FEATURING J.R. BOURNE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JUSTIN TYLER CLOSE

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***FULL STORY AVAILABLE IN THE LAB MAGAZINE ISSUE#4 PRINTED EDITION – IN STORES NOW! (WORLD-WIDE)***

Take one look at Madame Peripetie’s exhilarating photography portfolio and you’d think the artist behind them came out the womb in Gaga heels and a bright pink afro. You’d be wrong. Strangely, Sylwana Zyburu, the German lady who bears the Madame Peripetie name, grew up in Poland and Iceland and experienced a somewhat monochrome childhood. With the discovery of all things sci-fi, comic conventions, David Lynch’s paintings and Robert Wilson’s avant-garde plays, Madame has rebelled against her pallid youth with a photographic explosion of PVC, outrageous fashions, absurd hair pieces and lots and lots of beautiful colour.

Her work has been displayed all over Germany making her nothing short of a national sensation. But to say that her photos are understood by all her fans would be mildly misleading, and that’s the way she likes it. “A tiny bit of mysteriousness and abstruseness is very important,” she says. “If I understand something completely, I’m not interested in it anymore.”

And then there’s the hair. When Madame refers to her own portraiture as “a surreal disturbance” it’s easy to see why. Her fetish for hair is most openly expressed in her series “Mr. and Mrs. Tremblehead”, where models faces are hidden by lavish gravity-defying wigs. Stemming from her love of Star Wars – it’s not hard to picture Chewbacca posing playfully in place of one of her subjects – and sourced from Madame’s own exotic dress-up box, the unearthly creatures that emerge from the grandiose styling and polished coiffures are surprisingly delightful.

Madame’s work moves from tense and moody to stark and shocking and as far as playfully obscene, and we’re delighted to reveal just a fraction of it here. It’s time to play dress-up…

INTERVIEW BY JUSTIN TYLER CLOSE

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Even if you don’t recognise his name, you’ve probably seen his photos. Back in 2005 his series “Beneath the Roses” crisply captured the silent pauses of small-town USA living with all the theatrical staging of a blockbuster movie production. The American photographer, whose previous subjects included insects, animals and body parts in “Natural Wonders”, has truly embraced the narrative potential of dramatic scene photography with earlier collection “Twilight” and “Beneath the Roses”.
The production of the New Yorker’s artwork is on a scale that would intimidate many competent photographers. Location scouts, production managers, crews, studios, 6-week shoots… no, Crewdson is no ordinary flash-monkey and the painstaking attention to detail is evident in the photos he makes that cleverly capture the gaps of life – what came before, and what comes after the shutter clicks is left to your imagination.
Unsurprisingly, Crewdson has exhibited all over the world, and his latest international collection is “Sanctuary”. Shot on the back lots of Cinecittà Studios in Rome, these photographs of old film sets, noticeably absent of people, reflect a state suspended between grandeur and ruin. Black and white images of decaying building facades; realities that never really existed, are haunting, evocative and imbued with a true sense of calm. And calm and collected after therapy and breakfast was how The Lab’s Justin Tyler Close found Crewdson when they spoke.

JUSTIN TYLER CLOSE—What were you doing an hour ago?

GREGORY CREWDSON—I was seeing my therapist.

JTC—Was it productive?

GC—I hope so. I think so. So you got me at a good point. I’m ready to reveal all my secrets.

JTC—That’s a good thing. What did you eat for breakfast this morning? Do you think breakfast is important?

GC—Yes I think breakfast is vitally important. This morning I dropped my daughter Lily off at school, and after that I had a coffee and a currant scone.

JTC—I want to talk to you about dreams a little, because when I look at some of your photography it often reminds me of a dark dream of sorts. Do you adapt some of your self-conscious thoughts to your conscious thoughts in your work? How do you usually come up with concepts?

GC—That’s interesting because my dreams are fairly uneventful. I come up with a lot of my images when I’m swimming – I’m a long-distance swimmer. I do open-water swimming in lakes, or in the bay, or the ocean. During the winter I swim in the pool, but wherever I go I make sure I have access to swimming every day.

JTC—I wonder what it is about swimming that helps you come up with your concepts – maybe it’s the feeling of floating…

GC—It’s also being submerged; it’s a womb-like state. During the day there’s always distraction so this is a context that allows my unconscious to emerge.

JTC—You’re not hearing anything or being anything; you’re just you. What were your childhood hobbies? Were you always into art or did you fantasize about doing other things?

GC—I didn’t really arrive at photography until later in life, when I was in college. My first love was always music.

JTC—The Speedies.

GC—That’s right.

JTC—That was a pretty big deal – you guys were selling out shows all over New York. What happened to The Speedies? Where did the band go?

GC—Like any post-punk, teenage pop band it’s a prescribed moment. That kind of music almost by definition has a short half-life. We had our moment when I was sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. It was in the late-70s and it was a great moment in New York and a great moment to be in a teenage band. I was one of two guitarists and one of two song-writers. Me and the other guitarist, Eric Hoffert, we wrote all the songs together. We wrote “Let Me Take Your Foto”.

JTC—That’s kind of funny, the title of the song…

GC—I know – that’s before I wanted to be a photographer. I’m sure you know that 25 years later the song was used for the HP Digital Camera ad campaign.

JTC—I didn’t know that.

GC—That’s the great end of the story. That song, 25 years later, was rediscovered by an ad agency and the original track was reformatted and used for the actual commercial.

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Art Direction by Topsy Design
Hair & Make-up by David Tolls with Workgroup

More————
www.jucophoto.com

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As technology evolves, it’s made buying a decent camera easy and calling yourself a photographer even easier, but the ones who stand out amongst the millions of shooters are the artists that continue to create new ways of exploring life behind a lens. Frank Ockenfels is a straight up camera junkie and has an astonishing career, which started in New York City when he was hired to shoot Tracy Chapman for Rolling Stone Magazine. His out of the box thinking and dark intoxicating imagery has created a style that has attracted some of the most influential performers in our lifetime. Frank has recently released a limited edition self-published book with some of his journals to the world and has covered the pages with drawings, photos and people who have affected all of our lives, such as Tom Waits, David Bowie, David Fincher and Marlboro cigarettes. Being one of the last living portraiture photographers his methods involve throwing lenses against the wall, crumpling up photos and re-scanning them, drawing or painting on top of a photo, any way to break the boundaries of what makes photography boring these days. You would think for someone like him, who has shot everyone you could imagine, from Kurt Cobain to Natalie Portman, that he would have a huge egotistical attitude, but I shit you not: He is the exact opposite. Frank is not only one of the top photographers in the world, but is one of the nicest, most humble human beings I have ever interviewed and I feel so blessed that I got the opportunity to sit down with him and chat about life, inspirations and about the emotional day, when he had fifteen minutes to do a photoshoot with Barack Obama.

JUSTIN—So Frank, how are you?

FRANK—How am I? Freezing today, in sunny Los Angeles.

J—Yeah, what the hell? We flew in yesterday and it was raining. I thought our pilot went in a circle and took us back to Vancouver.

F—We even had frost this morning.

J—I didn’t even know that existed here?

F—We don’t like talking about the cold days, we like the sun. Anybody who ends up here on a cold day, they’re, like, “Uh, what’s going on?”

J—I’m so confused by the cold here. Anyways, let’s not talk about it then.

F—[laughs] Let’s make it go away.

J—How’d you sleep last night?

F—Good. I recently moved; we bought a smaller house but with a bigger piece of property. We’re renovating a building on the property, so we moved our 3000 square foot house into a 900 square foot house, so my sons are asking me what the hell have I done because they both used to have their own bedrooms.

J—That’s intimate. Brotherhood at its finest. Good and bad.

F—Yeah, they now share a bedroom that’s 8 x 8 with a bunk bed. We call it “Prison.”

J—You can make it a game. Playing Prison and you can play the gatekeeper. What did you eat for breakfast? Are you a breakfast guy?

F—No. No. I’m a dinner guy, which is weird because everyone says it’s the worst meal to eat a heavy one, but…my breakfast usually is four shots of espresso with a little bit of steamed milk in it. So, I kind of go for that jolt in the morning, that’s it. I mean, I might eat a banana or something like that. But, yeah, breakfast; it’s not my thing.

J—It’s actually the first thing I think of when I wake up.

F—When you wake up?

J—I’m a breakfast guy for sure, orange juice, eggs, bacon, all the time.

F—If I eat breakfast, I want to go back to bed.

J—Yeah, that’s true. I fight that feeling daily. Your gallery show (Clark Oshin Gallery at The Icon) looks great…

F—Yeah, it worked out well. It’s funny though, because a lot of people said to me, “Well, it would be nice to see you in a ‘real’ gallery.” And I mean, but a real gallery wouldn’t give them my nooks and crannies and in here it kind of makes people look at things in a different way.

J—Totally does that. Feels less forced.

F—I like it when you go someplace and you go back again and you see something you hadn’t seen or that you have a different experience each time you go. That’s kind of why I did it, so that each part of the room is presented in a different way.

]]> http://thelabmagazineonline.com/2010/02/frank-w-ockenfels-3/feed/ 0 http://thelabmagazineonline.com/2010/02/matt-hoyle-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=matt-hoyle-2 http://thelabmagazineonline.com/2010/02/matt-hoyle-2/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:08:10 +0000 Jeremy http://thelabmagazineonline.com/?p=1092 “BARNUMVILLIAMS”

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MATT HOYLE

“ALICE IN WONDERLAND”

INTERVIEW BY JEREMY POWER REGIMBAL

PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN ANDREWS

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His passport says he’s a New Zealander, his accent says he’s Canadian, he got his degree in Australia, and he’s just closed the door on eight months working as a photojournalist in southern Africa. Crossing borders is a lifestyle for filmmaker and photographer Austin Andrews, and to prove it he’s started counting the countries he’s been banned from on his second hand. At 23, Austin hops from whim to whim like a mallet playing Whac-a-Mole and he’s just getting started. His film work has screened to millions at festivals on five continents, his photography has featured in National Geographic and he once filled a passport without stepping foot on a plane. And for his next trick? Read on to find out.

JEREMY—Hey Austin. I was on your website today and I must say that your photos are just getting better and better. You have really put yourself into some dangerous but thrilling situations, all for a photograph. Not only that, but I know from experience by working with you on films, your ability to capture a moment is truly inspiring. I want to start this interview off with something simple. Tell us a little bit about yourself?

AUSTIN—I guess over the last few years I’ve kind of partitioned my time into distinct chapters, focusing pretty much exclusively on one thing for between four and twelve months. It could be anything from a film project from early pre-production through to the premiere, or like the chapter I’m on now, where I’ve been in South Africa for eight months focusing on photography. I arrived here not knowing what form that focus would take and ended up shooting for a few different NGOs, working freelance for a paper, that kind of thing. All I knew entering this period was the body of work I wanted to get out of it.