium of fashion photography, fiction and poetry that has been published in a hardcover periodical every spring and every fall since 2009 and features photographers including Martin Parr, Nan Goldin, Sarah Moon, among many more.

The photograph comes first for Ilardi Martin, whose native Roman passion for the grandeur of everyday beauty belies each story produced in the book. She is nothing if not a womanist by nature, honoring the power and influence of the female mind, body, and heart.

She explains, “I wish to educate people on how to improve their dressing habits, what to choose to buy for the next season, how to style it with their own wardrobe and how to wear it for the best result. Every styling seen in GREY magazine is meant to be analyzed from the viewer and eventually reworked on an individual base. It’s meant to be an example that can be modified or adapted as a realistic suggestion for the upcoming season. I am not interested in a bizarre appearance. GREY is a magazine for a real, contemporary woman.

”When I plan a fashion shoot I start with the choice of the photographer. The idea will be constructed around his style, which at GREY is very precise and recognizable. I tend to keep the same contributors when possible to strengthen our visual direction. I choose photographers who are already GREY. Deborah Turbeville, Erwin Olaf, Todd Hido—they all have different styles while keeping a very defined identity and a very correct approach towards the woman. I like photographers who can understand emotions and portray the subject in front of them for what it really is. We show a great woman as an inspiration, we know them as human beings, not just as subjects for photographs. In accordance with the photographer we develop the story, the location, the casting. Sometimes the subject comes first, sometimes the place.It depends on many factors, mainly inspiration. When everything is in place, then, we think about the ideal clothes, the appearance, hair, makeup, mood. Only then. My aim and focus is now to bring to the reader something they can relate to, accept, love and be driven to, something they’ll try to emulate, because that is a selection of real, amazing, nowadays situations.”

Read the Full Story at
Le Journal de la Photographie

© Sheila Metzner

~ Grandmother Power ~

Photograph by Eric Johnson

It was two summers ago: 2011, to be exact, when I first saw the photograph. It was an image of an older woman laying in bed, her hand reaching forward and clasping the hand of the photographer.

With one hand he managed to take the photograph while being in part of the image itself. The intensity of the image, the skill it took, to the power that transcends the moment, it drew me close. I could feel her hand clasping my own and somehow I was drawn into the photograph like Alice through the looking glass.

And so it began. But I did not know. Where it would go, for the circle has no beginning or no end once we set forth. The photograph remained in my memory. It’s effect could not be forgotten, undone. Months later that I re-approached photographer Eric Johnson about writing a story about his grandmother, Mrs. Idell Marshall, for Le Journal de la Photographie.

I didn’t know what or why; I just needed to know more. My curiosity can be insatiable and journalism is nothing if not a license to ask questions that polite society might otherwise ignore. To ask questions is to express interest. To listen and to learn and to consider from where the fascination stems and what truths can be discerned.

And so it was that we began to talk, and as we spoke, stories began to surface. From the depths, they came alive. Little by little, from memories that had receded into the distance, things untold. Justice to be served. Truth to be spoke. It began in death, as so many things do, only this was not death as I had thought death was, but a revolution too.

The completion of a circle as it spins round, the snake eating its tail, no beginning and no ending but it is here that I entered and I—

—saw it. Heard it. And I knew.

“Pull up a chair and sit down,” the voice told me as I looked through the doorway at the kitchen table. I was inside the photograph, here, in this space. I was returning to from whence I came: Books. That’s all it has ever been.

It had been years, long enough to forget. Long enough to remember that I never thought of making a book again. Never thought of it until it called to me: “Pull up a chair and sit down.”

“Eric! This is a book!” I gasped through a hazy glow of rose.

Eric is cool. He smiled and said, “Okay.”

And so it began.

Just like that. In his grandmother’s last days, Eric stood before her with a camera. She, who never liked being photographed, became so powerful she transcended the planes of reality. Three dimensions into two and then back into three. Through time and space, she called to me. Maybe not to me, specifically, but I cannot help but listen when I hear things.

I believe.

It began a year ago. Photographs and stories and stories and photographs were like puzzle pieces without a cover image. It began because it never ended and there was work to be done. And there was no intention, except love and respect, patience and trust. Patience as I have never known. Trust in being able to not know, being able to listen.. to the space in between the words.. so that I could begin to write them down. And, now, one year later, the circle turns once more.

We come to this. By way of faith. By way of belief. By way of an understanding for which there are no words but in the photograph, the spirit remains. Forever eternal. Forevermore. Grandmother Power. Power as the dictionary defines it first and foremost: the ability to act or to produce an effect.

Transcendence is beyond the rational, as well it should be. Transcendence is not a thing of the mind but the connection to a higher plane. It speaks through the soul, and it is heard in the heart, and finally, ohh finally, it reverberates in words that give it physical form. But it is not physical, nor rational; it is beyond our ability to comprehend through logic. It is meaning without reason and it calls to me and to it I answer and dedicate my life to it.

To this. To something I cannot full express. But it begins with gratitude for each and every breath. For the darkness that has brought me into the light. For Eric Johnson, Mrs. Idell Marshall, and the entire clan.

And for Paola Gianturco whose commitment to the magnificence of the female spirit I honor with these words. Grandmother Power. I thank you.

Read Eric Johnson’s Story at
Le Journal de la Photographie

More about Grandmother Power,
the inspiration for this post

.. sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself ..

Brownsville, BK 1980

The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness.
And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.

Red Hook, BK 1980

No human relation gives one possession in another—
every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love,
the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone.

Keisha

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.

Brooklyn 1980

Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
And think not you can direct the course of love,
if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.

Flatbush, BK

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

Photographs by Jamel Shabazz
Quotes by Khalil Gibran

Trolley is the Antidote

Daniele Tamagni, ‘Gentlemen of Bacongo’ poster

A month ago I was asked to write a small piece, a tribute to the great Gigi Giannuzzi on the occasion of the forthcoming publication of TROLLEYOLOGY, a ten year retrospective of one of the greatest illustrated book publishing houses to ever exist. I won’t look back, I won’t re-read what I wrote. I shall begin again, speaking from my heart.

Gigi is dead. Long live Gigi. His spirit is eternal. I knew this, as I know so many things that are without words and yet I am charged to find a way to express the ineffable. Gigi is (not was) a force of Nature, a triumph of the will, a prince among men. He walks the earth with the express purpose of bringing light into the dark.

He does this, as only he can. He produces books, book unlike anything the world has seen before. Books that take on some of the most difficult stories to tell, the beautiful dreams and horrific nightmares that cannot be erased when we close our eyes. We cannot and will not look away. Gigi understands the photograph, the heart of the photographer, the witness who bears evidence, proof, and testimony of the ephemeral made eternal. Gigi makes us look. He makes us understand. We are all complicit in the damnation of the world, and we are all charged with its salvation.

Though Gigi has passed from the mortal plane into the spirit world, he is still here and his legacy carries forth, not only in what he has achieved but in how we carry on. And it is here the opportunity arrives to show heart. TROLLEYOLOGY is on Kickstarter. It doesn’t ask for much, just for each one of us to do our part. And what that is, you may discover when you step into a world, a world that lies right outside your door, when you open your eyes and see it anew.

Please Support

Philip Jones Griffiths, Gigi in Venice whilst making the book Agent Orange, 2003

Brandt Nudes

Nude, London, 1951, February ©The Bill Brandt Archive

The body as landscape, object, sculpture, and form, as costume, architecture, or anything else you could imagine it to become in all of its glory. It is both positive and negative, being and nothingness. It is present and absent, past and future, paradoxes intertwined and connected as one. In a state of simultaneity that is impossible to recognize fully but at the same time it is the thing in which we are forever traveling, consciously and unconsciously.

The body is both object and symbol of the object itself, and the female form most of all assumes the passive role of being that which we act upon, as we exalt its beingness into an abstract meditation on life itself. It is a thing of beauty to behold and perhaps no one does it quite like Bill Brandt whose female nudes have been collected in two volumes twice in his lifetime. The first in Perspective of Nudes (1961) and again in Bill Brandt: Nudes 1945–1980. Now, the oeuvre is brought together in a single volume, Brandt Nudes (Thames & Hudson), which includes a preface by Lawrence Durrell and commentaries by Mark Haworth-Booth. It is here, in Brandt Nudes, that we can consider Brandt’s relationship to the female form throughout the course of his esteemed career.

As Brandt recalls in quoted text from a piece first published in 1933, “It was after the war, when I was busy photographing London celebrities for English and American magazines, that I began to feel irritated by the limitations imposed by such jobs. I was taking portraits of politicians, artists writers, actors, in their own surrounding, but there was never enough time for me to do what I wanted. My sitters were always in a hurry. Their rooms were rarely inspiring backgrounds, and I felt the need for exciting backgrounds to make pictures of the portraits. I wanted more say in the pictures; I wanted rooms of my own choice. And so I came to the nudes. Nudes, at that time, were photographed in studios. I thought of photographing them in real rooms…”

Read the Full Story at
Le Journal de la Photographie

Nude, Baie des Anges, France, 1959, October ©The Bill Brandt Archive

Happy Birthday April Flores ~*~

 Because we have so much eye candy and mind candy,
spending so much time trying to pay the rent,
all of this conspires to keep us from thinking too hard or taking action from that.
Our time is stolen. So much of our daily life is stolen.

Just because my bank account hasn’t swelled astronomically
I don’t consider myself any less of a success.

I’m a total pleasure seeker. I pursue anything that satisfies me. I usually get it.
I have specific needs and I know what they are so I can achieve satisfaction.

If people could understand how much pleasure they could have by themselves,
I think everyone would be a lot saner.
I think that people really need a dose of quality time with one’s self.

The female format is a beautiful one in which to function. Foolhardy as it may be.
I change my image all the time, it’s whatever suits me at the moment.

Think your own thoughts.

Photographs of April Flores by Carlos Batts
Quotes by Lydia Lunch

Get Ready! FAT GIRL is Coming!

…it comes only from inside…

a new talent discovered
thank you Jayne

XOXO

The High Priestess

The High Priestess is the guardian of the unconscious. She sits in front of the thin veil of unawareness which is all that separates us from our inner landscape. She contains within herself the secrets of these realms and offers us the silent invitation, “Be still and know that I am God.”

The High Priestess is the feminine principle that balances the masculine force of the Magician. The feminine archetype in the tarot is split between the High Priestess and the Empress. The High Priestess is the mysterious unknown that women often represent, especially in cultures that focus on the tangible and known. The Empress represents woman’s role as the crucible of life.

In readings, the High Priestess poses a challenge to you to go deeper – to look beyond the obvious, surface situation to what is hidden and obscure. She also asks you to recall the vastness of your potential and to remember the unlimited possibilities you hold within yourself. The High Priestess can represent a time of waiting and allowing. It is not always necessary to act to achieve your goals. Sometimes they can be realized through a stillness that gives desire a chance to flower within the fullness of time.

 

Joshua Lutz: Hesitating Beauty

Hangnot Slipnot © Joshua Lutz

To speak openly of mental illness is one of the last great taboos. Not to speak of treatment, of therapies, of medication, doctors, hospitals—not to speak of the industry that has been in existence for but a century, but to speak of the people themselves. Of their inner and outer lives, and the way in which these boundaries melt, of the way in which their illness subverts our understanding of what both reality and relationship mean. It takes an unfathomable courage to wade into the murky waters of the mind, into places that have been wounded and have become maladapted over time, into places few dare to tread for fear of losing themselves in the quagmire that goes beyond the rational mode of interpretation.

What few may understand is that mental illness is a shared state, affecting not only the person it befalls but those who walk in its wake. To stand before this illness and experience it in the flesh is to know a side to the sublime that few can truly grasp, a kind of shadow being that has cast its hand upon the earth. Many who live with it, or live in its presence have become silenced by its reach, fearing not only external judgment but the implications of sharing in its path. So much is unknown, untold, misunderstood, misdiagnosed. So much is dehumanized by fear, by shame, and by the system itself. It is for this reason that we are blessed to have artists like Joshua Lutz who bring profound and painful truths to us in the form of art so that we as a people may both meditate on and mediate the space where few dare to share with the world.

“Hesitating Beauty”, which runs April 11–May 18 at ClampArt, NY, is a study of Lutz’s experiences living with a mother suffering from schizophrenia. The nature of schizophrenia itself is not fully understood, but it is a detachment for our commonly-held perceptions of reality that drive the sufferer into a kind of psychosis few can comprehend on its own terms.

Read the Full Story at
Le Journal de la Photographie

Wallpaper © Joshua Lutz

DayPass © Joshua Lutz

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