Street Kids, Fashion, and Art-Fashion Magazine Hybrids

I've come across more interesting to good magazines, with interesting to good lesser-known photographers, and sadly, the same non-web presence.

Issue Magazine is an excellent contemporary magazine that's either a brilliant hybrid of several genres or a hopelessly confused mishmash. Their past mission statement reads as follows: "ISSUE magazine strives to be the National Geographic of the American Liberal Arts focusing on the Visual Arts and Sciences, Photography, Music, Film, Architecture, Culture and Fashion with a distinctive and classic aesthetic". Yikes.

The magazine re-launched last fall with a fresher format and a mix of features on contemporary photography, painting, comic book art and a variety of other broader cultural topics. The photography that's featured is very good and printed wonderfully; most striking to me in the most recent issue (Fall 2003) were Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry's video and photographic project, Endurance, on homeless Seattle teenagers, and Mark Lyon's alternatingly affectionate and voyeuristic photographs of the development of a teenage model.

McCallum and Tarry's work has a dedicated website where one can view the portraits of the teenagers and watch time lapse video of each teenager occupying a single block, one at a time, telling their stories in sequence. The site is worth visiting and the project has received rave reviews from a number of art critics. You can also see larger images and associated press on the Conner Contemporary gallery web site (click on "artists" and look for mccallum and tarry)

This isn't just another documentary style project about hard luck kids, though, as worthy as that would be. What's striking about the project (and difficult to appreciate on the web because of the size of the images) is the juxtaposition of the reality of the teenagers' lives and the sheer endurance exemplified by the video work, with the sheer beauty of their portraits. I felt almost guilty when first looking at the images in the magazine because they conveyed more beauty and buzz than the vast majority of fashion magazine layouts or Vanity Fair/New Yorker portraits...slacker/heroin chic, but with a weirdly unsettling hardness or emptiness hovering around the edges. The portraits were taken with highly flattering frontal lighting and saturated color, which serve as an interesting contrast to the usual photojournalistic practice of stark and grungy reality associated with street portraiture.

Jessica, McCallum/Terry image from Endurance

This, of course, will raise hackles from some who believe that aestheticization and beautification has no place in documentary projects of this sort, a debate that's been around for a long time. Personally, I feel McCallum and Tarry are far more successful in producing a deeper sense of discomfort and empathy doing what they've done, than with a more putatively straight approach. One of my favorite passages on this topic comes from photography critic David Levi-Strauss's essay, "The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic?":

"The doctrinaire right contends that politics has no place in art, while the doctrinaire left contends that art has no place in politics. Both takes are culturally restrictive and historically inaccurate...The idea that the more transformed or "aestheticized" an image is, the less "authentic" or politically valuable it becomes, is one that needs to be seriously questioned. Why can't beauty be a call to action? The unsupported and careless use of "aestheticization" to condemn artists who deal with politically charged subjects recalls Brecht's statement that 'the right thinking people among us, whom Stalin in another context distinguishes from creative people, have a habit of spell-binding our minds with certain words used in an extremely arbitrary sense'.

To represent is to aestheticize; that is, to transform. It presents a vast field of choices but it does not include the choice not to transform, not to change or alter whatever is being represented. It can not be a pure process, in practice...Aestheticization is one of the ways that disparate peoples recognize themselves in one another. Photographs by themselves cannot tell "the whole truth" -- they are always only instants."

On a lighter note, another magazine with a well presented but frothier mix of fashion, photojournalism and pop culture, Noi.se, doesn't even have a website...really lovely black and white and color layouts, cutting edge fashion and intense black and white portraiture, but none of it to be found on the web.

One photographer, though, Sarah Silver, has her entire portfolio from Noi.se and other publications available online, and her color fashion work is particularly nice. The lighting and compositions don't always push the envelope, but the use of color and motion is eye-grabbing, and her feature on New York ballet dancers in the current issue of Noi.se is particularly well done. Worth checking out.

Sarah Silver image, 2003