Roy Lichtenstein and George Bellows both have local ties.
Throwback Thursday: Marker honors two great Columbus artists
Kew Gardens unveils sculpture exhibition, fusing art and nature
The visual artist Marc Quinn was inspired by scientists’ research about plants in London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. With their collaboration, he has created an exhibition of 16 sculptures integrated
Pittsburgh gets its first public statue depicting a woman of color
In Highland Park, artist Marlana Adele Vassar has created the first statue of a woman of color, called “Flora.” It’s a bronze sculpture of a beatific Black girl cradling a rabbit, sited in a flower garden near the entrance.
Princess Kate takes candid photograph of Princess Charlotte to mark 9th birthday
The Prince and Princess of Wales proudly shared a new photograph of Princess Charlotte to make her ninth birthday on Thursday.
The portrait, taken by mum Kate in Windsor in the last few days, shows the youngster smiling at the camera and casually posing outside next to a clematis plant with pink petals.
Sporting a burgundy cardigan over a floral shirt and a navy knit and a denim skirt, Charlotte wears her long locks loose over her shoulders.
The caption read: “Happy 9th Birthday, Princess Charlotte! Thank you for all of the kind messages today.”
© The Princess of WalesIn line with the new precedent they set for Prince Louis’ sixth birthday last month, Prince William and Kate posted the image directly on social media on Charlotte’s special day on 2 May, rather than under embargo to the press as was the tradition.
It avoided the uproar sparked by the Princess’s digitally altered Mother’s Day photo.
Charlotte’s ninth birthday comes during unprecedented time for the Wales family with Kate appealing for time, space and privacy as she continues her treatment following her cancer diagnosis.
On 22 March, the Princess announced her diagnosis in a moving video message, saying to camera: “It has taken me time to recover from major surgery in order to start my treatment. But, most importantly, it has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte and Louis in a way that is appropriate for them, and to reassure them that I am going to be OK.
“As I have said to them; I am well and getting stronger every day by focusing on the things that will help me heal; in my mind, body and spirits.”
Charlotte was last seen in public on Christmas Day when she walked to church with her family and second cousin Mia Tindall at Sandringham.
Princess Charlotte’s early life, education and more
Charlotte Elizabeth Diana was born in the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London, at 8.34am on 2 May 2015, weighing 8lbs 3oz.
© GettyMum Kate captured the first official photograph of newborn daughter with her big brother, Prince George, a month after Charlotte’s birth.
The tot was christened at St Mary Magdalene Church, Sandringham, with the then Cambridges residing nearby at Anmer Hall at the time.
Charlotte made history at the age of two as she was the first female royal to benefit from The Succession to the Crown Act (2013), which states that girls will not be overtaken by any future younger brothers, keeping her place in the line of succession when little brother Prince Louis arrived in April 2018.
The princess joined her parents on her first royal tour to Canada when she was just 16 months old. Relive this sweet mother-daughter moment between Kate and Charlotte as the royals attended a party for military families…
George and Charlotte, then aged three and two respectively, also joined their parents on their royal tour of Germany and Poland in July 2017.
She began her education at Willcocks Nursery School in Kensington in January, following the family’s move to London and later joined George at Thomas’s Battersea School.
© Getty ImagesGeorge, Charlotte and Louis enrolled at Lambrook School in Berkshire in September 2022 after William and Kate relocated to Adelaide Cottage in Windsor.
Charlotte, who has a passion for dancing, has accompanied her parents to some major royal events over the years, including the King’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in May 2023.
© GettyShe wore a mini-me version of Kate’s silver bullion, crystal and silver thread headpiece by Jess Collett x Alexander McQueen, along with a caped ivory McQueen frock.
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In the Arts, Is It Breaking Big, or Selling Out?
The boundaries between art, fashion and luxury seem to be melting away. That’s great for brands, but what about artists — and the art?
The photographs worth a thousand words
You are on an escalator, standing behind and slightly below a middle-aged woman who is wearing a sensible black knee-length skirt and flat shoes. Your visual field is filled by two stoutish legs in pale tights that are preparing to step off the top of the moving stairway. You are looking at a photograph by Dolorès Marat: Legs, Paris, 1997. Maybe you choose to focus on the contrast between the disembodied limbs and the industrial metal of the escalator; or to imagine the office routine ahead and all the traipsing those legs are going to have to do; or to think about the woman behind the camera, who is just as present in the image as the woman whose legs you are looking at, if not more so. What did she see in this image, and want you to see?
Marat’s photographs of street scenes form part of the ‘Exteriors’ exhibition at the Museum of European Photography in Paris. Curated by the writer Lou Stoppard during a residency at MEP, the show displays works in the permanent collection – shots of everyday life in France but also London, Scarborough, New York, Tokyo and Shanghai by over 25 different artists – alongside extracts from Journal du dehors, a published diary by the writer Annie Ernaux in which she recorded her immediate impressions of life in and around the Paris suburb of Cergy-Pontoise between 1985 and 1992.
‘Can you see a text? Can you read a photograph?’ asks Stoppard in the catalogue essay. What the medium of photography does best is ‘describe’, said the American street photographer Garry Winogrand, whose photographs of a shop window in San Marcos, Texas, and another in New York City are paired with Ernaux’s street images. One extract reads, in its entirety: ‘A trolley on its side, a long way from the shopping centre, like a toy forgotten in the grass.’
Shinjuku Station, Tokyo (1962), Hiro. MEP Collection, Paris. © The Estate of Y. Hiro Wakabayashi
Ernaux has joked that her signature ‘flat’, unrhetorical style was an attempt to create work at ‘a cut below literature’. Her texts are hung on the walls of the exhibition like photographs: scenes at the supermarket, on the metro and the RER, very often focusing on women and girls performing themselves in public. There’s a hairdresser ‘cleansing herself’ after an encounter with a woman carrying head lice by complaining loudly; girls chatting at the supermarket checkout, ignoring their customers; snippets read over the shoulder of fellow passengers on the metro.
Stoppard’s pairings work best when the overheard, or ‘overseen’, aspect of the image is embedded in the photographs themselves. The camera lens nods to real-life framing devices: windows, mirrors, streetscapes and even hedges. Take the foreshortened view in Richard Kalvar’s work Sunbathing Woman, Bryant Park, New York City (1969): torso, arm, tipped-over plastic cup and straw, seen through bushes and what may be the framing window of a bus. These photographs insist on perspectives that are simultaneously stolen, accidental and set up.
Because there is, of course, no neutral seeing. ‘I have put a lot of myself into these texts, far more than originally planned,’ says Ernaux, ‘memories and obsessions subconsciously dictating my choice of words, and the scenes I wished to freeze.’
Istanbul (Turkey) (1986), Jean-Christophe Béchet. MEP Collection, Paris. © Jean-Christophe Béchet
Ernaux’s exteriors lead to a personal interior, but her book is also intended as a documentary of behaviours she finds wanting:
The violence and shame inherent in society can be found in the contempt a customer shows for a cashier or in the vagrant begging for money who is shunned by his peers – in anything that appears to be unimportant and meaningless simply because it is familiar or ordinary […] a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall.
For all the focus on the image, Ernaux is less interested in the visual shape of what she sees than in what it means. There’s nothing like the glorious visual rhyme in Bernard Pierre Wolff’s Mid Manhattan, New York (1984), in which the red and white striped fabric of a woman’s dress repeats the red and white stripes on a warning barrier in the street.
My favourite image in the exhibition frames another visual rhyme for the viewer, and one more in keeping with Ernaux’s preoccupation with female generations. It’s Jean-Philippe Charbonnier’s Two Hands and a Pair of Underpants, Luxembourg, Paris (1978), and it’s a drama in three acts. We catch sight of them in the park, a middle-aged woman in the sun, left hand to her chest, right hand on her knee. Beside her a teenage girl, most probably her daughter, is caught in the same gesture – it’s unclear whether she’s modelling herself consciously or not. Up in the right-hand corner sits a young girl, casually showing us her knickers. She’s not yet inducted in the ways of femininity, but she will be.
Nabari Mie (1977), from the series Fushikaden (1971–78) by Suda Issei. MEP Collection, Paris. Courtesy Akio Nagasawa Gallery; © Issei Suda
‘Exteriors – Annie Ernaux and Photography’ is at the MEP, Paris, until 26 May.
‘I was lying on the ground beside a wall of cops’: student photographers’ best images of the campus protests
As protests in support of Palestine sweep university campuses across the US, student journalists from New York to Texas have documented the reality inside the encampments. They have risen to the occasion, capturing the quiet moments, the celebratory elements, the tense scenes and the violent police arrests.
We asked nine photographers – who have been covering the demonstrations at Columbia, Berkeley, the University of Texas and beyond – to tell the stories behind their most powerful photos.
Lily Speredelozzi | George Washington University
When a portion of the encampment at George Washington University was closed off by barriers, protesters outside chalked quotes such as “GW is complicit in genocide”, “shame on you GW”, or “power to the people”. Later, protesters broke down the barriers. I was excited to take this photo. I wanted to include context: the Palestinian flag, the students, the chalk. I love the overhead shot and the shadowsThe GWU encampment protest has been peaceful, with GW police and DC Metro police presence but no activity.
Christian Harsa | The Lantern, Ohio State University
This photo was taken on the South Oval, across College Road from the Ohio Union. I wanted to get a shot of how police were making arrests so people could see what was happening on the ground. Adrenaline was running high because I was so close to where the police and the line of protesters met. The threat of being arrested myself was ever present. In this photo a student is being arrested after being brought to the ground and pulled from the line of protesters. I love the action this photo caught. I can’t help but put myself in her shoes and consider the anger and fear she must have felt.
Krish Dev | Washington Square News, New York University
This was taken on the evening of 25 April, right before over 100 students formed a picket line outside Gould Plaza to protest the 120 arrests of protesters, including students and faculty, at the site two days prior. I saw police aggressively charge at protesters in riot gear and zip-tie them; they even pepper-sprayed one of our photographers. Following the arrests, police constructed a wall using metal boards and plastic barriers. Some wrote messages and attached flyers calling on students to go to Columbia University to support the encampment there. The person who is looking at the board in the image is a campus safety officer. Campus safety officers have been guarding the protests 24/7 over the past week and, in my experience, have been respectful of demonstrations and kept protesters safe from those outside. Originally, I was planning to take a photo of the wooden board and the words “WALL OF SHAME” written on it. As I was taking the photo, a campus safety officer started to look at the message. I thought the juxtaposition between him and the message was very powerful. I felt a little sad for the officer, who looked slightly upset in the shot. I’ve seen multiple campus safety officers who appear conflicted. I was also reminded of the violation of student trust taking place on campus.
Anita Liu | The Daily Californian, University of California, Berkeley
This picture was taken from the balcony of the Martin Luther King Jr student union building, which is directly opposite the encampment. It’s a common location to take protest photos, to show a wider perspective. There were approximately 150 tents and no police activity at the time. The steps were named after a leader of the free speech movement, making the encampment grounds an important site in political activism.
When taking this photo, I knew I was documenting an important moment in campus history. I couldn’t help but think about the parallels between the Free Palestine encampment and the South African apartheid demonstrations on campus back in the 1980s.
Charlotte Keene | The Daily Texan, University of Texas, Austin
After protest and police interactions got more hectic, many students started running away.
Another photographer and I ran into this building after police started using force to disperse the crowd. We knew we had to do more than hide, so we started looking for classrooms with windows. We heard the commotion coming from the bottom floor exits. And then we saw the scene.
I was scared. I almost did not take it. Those of us in the building were unsure whether the police would force their way in. But I stopped for a second and knew I needed to capture what I was seeing.
I love the symmetry. I think there is something pleasant to look at about the contrast in light and the repetitive squares from the window – almost as if there is a sense of calm before the storm. To me, the stillness reads as anticipation.
Marco Postigo Storel | Columbia University
Different groups within the Gaza Solidarity encampment at Columbia University were having a dance presentation inside the encampment during a warm afternoon. I decided to lie down on the grassy ground in the center of the circle, and get their feet in the foreground while the rest of the people were moving in the background. It was a warm day with good lighting.
I like how everything in the frame is at the right spot at the right time, and the three-dimensionality that the photo has makes it better. Like a finished puzzle. I got a lot of dirt on my clothes by taking this photo, but it was worth it.
Manoo Sirivelu | The Daily Texan, University of Texas at Austin
In this picture, University of Texas police (UTPD) officers are pinning a protester on the concrete sidewalk and zip-tying them. Law enforcement would push in at intervals and surround the protesters, 360 degrees. Nearby crowds and media often couldn’t see the full extent of the force used and how the protesters were being detained. I wanted to show the feelings of imprisonment and suffocation that the students were experiencing, so I tried to depict the officers’ legs as bars that were already surrounding the student.
I was beside the student in this picture when the arrest was made and a UTPD officer had pushed me down while trying to make space. I was lying on the ground with a wall of cops between me and the student when I sat up to take this picture, not more than five feet away from her.
I was shocked from being pushed to the ground when I met her gaze and realized we were close enough to make eye contact. I felt needed to take a picture that would encapsulate both her feelings and my own.
It shows how unnecessary the force used in these arrests was. Our cameras bear the responsibility of recording the events – to allow the viewers to see, and, most importantly, place themselves in our point of view with a space for empathy that a photo like this provides.
Jason Alpert-Wisnia | Washington Square News, New York University
In this photograph, students were eating donated and purchased food. They had supplies gathered in the center of their space and students would sit around by their tents there to eat. I wanted to show the stillness, in between the moments of action that are everywhere. Shooting from above gives scale to the campus protests. I took this from the third floor of NYU’s Paulson Center looking down on the camp. As a student I can enter buildings and work from angles that non-students cannot, so I had the advantage of height.
Top Image:
Lorianne Willett | The Daily Texan, University of Texas, Austin
I was looking to tell the stories of students being arrested. When I took this picture, I was standing just in front of state troopers who’d surrounded the van they were putting arrested people in. I was in the front of a large crowd of people protesting and spectating. After going through my take, I really felt so affected by seeing the faces of people my age being taken to jail. In this shot, I like the framing of arrested protesters in between the helmets of state troopers.
In pictures: The thrill and chaos of growing up in New York
Nolan Zangas’ move towards photography was a natural, “organic” journey. “I started filming skateboarding at a really young age and over time that transitioned into taking pictures,” explains the 25-year-old New Yorker. “I slowly lost interest in skateboarding and started taking photography more seriously, and here I am today.”
While having made his name as a photographer shooting fashion editorials, his debut monograph, So Far So Good (published by Blurring Books) instead reflects on New York’s streets and the city’s youth culture. The culmination of the past five years, Zangas’ first book is like a time capsule which chronicles the skateboard kids and their unique culture at a very particular moment in time.
“Photography gave me a real reason to straighten out my life and grow as a person. I think people know my work for documenting celebrities and models and, don’t get me wrong, I love doing that. But that’s not where I come from,“ Zangas tells Dazed in a conversation over email. “I started taking pictures just being a kid running around the city. I wanted to make a book that reflected that and shed light on those less recognised, to take beautiful pictures that make them feel noticed.”
The principle story emerging from Zangas’ pictures is a coming-of-age tale many of us will feel an affinity with. He conveys that heady sensation of the newfound freedom of adolescence and all the precarity and risk it entails. From fireballs in the streets to the bridges of the Hudson River at dusk and friends fucking about with flames, skateboards, cigarettes and aerosols, Zangas’ portraits evoke the febrile quality of NYC nights and the sense of feeling reckless and part of a crew. One topless figure brandishes a knife, a masked kid gazes out defiantly through the eye holes of a balaclava, a young couple kiss against the backdrop of a gathering crowd, a pair of cyclists wheelie daringly toward the camera. A sense of fevered danger permeates the pictures.
“I was definitely a bit of a troublemaker growing up,” he admits. Yet, despite the riotous undercurrent, there’s also an overriding sense of hopefulness in the pages of So Far So Good. Even the name of the book is tentatively positive. “The theme is optimistic but also questions, ‘What’s next?’” he explains. “I always think about how far you can push something until you hit breaking point. It’s a question I’ve often asked myself when I felt things were going too far in a negative way. I wanted the book to question that a bit as well, and I think the title is very fitting in that sense.”
As well as being an ode to his friends and the skateboard community that embraced him, So Far So Good is also a love story with New York itself. “New York is very chaotic and there is always something happening,” he says. “The streets are filled with excitement. It makes me always want to carry a camera because I never know what I’ll see. I think New York gives me a constant sense of attention and curiosity.”
The book preserves a sense of Zangas’ own transition from adolescence to adulthood but also immortalises his wider community during this seminal five-year period. In a city that moves so quickly, even his relatively recent pictures are already artefacts of the past. “Looking back at these images, everything looks so different now… the clothes people wear, the buildings, the cars, the streets. New York is constantly changing and people are too… I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but I think one day it will be cool to look back and interesting to see the directions everyone’s life took.”
Nolan Zangas’ So Far So Good is published by Blurring Books and is available here now.
‘They look sad’: Tony Cragg scraps audio guides for Castle Howard exhibition
Sculptor says he wants visitors to form their own relationships with art, without ‘anyone else interfering’
Encompassing Euphoria: JK Wong shakes up the world of photography
JK Wong is shaking up the world of photography. The Chinese-born, LA-based fashion photographer is not one who shies away from being bold or adding dramatic flair to her work.
Using photography to celebrate the female form and fashion, Wong loves exaggerated poses, euphoric expressions and saturated colors. She finds inspiration in models who feel elevated in garb that show women as playful, desirable and powerful.
Wong moved to the Pasadena area three years ago and works as a freelance photographer throughout California.
“I told my parents about eight years ago that I was going to move to America to pursue photography,” Wong said. “Well, I actually first knew I wanted to have something to do with fashion design, but then my mom encouraged me to look into pursuing media.”
After gathering some model friends for photos, Wong built her portfolio in hopes of becoming a professional photographer.
“Back then, I fell in love with this guy I had met through friends, and I wanted to capture moments of his life,” Wong said. “But if you look at my website now, with all the photos I’ve taken in my career, they’re all of women — I found them more interesting to photograph, down to the way they move their bodies in photos, to their fashion.”
One of Wong’s most prominent attributes to her photography is color. Back when she was studying at university about eight years ago, someone had given her the advice to purchase a reflector to add more color to a session. The one she ended up buying for $4 is something she still uses in almost every photoshoot.
“It’s so much easier than transporting around heavy, expensive lighting equipment that seems to break so easily,” Wong said. “I first dreamed of moving out to New York, but when I visited, the sky was so dark and gray. When I landed in Los Angeles, though, it was at sunset and I just knew how perfectly the light would complement my photos. I knew my future was here.”
To keep each photoshoot fresh, Wong typically doesn’t use the same model more than twice. In most of the stories she has depicted, Wong’s models are dressed as fairy tale characters like Alice or the Queen of Hearts from “Alice in Wonderland,” Barbie, Ex Machina, fairies, circus clowns and many more.
When reflecting on some of her most memorable shoots, JK shared the story behind “Alien Pilot,” where her first model, who was bald, was disrespecting a makeup artist and stylist on the set. After hearing this, Wong canceled the shoot but still wanted to use the idea she had prepared. After calling an agent, another model Wong had wanted was able to work on the idea for “Alien Pilot,” but with one problem.
“She had so much hair, I had no idea what to do,” Wong said. “Everything was so last minute, I asked the makeup artist if she was able to get a bald cap, and she did! Looking back at the photos, it’s one of my favorite photoshoots I’ve done.”
Before her photoshoot titled “Euphoria,” Wong felt it was a word that resonated most with the way she felt taking photos.
“I want to create and show a euphoric experience — it’s my favorite word and it’s the way I think about my art. It’s what I want to show the world,” Wong said.
Her whimsical and surreal imagery can also be seen in her featured publications like Vogue, covers of Harper’s Bazaar, L’Officiel, Playboy, Grazia, Glamour and many more.
