Stars like Cardi B and Normani wear his clothes, but for Mesches, his pieces are ‘sculpture-based, first and foremost.’
Don’t call Kim Mesches a fashion designer
In pictures: Fujifilm unveils revamped House of Photography flagship
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A Striking Resemblance: the photography of François Brunelle
(Credits: Far Out / François Brunelle)
The school system can engender a false impression that early life is a rehearsal for the real world. This is, of course, far from the truth: as the proverb, “Every day is a school day” suggests, school never really finishes. There are also no rehearsals, and guiding passions will often arrive far from the classroom. In the case of today’s featured photographer, François Brunelle, it all began with a camera.
At the age of 15, the Canadian photographer received his first camera, a Praktika, as a gift from his parents. As he set out on his teenage photographic pursuits in the late 1960s, Brunelle became increasingly interested in people and, more specifically, their faces. Over time, adult life demanded commercial work in graphic design, advertising and theatre, but he never forgot his preferred medium.
After a few decades in commercial photography, Brunelle set himself a task to sate curiosity in his favourite medium. In 2000, he embarked on his so-called I’m not a look-alike! project, with the intention of locating Doppelgängers around the world and inviting them to the studio for a photograph.
Brunelle set himself the ambitious target of capturing 200 “couples,” as he refers to them. Alongside several other projects and professional endeavours, this staggering task took him 12 years to complete. This seemed like a reasonably impressive record since locating Doppelgängers willing and worthy of travel expenses and studio time is difficult and time-consuming.
Personally, I would have started by reaching out to Will Ferrell and Chad Smith, drummer of Red Hot Chili Peppers, as the only Doppelgänger pair I can think of. However, to find 200 couples, Brunelle had to rely on word of mouth. In public advertisements and addresses, he encouraged anybody who knew of a look-alike pairing to get in contact.
Willing participants would send Brunelle their names, region and nation of residence, alternative contact information and photos. The last thing Brunelle needed was a 12-hour flight only to realise his participants looked nothing alike.
Naturally, Brunelle had to contend with Doppelgängers who were hesitant to comply with the arrangements or uncomfortable posing with a total stranger—as much as they might look like family. With all hurdles cleared, Brunelle invited his subjects to the studio, where he would have them dress in similar or identical clothing and jewellery. Finally, he took his snaps, opting for monochrome photographs to homogenise the palette for optimal similarity.
As you can see in the small sample I obtained below, the results were remarkable. Some of the Doppelgängers lived many miles from one another, and others displayed strikingly similar features despite being of opposing sexes.
During our brief exchange, Brunelle informed me that, over the past year or so, he has been working on a book to showcase I’m not a look-alike! The project was a hard-fought labour of love that Brunelle describes as the party of his career of which he’s most “proud” despite winning awards for several more easily accomplished endeavours.
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Isa Aydin Photography Announces Exclusive Discounted Week for Fashion Photography Services
Starting today, Isa Aydin Photography is announcing a special discounted week from June 17th to June 21st, 2024.
HACKENSACK, NEW JERSEY, UNITED STATES, May 31, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — Isa Aydin Photography, a premier photography studio renowned for its high-end fashion photography services, is excited to announce an exclusive discounted week for fashion photography. With studios located in New Jersey, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Isa Aydin Photography serves nationwide clients, delivering exceptional quality and service.
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Starting today, Isa Aydin Photography is announcing a special discounted week from June 17th to June 21st, 2024. Clients who want to enjoy a 30% discount on fashion photography services must book their shoot during this discounted week. This exclusive offer is limited to only five spots, and clients are encouraged to book their sessions promptly to take advantage of this limited offer.
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About Isa Aydin Photography
Isa Aydin Photography is a high-end photography studio specializing in fashion photography, serving nationwide clients with studios in New Jersey, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Known for their precise light control and color accuracy, Isa Aydin Photography provides top-tier services, including access to a large network of freelance models, makeup artists, and fashion stylists.
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A trio of artists develops friendships alongside photography careers
It’s a friendly exhibit for three photographers who have spent decades honing their craft. But you can’t fault them if it feels a little bigger than that.
Ashton Thornhill, John Wylie, and Sam Elkind met and became friends on the Eldorado studio art tour, and when they stage their Visual Journeys exhibition at Nocturne 818 Gallery this month, it will mark the first time any of them have had a exhibit like this in Santa Fe.
“We’ve all shown elsewhere. We’ve shown in group shows here,” says Elkind. “But it’s great to be in charge of our own — what would you say? ‘Destiny’ is probably too strong a word, but it’s great to be in control of the work.”
Sculptures in season at botanical garden
The Santa Fe Botanical Gardens isn’t just one of the city’s most striking scenic landmarks; for the next 11 months, it’ll also be home to a sculpture garden.
In pictures: The chaos and euphoria of Primavera 2024
Photographer and Dazed Clubber Gracie Brackstone reports back from this year’s Primavera Sound Barcelona
31May 2024
Vivian Maier’s Treasure Trove of Photographs Uncovered
Vivian Maier’s Treasure Trove of Photographs Uncovered
Jackson Arn
The New Yorker’s art critic
As late as 2007, the case could be made that some storage lockers in Chicago held the best photography collection in the United States. In the course of that year, the renter defaulted on payments, and everything inside, including many boxes bursting with negatives, was auctioned off to local collectors. One of these—think of him as patient zero—had enough taste to scan the negatives and post about them on Flickr.
Seventeen years, myriad copyright squabbles, incalculable praise, and one Academy Award-nominated documentary later, what do we know about Vivian Maier? She was born in 1926 and died in 2009, a few years before it had become routine to call her one of the best street photographers of the previous century. She was shy with most people and allergic to attention. She worked as a nanny and later had to rely on financial support from the people she’d once been paid to raise. A former employer recalled that Maier spoke to her children, the baby included, as though they were already grown.
That recollection helps to clarify something about Maier’s photographs, more than two hundred of which appear in Fotografiska’s exhibition, opening on May 31, “Vivian Maier: Unseen Work”: innocence is nowhere to be seen in them, possibly because it doesn’t exist. Children look world-weary even when they’re horsing around. When adults show up, even their leisure looks laborious. Like all the best street photographers, Maier had a fine eye for bathos: a doll in a trash can, an old lady selling pretzels near a sign for a beauty school, a marquee for a Bing Crosby movie shining down on what looks like a corpse.
Maier’s finest images may be her self-portraits, in which she finds her frank, sharp, “Whistler’s Mother” face in a mirror and makes the rest of the world surround it. When I look at one and then think about all the other great works of art yellowing away in other forgotten lockers, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
About Town
Off Broadway
The final installment in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s Friel Project, Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney,” follows a functionally blind woman who is offered the possibility of regaining some vision. The operation, despite slim odds of success, seems like a no-brainer to her husband, Frank (an endearingly tedious John Keating), who lives for far-fetched, noble-minded enterprises, and to the ophthalmologist Mr. Rice (Rufus Collins), who sees “curing” Molly (a superb Sarah Street) as a way to resuscitate his once glorious career. Friel’s play, first performed in 1994, presents two would-be Pygmalions who fail to realize that their Galatea is already fully alive. Molly alone grasps the difference “between seeing and understanding”; Charlotte Moore’s economical yet elegant staging invites us to do so as well.—Dan Stahl (Irish Rep; through June 30.)
Art
In the four decades leading up to the Nazi dictatorship, Käthe Kollwitz was Germany’s howling, wrenching conscience. A retrospective at MOMA occasionally seems more intrigued by her views on war and labor strife than by the drawings, sculptures, and prints in which she expressed them, but the evidence speaks for itself: she had one of the most vivid graphic imaginations of the era. Bodies are forever trying and failing to merge in these images: mothers grip dead children, crowds march almost forward, profiles press into a single head. Unity is often the goal but never the reality; Kollwitz’s doubt is as powerful as her faith. She is, in other words, something subtler and more valuable than a crusader: a genuine artist.—Jackson Arn (MOMA; through July 20.)
Dance
The young Belfast-raised dancemaker Oona Doherty isn’t afraid of big music, or big emotions, or delving into anxiety. In “Navy Blue,” a heartfelt dance for twelve, set to Rachmaninoff and Jamie xx, Doherty combines lyricism and jaggedness, physical grace and what looks like an uncomfortable unravelling of the body, to produce a portrait of the discomfort of living—a “Rite of Spring” for our time. Both the movement and an insistent voice-over evoke humanity’s violent, self-destructive tendencies and the way that modernity has reduced everything to dollars and cents—and, underneath all this, mankind’s fundamental irrelevance. After all, as the voice-over says, we are just “a pale blue dot on a pale blue dot.”—Marina Harss (Joyce Theatre, June 4-9.)
Electronic Music
Under the alias Machinedrum, the electronic musician Travis Stewart conjures quirky, beat-driven music that distorts the dimensions of pop sounds into something otherworldly. A multiyear project called “Vapor City” envisioned urban planning through sound design, dedicating its songs to a dream metropolis, and the album “Human Energy,” from 2016, pursued the intangible in prismatic flashes. A new record, “3FOR82,” was inspired by a trip to Joshua Tree National Park, where solitude led Stewart to his old hard drives full of beats he had produced in the late nineties, using Impulse Tracker. The songs tap into the creativity that antiquated technology prompts, pulling an unconventional band of collaborators—aja monet, Tinashe, Jesse Boykins III, Topaz Jones, deem spencer, and more—into his superlunar orbit.—Sheldon Pearce (Market Hotel; June 7.)
Off Broadway
Julia Masli emerges from a dark corridor, a huge contraption looming over her narrow face—part witch’s hat, part Gigeresque GoPro lighting rig. “Ha ha ha,” she intones, the words so thickened by her Estonian accent that they sound like an owl hooting. Masli’s eldritch, exquisite show “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” was an Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit last year, a mix of elevated clown work (Masli operates in an improvisatory French bouffon tradition) and group-therapy session. Slowly, deliberately, she glides up to audience members: “Problem?” she asks. Whatever the problem is—sweatiness, grief, fear of failure on the night I saw it—she tries to solve it with what she has on hand, deploying a roll of electrical tape, for instance, to bind family members together, or exerting her weird, lachrymose compassion. “You’re amazing,” I heard her say to a woman with a hurt foot. “Your foot is metaphor.”—Helen Shaw (SoHo Playhouse; through June 8.)
Movies
In 1997, the Bulgarian-born, French-based filmmaker Mosco Boucault launched a series of documentaries about police investigations with “The Shooting on Mole Street,” centered on the killing of the fifteen-year-old Shafeeq Murrell, in the crossfire of a drug-gang war in Philadelphia. Boucault follows two police detectives (both white) in their maneuverings to meet and interrogate potential witnesses and suspects (who, like the victim, are Black); he encounters teens trapped in the carceral system and in cycles of violence, and neighbors whose mournful outrage at Shafeeq’s death is matched by fear of gang reprisals. Many in the neighborhood, struggling merely to live in peace, have the weary desperation of refugees at home.—Richard Brody (Streaming on OVID.tv.)
Pick Three
The staff writer Rachel Syme shares current obsessions.
1. Every summer, I attempt a rewatch of an old, multi-season television show; it provides a soothing activity to look forward to on sticky days. (Whenever I get overheated, I just think, At least tonight I’ll get to bask in the A.C. with my little show.) This year, I’m rewatching “Six Feet Under,” the HBO masterpiece from the early two-thousands. It’s even better than I remembered. The acting is so strange and spiky and surprising, and the cold opens of most episodes—usually showing the bizarre death of a random person in Los Angeles—are still harrowing and brilliant. I know that when I get to the infamous finale, I’ll be a wreck all over again.
2. I cannot stop listening to the songs from “Stereophonic,” a new Broadway play that follows a band that may or may not be based on Fleetwood Mac, as it pushes through interpersonal drama to record a new album. The play’s songs, by Will Butler, formerly of the band Arcade Fire, so perfectly mimic a seventies Laurel Canyon sound that you might think that you’ve stumbled upon a cache of lost Stevie Nicks B-sides.
3. I’ve been pressing Miranda July’s new novel, “All Fours,” into the hands of many friends. I read it in two sittings and was despondent when it was over. No book has so accurately captured the wandering years that many women experience during their thirties and forties, when we are no longer young but also not yet prepared to be considered old. The book does for perimenopause what Melville did for whales: it makes the subject seem epic and earth-swallowing.
P.S. Good stuff on the Internet:
Look back on Rankin’s iconic 90s archive, starring Björk, Bowie, and more
As his new exhibition, Back in the Dazed, opens at 180 Studios, the photographer and Dazed co-founder shares memories and advice from across his star-studded career
31May 2024
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Up in the air with the photographer who documents the world from 12,000 feet
London
CNN
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“This is not daredevil stuff,” says 75-year-old fine art photographer Donn Delson as we sit in a helicopter with no door, almost 2,000 feet above London. At this height, the winds are numbing even in May, yet Delson, on the outermost seat, dangles his legs out as a diminutive Big Ben and Tower Bridge pass by beneath us. “On a good day I’ll go out on the (skid),” he says rather nonchalantly, referring to the two nail-bitingly thin helicopter landing bars beneath us. “But harnessed up, of course, and only when we’re hovering.”
While many may turn green at the thought of hanging out of a door-less helicopter, this is the desired set up for Delson — who refuses to put his camera lens anywhere near a window. “It’s really the only way I want to shoot,” he said, back on the ground the following day, of his penchant for working at height. “I do everything on a large scale, because I want people to get the feeling I have when I’m up there.”
The feeling, as it appeared sitting next to Delson in that same sky-high ‘copter, is one of complete calmness. Mid-flight, he grumbles at the fierce winds and asks the pilot to slow the aircraft down to a hover. Suddenly we’re suspended — wobbling in the air somewhere above the river Thames (a designated heli-lane intended to spare the rest of the city in the event of a crash) as Delson reaches under his headset to remove the black cap worn backwards on his head. “Much better,” he says, and gives the signal to fly on.
Delson, who is based in Los Angeles, began his career as an aerial photographer almost a decade ago. He’s since spent over 300 hours in a helicopter, capturing everything from the ephemeral cherry blossoms of Japan to rugged mountain trails hidden in the Red Sea — sometimes from as high as 12,000 feet. His preference to charter private helicopters, which costs him between $800 and $2,500 per hour, is made possible by the fact that this is his 9th career. “I’ve been fortunate to have been an entrepreneur most of my life, and be successful in my business activities,” Delson told CNN. After selling his last company BandMerch — one of the largest entertainment merchandise businesses in the world with Rihanna, Outkast and Billy Joel as his clientele — Delson was able to retire, briefly, before a chance holiday excursion set him on a new path.
“We were on a trip to New Zealand, and my wife and I had the opportunity to go up in a helicopter to see a glacier,” he said. The pilot, noticing a hefty camera strapped around Delson, offered to open the door in order to let him shoot out unencumbered. “My wife said no. I said, ‘Sounds fabulous.’”
There’s an uncanniness to looking down at the world from above. The usual markers of your street-level experience have vanished, as has everyone else in the world. It’s quiet and still. If there wasn’t the looming anxiety of a potential helicopter malfunction, it might even be peaceful. Delson’s work leans into this strange, disembodied feeling by capturing scenes that trick the eye. A parking lot filled with cargo containers that look like musical bars on a xylophone; or the Red Sea’s sprawling canyons and gullies that could be the branches of an ancient tree. “The French term trompe l’oeil was used by painters whose paintings were so lifelike you’d think it’s a picture. I want to make audiences rethink assumptions about what they’re seeing.”
There’s no guarantee Delson will get one of these illusionary shots, however. In Japan, the photographer spent between 20 and 25 hours in the air over the course of a week — in Israel, he flew for a combined 36 hours. But sometimes he won’t take a single picture. “It’s a risk,” Delson said. “I have no idea when I go up whether or not I’m going to find anything.”
Even if he returns empty-handed, Delson believes there is more to be gained from the experience than simply making new work. “I’m definitely different than before I started flying,” he told CNN. “I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly spiritual person, but the perspective that one gets when you have the opportunity to do these things is transformative.”
Journeying back to the office at ground level, London seems a lot smaller. Just a few hours before, the capital was an intimidating, sprawling metropolis home to almost 9 million people. Now it feels almost bijou. The London Eye, what I considered to be the vertiginous pinnacle of the city at 10 years old, now feels laughably miniature; nothing more than a hamster wheel. Even Canary Wharf struggles to seem as imposing once you’ve seen 50-storey landmark One Canada Square from 1,200 feet, shrunken to the size of a Lego brick.
“The world from above, it’s just so different from the world we know,” said Delson. For any newcomers or tourists, struggling with the numerous skyscrapers, boroughs, tube lines or zone demarcations — try stepping into a helicopter. The result is a city that feels much more manageable.
