Lightness, experimentation, reduction: such are the principles behind Stone Island’s ’Ghost’ line, seeing details stripped back and every element on the garment – including the brand’s signature compass badge – rendered in pure monochrome. 

It makes Oscar Niemeyer’s 1970s-built Palazzo Mondadori in Milan, a vast modernist office where monumental concrete arches emerge from the surface of an artificial lake, an apt backdrop for a new series of images of the collection captured by seminal British artist and photographer Nick Waplington (the campaign is revealed by Wallpaper* for the first time today).

Joseph Grima photographed by Nick Waplington for Stone Island

Described as a ’response’ to Stone Island Ghost’s latest collection, the series stars the architect Joseph Grima in what the brand describes as a continuing ’research’ project into members of the Stone Island community (another recent campaign, released the same day as the brand’s first runway show in January 2024, captured the Stone Island ’famiglia’ from actor Jason Statham to musician Dave).

Grima, who is co-founder of the architecture and research studio Space Caviar and creative director of Design Academy Eindhoven, said he came to be involved in the project through Stone Island’s creative director Ferdinando Verderi, ’an old friend’. ’I didn’t know Nick previously but I’ve always loved his photography. It all sounded crazy and fun so I jumped on board,’ Grima tells Wallpaper*.

The choice of Palazzo Mondadori was his own, ’mainly for the opportunity to explore it properly, which I’d been meaning to do for years’, he says of the building, which he describes as ‘insanely amazing’. ’I basically spent the day on what felt like a sci-fi film set, acting out the part of some lost and confused interplanetary design critic who had travelled a few light years to experience the seductive architectural wonders of a nearby galaxy,’ he says.

’At the outset, I didn’t really know anything about what I’d be wearing, but in retrospect, Stone Island’s Ghost collection felt like it was designed to be worn in such an extreme environment – Nick’s main job was to keep my feet on the ground and stop me getting carried away by my fantasies of interstellar cinematic glory.’

This season, the Stone Island Ghost collection largely centres on research into two fabrics, cotton-derived Cupro Raso, which has the hand-feel of silk, and the contrasting organic cotton O-VENTILE, a fabric used by the military for its breathable and waterproof properties. Here, it makes up versions of archetypal trench coats and field jackets.

‘I enjoyed the playfulness of the pieces – it was very liberating to be stepping into such futuristic clothing,’ Grima continues. ‘My favourite was the white outfit, perhaps because we shot that one on the top-floor terrace, which famously is the only place in Milan from which you can see the moon rising,’ he adds. ‘[It was] brilliant, unforgettable stuff.’

The S/S 2024 Stone Island Ghost collection is available from stoneisland.com.

stoneisland.com

Dmitry Markov, a Russian photographer who shot exclusively on smartphones and was known for capturing provincial areas around Moscow, has died at age 42.

Markov rose to fame because of his exquisite photos that depicted everyday life which he posted to his Instagram page that has almost one million followers.

In 2021, his photo of a police officer sitting beneath a portrait of President Putin went viral and he later sold it for two million roubles ($22,000).

In 2016, Markov participated in Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign for the iPhone 7. He was the first Russian participant and one of 15 photographers from 15 countries.

An Unlikely Photography Star

Markov was born in Pushkino, a tough industrial town north of Moscow where he spent his days sniffing glue with his friends while avoiding their alcoholic fathers. He battled drug addiction most of his life.

However through photography and blogging, Markov gradually gained attention and was awarded grants and commissions. As his fame grew and companies began hiring him, he kept his life grounded and kept his focus on documenting Russia’s gritty streets.

He moved to Pskov, a border city close to Estonia, and began working for a charity organization. It was there his camera was stolen and he switched to an iPhone for his photography.

“Quality? Screw it, I’d sketch things with a pencil if I could draw,” he wrote in a blog post.

Markov documented street protests and the famous photo of the policeman sitting beneath Putin’s picture came about after he was arrested while attending a rally in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny — who died on Friday while incarcerated in a federal penitentiary inside the Arctic Circle.

Inspiration

Markov’s photos borrow the color palette of old Russian paintings but his subjects were very different.

In an interview with RFE/RL’s Siberia Desk, Markov explained the choice of heroes for his photographs with a story that reads like something straight out of Chekhov:

My grandmother died recently, she worked as a seamstress in a factory. Under the bed she was lying in the weeks before her death, she kept a sack of potatoes — she sewed these same sacks every day for decades. My grandma lived like this. You could call this ‘doom,’ too right? I doubt young people dream of working all their lives in a factory and dying on a mattress above a bag of potatoes.

At the same time, when I see these scenes — these [saleswomen on a cigarette break pictured above], or this bag of potatoes, I want to see the meaning and beauty in it. This is people’s life, it passes by like this. And it’s not two or three people, most people live like that. I want to capture them. Look at any magazine rack: stars and celebrities. I want to capture the simple person, to show the beauty of ordinary life.

His final Instagram post proved to be controversial: A sympathetic portrait of his solider friend who is planning to return to the front line of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine territory.

“I can’t stop loving people close to me and start hating them,” he wrote. “And I realize that I’m a legitimate target for hatred on the part of Ukrainians. I don’t know how to do the right thing in this situation.”

Local media outlets confirmed the news of his death with reports that his longtime girlfriend found him at their home. The cause of his death remains unknown.

Image credits: Photographs by Dmitry Markov

Image editing is a topic that’s as large in scale as photography itself, but how to edit iPhone photos the right way doesn’t have to be at all daunting. While dedicated editing apps such as Pixelmator Pro are likely where you’ll end up once you grow in confidence, the humble Photos app has everything you need to get started.

But rather than simply tapping Edit and hitting the Auto icon, I’m going to break down the Photos app’s image editor so you can navigate your way through its menus and tools and apply your own manual edits like a pro. Editing is your chance to really stamp your mark on your photos. And as you advance your skills, you’ll begin to develop your own style. Here’s how to get started…

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Mike Harris

I’m Deputy Editor of N-Photo: The Nikon Magazine, but moonlight as iMore’s go-to photography know-it-all. I’ve worked in the photo industry for over six years and have been an avid iPhone photographer since the iPhone 4. I’m a firm believer that iPhone photography is a great starting point for burgeoning photographers, which is why I’ve created a series of iPhone photography basics tutorials, so you can either firm up your existing iPhone Camera skills or embark on a whole new passion.

Consider a light touch

The best iPhones are brimming with AI-powered computational photography tech that allows your iPhone to perform an incredible number of processes in a split second, such as sharpening, noise reduction, color edits, and increased dynamic range to create a more balanced exposure. There’s an argument that it does too much, but there’s no denying how impressive it is. However, this does mean that editing iPhone images requires a much lighter touch than normal. 

It’s tempting to set about lifting shadows, reducing highlights, and adding generous dollops of saturation, but if you’re not careful, your images will look fabricated. Take a moment to examine each image, fresh from the camera, to really consider every edit you make. Shooting in Apple ProRAW will reduce the level of computational photography applied, but it’s still there. A good tip is to keep revisiting the original image. This will help make your changes more obvious, so you’re more likely to tell if it needs toning down.

1. In the Photos app’s editing suite, apply your chosen edits
2. Tap the image to revert back to the original photo so you can quickly gauge the impact of your edits

How to make a duplicate image

Once you’ve edited an image in the Photos app’s editing suite and tapped Done, you can recover your original image by entering the editing suite once again and tapping Revert. However, to be absolutely certain I don’t lose my original image, in case I want to edit it again in the future, I like to make a duplicate. 

View your chosen image in the Photos app and select the three-dot icon in the top-right corner of the screen then tap Duplicate. You’ll find the duplicate at the very bottom of your Recents Album or next to the duplicated image in any other Album. While you’re in the middle of an edit, it can be useful to see the original image to ensure you haven’t gone overboard with your edits (see the previous step).

1. Open the Photos app and find your desired image
2. Tap the three-dotted icon in the top-right corner of the screen
3. Select Duplicate to create a duplicate at the bottom of your Album

How to crop

It’s good practice to crop your image before performing any other edits, so you are working with the final image. This is imperative when applying processes like noise reduction or sharpening because the size of the image may affect how much or how little you choose to apply. Cropping reduces an image’s size and quality. Ideally, you want to get the composition as perfect as possible in-camera, using the cropping tool sparingly to tidy up the composition or straighten the horizon. 

Of course, you may wish to crop an image for a specific platform, such as 16:9 or 1:1 for Instagram. If you make a mistake when cropping, you can tap the yellow Reset button that appears immediately after you’ve cropped an image. You can also use the Straighten, Vertical, and Horizontal tools when cropping to straighten the horizon or line up verticals, like interior walls.

1. Open your chosen image in the Photos app’s editing suite and select the crop tab
2. Tap the Straighten, Vertical or Horizontal icons to rotate the image or change the perspective of the verticals and horizontals, respectively
3. Select the icon to the left of the marker icon and choose from a variety of cropping presets near the bottom of the screen
4. Hit Reset to revert to the original crop

Fix your exposure

Next you’ll want to adjust the overall exposure of your image. Your iPhone’s computational photography has probably already done most of the legwork here, but if parts of the image are looking a little too dark or bright, you can boost the Shadows and reduce the Highlights sliders to bring back some of the detail. Always remember, you can bring back more detail when lifting shadows than reducing highlights. 

If the entire frame is too dark or too light, you can adjust the Exposure slider to make the entire image lighter or darker. This is a particularly powerful tool, so use it sparingly. Brightness works very similarly to Exposure, but the effect isn’t as intense. While it affects the shadows and mid-tones rather comparatively, it doesn’t affect the highlights quite as much. 

Brilliance is an interesting tool that’s used to brighten or darken an image without affecting the highlights. Slide it to the right to brighten the frame with less chance of clipping (losing detail when the whites get too bright or the shadows get too dark) and slide it to the left to darken the shadows but retain the brightest highlights.

1. In the Photos app’s editing suite, ensure you have the Adjust icon selected 
2. Scroll through and tap on one of the various adjustment icons to bring up the corresponding slider
3. Move the slider left or right and watch as it affects the image

How to add contrast

Contrast regards the difference between light and dark portions of the image. A high-contrast image will have darker blacks and brighter whites, while a low-contrast image will display softer gray-toned blacks and whites. There’s nothing wrong with either but extremes at either end rarely look good. Too much contrast can leave an image appearing fabricated and overly intense, and too little contrast can leave it looking dull and flat. 

The Contrast slider can be used to increase or decrease the contrast of the entire image, so the blacks get darker and the whites get brighter. Black Point is useful if you just want to increase or decrease the intensity of the blacks. Another slider you can use to alter the contrast of your image is Definition. This adds contrast to the midtones and contours edges within the image. The bold lines formed via the latter creates a kind of sharpening effect that’s very easy to overdo, so use it sparingly.

1. Scroll through the Photos app’s Adjust tab in the editing suite
2. Use Contrast to increase/decrease contrast across the whole image
3. Use Black Point to increase/decrease the intensity of the blacks
4. Definition will add contrast to the mid tones and definition to edges

How to edit color

You have four color tools at your disposal: Warmth, Tint, Vibrance and Saturation. Warmth changes the color temperature of your image. Drag the slider to the right and the warm colors (such as reds and yellows) will intensify, drag the slider to the left and the cool colors (such as blues and cooler greens) will intensify. Boosting Warmth is a great way to intensify the effects of golden hour or a fiery sunset, while decreasing the warmth may add mood to a stormy seascape or winter portrait. 

Tint is used to correct for any green or magenta color casts. If you spot a subtle green hue on a portrait subject’s skin for example, moving the slider right will add magenta to combat the green cast. If you’re not careful, though, you can end up going too far the other way, so if you’re unsure or simply can’t see anything wrong with the image, this is best left alone.

Saturation increases or decreases the intensity of all colors and when decreased to -100 will leave the image black and white. Vibrance works similarly to Saturation, with an emphasis on the less dominant colors within an image. This can be used to help balance the saturation of an image, with less chance of colors clipping.

1. Use Warmth to adjust the color temperature of an image
2. Drag it left to make it cooler and right to make it warmer
3. Use Tint to remove color casts
4. Move it left to add green and right to add magenta
5. Use Vibrance to boost or reduce less-dominant colors
6. Use Saturation to boost or reduce all colors

How to finish off an edit

The only tools I haven’t talked about are Sharpness, Noise Reduction and Vignette. A professional photographer would typically sharpen an image right before it’s exported. But iPhone’s computational photography already sharpens images, arguably, too much and if you’re only going to be posting your images on Instagram or looking at them via your iPhone’s display, there’s really no need to sharpen them. Noise Reduction removes noise, tiny colorful specks that hamper image quality and become increasingly prominent the more a camera’s sensor is required to compensate in low-light conditions. 

This is something I’d recommend performing near the beginning of an edit, but again, your iPhone already applies a decent dose of noise reduction by default. If you do ever need to use it, the further you push the slider the more the noise will decrease, but the softer the image will become, so it’s a bit of a balancing act. And finally, Vignette allows you to darken the edges of your image. It can be used a little like a frame-within-a-frame to draw the viewer’s attention towards your subject or a stylistic choice to replicate the less advanced optics of older lenses that were more susceptible to noticeable vignetting than modern ones

1. Use Sharpness very sparingly, if at all, to sharpen an image prior to exporting
2. Noise Reduction should be used sparingly too, it reduces noise but soften images in the process
3. Add a dark vignette by pushing the slider to the right and a light vignette by sliding it to the left
4. Use Vignette to draw attention to subjects in the center of the frame

How can I improve my editing further?

If you have an iPhone that can capture Apple ProRAW files, then you’ll find images are much more pliable. This is because a RAW file is designed to capture as much image data as possible. Our tips to improve your iPhone photography instantly guide explains this in more detail. But beyond the hardware that you’re using, you’ll find there’s a plethora of dedicated editing apps available on the App Store, such as , , and , that boast additional editing capabilities so you can take your photo editing skills to the next level. However, the bulk of editing is done using the tonal adjustment tools available in the Photos app. So make sure you understand how to use it thoroughly before progressing.

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For 108 days from 7 October 2023, Gazan photographer Motaz Azaiza captured the horrors of the Israel-Palestine conflict on camera. Buildings destroyed, bodies buried in rubble, children crying and injured from airstrikes, his Instagram feed served the heart-wrenching reality of war to his 18.6 million followers. Then, last month, he made the difficult decision to evacuate to Qatar, explaining online, ‘I spent my whole power on showing the truth and [the war] didn’t stop.’

Days prior to his evacuation, Grazia spoke to Motaz about life in Gaza, where the death toll currently sits at 27,700, according to the most recent Red Cross estimates as Grazia went to press. They also say that more than 1.9 million people have been displaced since Israel took retaliatory action after Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a terror attack on Israel killing 1,200 people and taking a further 240 hostages. At present, 134 hostages remain in Hamas captivity, with The New York Times reporting that at least a fifth of those are presumed dead.

Two hostages, Fernando Simon Marman, 60, and Louis Har, 70, were reunited with their families after being rescued by special forces in a raid in Gaza’s Rafah region on 11 February. But Foreign Secretary David Cameron warned Israel to ‘think very seriously before it takes any further action’ in Rafah, instead calling for ‘an immediate pause in fighting’.

As the conflict rages on, Motaz describes the increasing despair. ‘Every day, I wake up very desperate, feeling hopeless,’ he explains over WhatsApp video call, the first time he had been able to get internet in weeks. ‘I try and find fresh food each day, because there’s no electricity so we can’t store it. I have to find diesel for the car, it’s so difficult to get and expensive – one litre is about $8. There is no internet connection [most of the time], you can’t make phone calls, so there is nothing to even distract you from your anger or pain.

Motaz Azaiza photographs two women holding babies in the ruins of Gaza ©Motaz Azaiza

‘I have more than 20 people in my house, people who evacuated Gaza City after the Israeli army entered, so there’s no privacy, there’s not enough food for everyone and we can’t shower. Everything makes you feel as though you want to kill yourself.’

The bombing has been so relentless, death so commonplace, that Motaz says people barely react to it anymore. ‘Even if there is a bombing at the end of a street, you will find people there trying to buy food. It’s so hopeless to stay alive, they may feel scared for a moment but then they will continue their day.’

Before the Israel-Palestine conflict escalated in October, Motaz’s photography was primarily joyful; sunset scenes of a beautiful Gaza and smiling portraits of people from different communities. Behind the camera, his life was still hard, he admits, but ‘a heaven compared to this’. As the eldest son in his family, Motaz was expected to provide for his family, dreaming of life as a travel photographer.

‘I was trying to find myself, find work, get paid more so I could travel because I was crazy about travel photography,’ he explains. ‘But your dreams aren’t your right, because as a Palestinian I can’t even enter the UK. You need plenty of money in the bank to apply for a visa to travel, so life was difficult before the war and now, it’s about suffering.’

In order to capture the human cost of this devastating conflict, Motaz spent months risking his life by heading into war zones, rather than running from them. Some of his photographs are so graphic they come with a content warning on Instagram. ‘My mum worries about my life, but she’s accepted it,’ he says. ‘I am cautious, of course, but sometimes I act like a fool and go into areas that may be bombed. I think, “Fuck the camera, I’ll die,” and keep filming.’

Memorable examples of his recent work include two mothers sitting with their babies among the ruins of a building (far left), and one of a little girl holding two red roses as she walks through a village reduced to rubble. But the most haunting scenes, Motaz says, he doesn’t photograph. ‘They are so awful; they just exist in my memory. The most hurtful thing to see is the babies, seeing one with his brain out… He did nothing – the children are innocent.’

With the number of his followers still rising, it’s clear that Instagram has given Motaz the power to show the truth of life in Gaza. Indeed, such is his power that one of the photos that first appeared on social media was voted Time Magazine’s photo of 2023. But Motaz is also quick to criticise the way he has exploded online, bemoaning those telling him to ‘be strong’ on social media. ‘I want the reaction to be on the streets, not in likes or comments,’ he says. ‘Go and show what this image made you feel. I appreciate what people do protesting, or sharing and commenting [on my posts], but it hasn’t stopped anything. Even the war now is about social media, it’s so useless.’

Still, since leaving Gaza, Motaz has started a new life in Qatar, and recently celebrated his 25th birthday. ‘I didn’t expect to even make it to 25,’ he confessed on Instagram. ‘One day, I felt as though something was going to happen to me personally. The war discovered Motaz, but it didn’t make Motaz.’

To support those impacted by the Israel- Palestine conflict, donate to the Red Cross Appeal. Follow @britishredcrossfor details.