Gabriel Moses Demands Your Attention in His New Art Book, “Regina”

By in Photography

Gabriel Moses Demands Your Attention in His New Art Book, “Regina”

Fashion photography wields the profound ability to not only capture the beauty and glamour of silhouettes, but also speak to the essence of struggle, resilience, joy, and cultural heritage. The art form also serves as a testament to visual storytelling’s enduring power to shape narratives about identity and social change. British-Nigerian photographer Gabriel Moses is part of the contemporary vanguard using fashion imagery to speak to global issues like representation within the African diaspora, colorism, Black women’s maternal mortality rates, and more.

Known for working with brands like Chanel, Nike, and Louis Vuitton, and collaborating with cultural figures including Pharrell, A$AP Rocky, and supermodels like Imaan Hammam, the highly in-demand Moses is carving out a space within the fashion, beauty, and entertainment sectors through his commanding photos. His work demands your attention. It conveys a cinematic undertone, with vivid use of color, dramatic lighting, and intentional composition. And now, he has set his sights on the world of publishing with a striking new monograph, Gabriel Moses: Regina (Prestel). Taking its title and inspiration from the Latin word for queen, the book is an ode to the women in Moses’s life and a comprehensive collection of his photography, presented alongside conversations with friends and industry peers like British rapper Skepta, photographer Ciesay, and designers Samuel Ross and Matthew Williams.

“It was important to create one body of work that represented my journey and what I’ve been trying to say over the years with the art,” Moses tells Harper’s Bazaar. We caught up with him to talk about the inspiration behind Regina, his distinct style and creative process, and how he uses image-making to, as he puts it, “create the world that I want my kids to grow up seeing.”

Can you talk us through the ideation process behind the book?

It was important to almost create a time capsule across my career, something that I can pass down to my kids—to have something physical that represented my career and my work so far.

Skepta, [photographer] Nick Knight, Samuel Ross—the book includes input from names working across art, music, and fashion. Can you talk about your collaborative process?

These are all people who have been really influential within my career, all people that were an inspiration for me growing up. It was super important to have them involved and to have an honest conversation with Skepta and Nick Knight, and to almost have two sides: one where we are speaking more about life, and the other about the discipline of photography. I think that was the best way to speak within this book, through honest conversations. To have close friends and collaborators sharing their overview on myself. It was important to have their perspective featured within the book.

a person with a red shirt

GABRIEL MOSES

How did you land on the cover image?

Motherhood is important to me. I was raised by a single mother of five. For me, I’ve always seen the strength and the beauty within that, and there was no better time to centralize it and celebrate it than having it as a cover of this book.

Your imagery often includes imagery of bodies that are othered, plus-size men, pregnant femmes, and subjects of a dark complexion. Why is this important to you?

These are the things I’ve always seen beauty within. And my work is very honest; I create work from my perspective. With all of my subjects, these are all people that I’ve wanted to represent, whether it’s me thinking about what I want my daughters to grow up seeing as beautiful, and seeing and knowing that their dad celebrated with all different types of Blackness. I feel like I have a responsibility to create the world that I want my kids to grow up seeing. I wanted to represent that within my work.

gabriel moses regina art book

GABRIEL MOSES

What role does color play in your image-making process? What do you hope people take away from Regina?

[Color is] massive within my image-making process. It’s something I’m really calculated about, and I consider a lot when image-making. The way in which we play around with tones, light, and creating an overall atmosphere—it all contributes to the feeling you feel when you look at these images, and that’s always been my aim, to make people feel something. If there’s anything anyone takes away, it’s a feeling. That’s always my mission, and that’s why I like the first page of the book to start with “Who Can’t Hear Must Feel.” That’s always been the number one priority.

Gabriel Moses: Regina will be available for purchase from U.S. retailers on June 4.

Gabriel Moses: Regina

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Aspiring teenage photographer battling cancer is working her way through her bucket list

By in Photography

Aspiring teenage photographer battling cancer is working her way through her bucket list

Sixteen year old Elizabeth Hatton, from Harrogate, England, is an aspiring photographer with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, but that isn’t going to stop her from getting her beautiful photographs seen.

In January of this year, Liz received the life-changing diagnosis of desmoplastic small round cell tumors in both her ovaries, her omentum tissue, and liver. 

Only 12 cases of desmoplastic small round cell tumor are diagnosed each year in England, according to the bone and soft tissue cancer charity Sarcoma UK. Doctors have told Liz she likely has between six months to three years to live, depending on the effectiveness of the chemotherapy. 

Liz got her first camera when she was 10 years old after saving up her money, and chose her school because it offered a course in photography. 

“There’s just been a bit of a shift in what’s normal,” Liz told Digital Camera World, “I used to be very focused on school work, but I’ve stopped that completely now. If I only have around three years left to live, what’s the point in A-levels?”

“This was a photo I took for my preliminary A Level shoot. We were exploring viewpoints. I was trying to encapsulate an urban atmosphere to create a grunge-like feel. It’s taken in a little alley in Harrogate. I took this on my old camera, a Canon 250D with a 50mm portrait lens.” (Image credit: Elizabeth Hatton)

Vicky, Liz’s mum, told us that her daughter has always loved photography. “I don’t think I overtly encouraged it,” said Vicky, “I’ve always enjoyed taking photos, although I’m not as good as Liz, so she was used to seeing me with a camera wherever we went.”  

Liz uses a Canon EOS R6 and favors portrait photography, “because I like capturing people’s emotions,” she said. 

“I was gifted my current camera by a very kind photographer who is a Canon ambassador and works for Getty Images,” said Liz, “He drove all the way from the south of England to spend a day at my house, and taught me how to use it when I first got diagnosed. I’m very grateful to him for giving me something that has given me so much pleasure ever since.” 

“This was also taken as part of my preliminary A Level coursework, where we were experimenting with colour. Throughout the shoot I used a range of different colours but I particularly liked this one because it gives the illusion that the mirror is actually water. This was taken at school on my Canon 250D with a 50mm portrait lens.” (Image credit: Elizabeth Hatton)

Liz’s parents had hoped to send her on a trip to Los Angeles to meet her favorite photographer David Suh, but the medical insurance proved a barrier. 

Instead, Vicky went viral on X, formerly Twitter, for her post sharing Liz’s photography bucket list:

  • Photograph the rehearsal of a major musical
  • Watch the filming of Would I Lie To You
  • Have photographs published in as many magazines as possible
  • Take photographs of the catwalk at London Fashion Week
  • Photograph circus performers practising their act
  • Help film a movie
  • Photograph a music festival
  • Take photos of the Christmas markets at Tivoli Gardens
  • Do a photo shoot with professional models
  • Take photos in a fashion shoot at a big fashion house

Liz at one of her photoshoots, using her Canon EOS R6.  (Image credit: Elizabeth Hatton)

“So far I have just achieved one,” said Liz, “I went to watch ‘Would I Lie To You’ being filmed, it was phenomenal. 

“I’ve been invited to watch the rehearsals of Six, Cabaret, and Wicked [West End musicals] – we’re just waiting for dates for those. I’m also getting to photograph a show at London Fashion Week this weekend. 

“So many people have offered me lots of opportunities that weren’t on the list though and I’m excited to do those as well.”

Liz started her seventh round of chemotherapy this week, and photography has been a useful distraction during this difficult time. 

“Photography has given me something to do,” she said, “It has become my focus in life.”

If you can help Liz with any of the opportunities on her photography bucket list, her mother’s X handle is @2ndtimeMama (PumpkinsandPost-Its). Give Liz a follow on Instagram as well at @lizhatton_photography. 

“When speaking to my friend about what things we could do a photo shoot on about her life and experiences, I asked her how would you like to be seen or how she would like to be in the future and she replied that she wanted to not worry so much and have more confidence to be herself. To make this into a shoot I interpreted this as being nonchalant and from there we based the setting, poses and clothing around this. It was taken at the Harrogate Studio, using my Canon R6 and my 85mm portrait lens.” (Image credit: Elizabeth Hatton)

“I spoke to my friend about herself and while we were talking we were thinking about what we could make into a shoot. One of the things we said was that she has more negative feelings but that she always tries to put them to the back of her mind. This really sparked an idea for me so I decided to use the glitter to represent these repressed emotions leaking out. I used coloured lights to enhance the emotions that I wanted to create. It was taken at the Harrogate Studio, using my Canon R6 and my 85mm portrait lens.” (Image credit: Elizabeth Hatton)

“I took this photo on a cruise around Northern Europe. I was exploring the emotion of loneliness. When I saw the little boat completely isolated amidst the waves I realised it would be a perfect shot for the concept. I took this on my old Canon 250D.” (Image credit: Elizabeth Hatton)

Follow in Liz’s footsteps and take a look at the best Canon cameras. We’ve also put together the best cameras for beginners, and the best cameras for portraits. 

Review | Two photographers traveled America. One became a star. The other vanished.

By in Photography

Review | Two photographers traveled America. One became a star. The other vanished.

The scenario is simple. Two different photographers. The same year: 1955. The same grant: a Guggenheim. The same idea: travel across the country taking photographs.

How will it end?

If you know the name Robert Frank, you know already. It ends with a sequence of 83 photographs, published in a book called “The Americans,” that is to photography what “Kind of Blue” is to jazz or “Sgt. Pepper’s” is to popular music: a body of work that is not just distinctive and original but, in artistic terms, almost theological: that than which nothing greater can be imagined. It has transcended its subject and medium to achieve the status of the very best art.

So what about the other guy?

Well, do you know the name Todd Webb? Because if you don’t, that’s also how it ends.

In 1955, Webb was a highly regarded figure in American photography. A protégé of Edward Steichen and a friend of Dorothea Lange, he was part of an inner circle of favored photographers, a fixture in some of the most important exhibitions of the era.

But after selling off his archive to a dealer who kept his work out of circulation, Webb fell into obscurity. During the 1970s and ’80s when curators and tastemakers were establishing the canon of 20th-century photography, he was barely considered. So while Frank’s “The Americans” is everywhere, Webb’s photographs from his 1955 travels have never previously been exhibited.

End of carousel

A superb exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., corrects this. Organized by Lisa Volpe, the show opened late last year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and will travel to the Brandywine Museum of Art in Pennsylvania in February.

For Webb’s reputation, it has to be said that “Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955” is not ideal. Just as it isn’t fair to Antonio Salieri always to be putting him on concert programs with Mozart, it’s not quite fair to Webb to put his 1955 project alongside Frank’s. He can only suffer by comparison.

Still, fairness be damned. As a sense-sharpening exercise, it’s irresistible, and highly instructive. Something about it recalls the mechanics of the scientific method.

You start with a question — let’s say, about America (“What sort of place is it?”) or aesthetics (“Can photographs rise to the level of the greatest art?”). You conduct a little research and concoct a hypothesis, e.g., “America is sad” or “Photographs are documentary, not artistic.” For a good experiment, you need a control. So: Two photographers. One gets the drug, the other a placebo.

A cursory analysis of the results leaves little doubt: Frank got the drug. And whatever it was, its efficacy cannot be questioned.

But the beauty of this exhibition is that it invites us to take another look, and to entertain less binary conclusions. It will make you see America and photography with freshly rinsed eyes.

The two photographers had similar kinds of curiosity but very different ways of seeing. Both were more attracted to people than to landscapes or things. They photographed roads and roadside businesses, billboards and signs, bars, parades, rallies, and public transport. They were alive to big themes like class and race relations, but also to the accidental, strangely poetic shapes made by bodies lying on picnic rugs or getting off chairlifts.

Frank, who traveled the country in a used 1950 Ford Business Coupe, whittled down the 83 photographs that made it into “The Americans” from 28,000. He was in his early 30s.

Webb, who traveled by foot, by raft and by bike, made his selections from a total of 10,000. So it’s fair to say that Webb took more trouble with his photographs. They are more calculated and deliberate. They’re also more static.

Frank’s photographs, by contrast, are mobile and responsive. “The places that interest me are on the way,” he said. There’s something clandestine and erotic about them, like a rueful exchange of looks between thwarted lovers across a loud restaurant table. Tilted and cropped, his pictures twitch with an animal alertness. Many envelop pockets of poignant focus in seas of blur, so that they feel targeted, ardent, but snatched on the run.

As indeed they often were. Frank showed silver-shining strips of road stretching miles ahead. The car itself was often his tripod. In the mid-1950s, many of the roads he traveled on were new. They made new parts of the country available to Frank’s camera. And they generated new kinds of phenomena: roadside diners, signs, billboards, gas stations.

Frank would place his camera low for some subjects, so that they loomed overhead like mysterious adults dimly perceived from a child’s cot. Alternatively, he’d photograph from an elevated vantage point: The resulting picture would express levels of power, degrees of separation, atomic loneliness.

In 1955, Webb was 49 years old. Like Frank, he had a natural sympathy for people who were marginalized, overlooked, factored out. His decision to avoid car travel was obviously consequential, but he didn’t want walking and cycling to become the point of the exercise. “The trip itself as it stretches out assumes the dimensions of a saga,” he wrote to his wife, Lucille. “There was one stretch between Lovelock and Fernley — 40 miles without a tree or blade of grass and an inferno of heat.”

His portraits pulse with human sympathy. But they’re also relatively conventional — the result of calculated, very intentional encounters. Compare them to Frank’s photographs of people, and you realize you are dealing with two different ideas of portraiture. Frank’s was intrinsically photographic. It was rooted, that’s to say, in a deeper feeling for the ramifications of the camera’s intrusiveness. “Once someone is aware of the camera, it becomes a different picture,” he said. He chose not to suppress or sidestep this fact, but to make hay with it.

His own favorite photo from “The Americans” was taken in a sloping park in San Francisco. “I was sitting down — sitting on the grass — behind these people, then [the man] looked back. It’s the look you often get as a photographer when you intrude.” (You understand something about intimacy when you break it.)

A lot of the sadness that comes off both bodies of work can be read as the sadness of what Volpe, in the show’s excellent catalogue, calls “the forms of destruction, injustice, and rabid consumption perpetuated in the name of American freedom.”

But then again, it’s also just human sadness. And sometimes it’s not even sadness: It’s solitude, absorption, oblivion. “The world moves very rapidly and not necessarily in perfect images,” said Frank. This is not a sad statement in itself, just a true one.

If Frank was responding intuitively to the world around him, he was also reacting against the artifice he detected in earlier styles of photography. Instead of determinedly hunting for life’s “decisive moments,” in the manner of Henri Cartier-Bresson, he seemed more curious about the moments before and after. His vision was almost syncopated in this sense. It was also achingly unresolved, like life. There was no clear beginning, no pivotal transformation, no resplendent culmination. Just degrees of shuffling along, each moment potentially momentous — or not.

In 1955, Frank was also shuffling along, albeit at high speed, sometimes with his wife and young children in tow, sometimes solo. “It seems nothing is really behind you,” he said, “girls you have known, or your children, or the town you came from. It’s all still with you in some way.”

“The Americans,” which I first discovered as a teenager, will always be with me in some way. Webb, meanwhile, is a welcome new discovery. He may suffer by comparison with Frank, but not too badly. He took more than enough wonderful photographs to earn our admiration (not least “Diner, Ouray, CO”). His 1955 project, uncovered at last, deserves to be examined on its own terms. But I see nothing wrong with acknowledging that studying Webb also serves to sharpen our appreciation of Frank.

Greece Turkey Parthenon Sculptures

By in Sculpture

Greece Turkey Parthenon Sculptures
FILE – A visitor takes pictures of sculptures that are part of the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum in London, Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023. One of the world’s most

Sand Castle and Sculpture Contest

By in Sculpture

Sand Castle and Sculpture Contest
Alameda’s 2024 Sand Castle Contest had 415 participants, dragons galore, and creative camaraderie filling the beach, Kelsey Goeres shares some of the whimsical creations and the list of winners.

Archaeologists Uncover Rare Blue Frescoes of an Ancient Sanctuary and Servant Quarters in Pompeii

By in Art World News

Archaeologists Uncover Rare Blue Frescoes of an Ancient Sanctuary and Servant Quarters in Pompeii

All images © Archaeological Park of Pompeii

Archaeologists continue to uncover the area known as Insula 10 of Pompeii’s Regio IX neighborhood, and a recent finding includes a stunning sky-blue sacrarium, a space for ritual and conservation of sacred objects. Brilliant red lines the niches, where statues and other devotional iconography likely stood.

The 8-square-meter room is decorated in the Fourth Style (c. 60–79 C.E.), an intricate aesthetic that was less ornamental than its predecessor but took a more narrative and architectural approach. Adorning the walls are several women donning flower crowns and flowing garments, four of which correspond to the seasons. Two others grasp a plow and pedum, a shepherd’s crook, and are allegories of agriculture and sheep-tending.

Researchers believe the room was used for storage during a larger renovation when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The team uncovered 15 amphorae, two jugs, and two lamps in the space, along with building materials and a pile of empty oyster shells that were likely slated to be ground and added to plaster.

 

a woman in a flowing gown is painted on a blue wall with an architectural roof to the left

Pompeiians typically reserved blue for the most sacred of spaces, and neither the color nor the accompanying frescoes appear in a discovery nearby. As noted by The History Blog, archaeologists also excavated the servants’ quarters of the villa of Civita Giuliana, a stark contrast to the sacrarium. The room contained a bed, work tools, a basket, rope, and wooden planks, the shapes of which were preserved by volcanic matter, and researchers were able to recreate their forms in plaster. They explain:

As the ash solidified, forming a very solid layer known as “cinerite,” organic material such as human bodies, animals, or wooden objects decayed, leaving a void in the ground. These voids can be filled with plaster during excavation, to regain the original shape from the “negative” impression. A technique that led to extraordinary results in the villa of Civita Giuliana, from the casts of two victims and a horse to those of the modest beds in the servile quarter.

Archaeologists recently shared two videos from the sites, and you can find more tours and views of the ancient city from the Pompeii team on YouTube.

 

two images of women, one with a scythe, and flowing garments on a blue fresco

ornate architectural details are painted in a blue fresco surrounding a red niche

piles of material are on a tiled floor near a black fresco

an archaeological site reveals the remains of a bed

an archaeological site reveals the remains of a jug and other tools

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Archaeologists Uncover Rare Blue Frescoes of an Ancient Sanctuary and Servant Quarters in Pompeii appeared first on Colossal.

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