Classiq - An online journal that celebrates cinema, culture, style and storytelling.

7 December 2017

The Gift of Books

Ever since childhood, books have been my absolute favourite present to receive, for Christmas or for any other occasion. And it is incredible to see how my toddler son is starting to feel the same. The advent calendar is not a tradition I grew up with, but I have started to embrace it this year (I love the entire part of December leading up to the 25th and I find this tradition to be such a great way to celebrate and embrace this special time of year), but make it my own – children’s books as our advent. Because I believe there are few things more beautiful than instilling the love for books and reading into your child and seeing how his imagination and joy for storytelling flourish.

We have already unwrapped a few books from under our tree, both Christmas and non-holiday related stories, and this one, The Christmas Wish, is the latest one, which also doubled as a gift from Saint Nicholas, one of my favourite holidays – because it’s one of children’s winter joys (and everyone else rejoices with them), because of this beautiful tradition, because of the wonderful childhood memories when my brother and I used to receive games and books instead of sweets (the same twist I want to put on the Advent calendar).

The Christmas Wish began as a family Christmas card, from the other-worldly photographs Per Breiehagen took of his daughter, Anja. I discovered Per’s photography years ago, but had no idea that in the meanwhile it had evolved into a beautifully crafted book for children and adults alike. Lori Evert, Anja’s mother, weaved a narrative about a child, a wish and a magical journey around these striking images of her snow-loving daughter dressed in traditional Norwegian clothing. It is about the power of dreaming and believing. We are already waiting for heavy snow and looking for a bell from Santa under the tree.

photo by me

Posted by classiq in Books, Children's books, Christmas time | | Comments Off

4 December 2017

Through the Lens of Joni Sternbach: SurfLand

Minnie+Lulu, 06.09.30

How often does it happen to you these days to go back over and over again to a photograph you’ve seen and wonder: How was it made? Very rarely indeed. And how often does it inspire you to describe it as made by hand? Exactly, almost never. But this is what happened when I discovered Joni Sternbach’s singular photographic series titled Surfland – evoking a feeling of both wonder and tranquility, an acute sense of time and place, a perfect imperfection that only handmaking and artistic intuition can achive, standing apart in this age of ubiquitous photography, and relating so well to the world of surfers and their spirit, their passion, their patience, their calm, and the certain state of mind it takes to ride above.

Using large format cameras and hand-poured plate collodion process, Joni Sternbach creates unique and strikingly beautiful portraits of unrivaled texture and depth along coastlines across the globe. She has been working on her ongoing series Surfland since 2006, documenting the surfing culture across the world, capturing and celebrating the diverse range and the way of life of people that are devotees of the sea. This is photography made by hand. It has soul. It’s one of a kind. There is something so extraordinary and mystifying about Joni Sternbach’s photography and I was thrilled that she could do an interview with me, giving me the chance to learn more about the artist and her art. Meet Joni.

Water Connection, 15.11.07

“Tintypes are handmade and
have characteristics that other methods
of photography do not. There is a magical,
primitive quality you cannot achieve
any other way. It is chemistry,
and the results cannot be totally controlled.
That leaves a lot open to chance,
and I think that is pretty spectacular.”

Joni, your tin-type portraits of surfers are remarkably different from the sort of digital images that have become the tradition of surf media these days. I think the best way I can describe your photography is that it has soul, it looks tangible, a moment captured in time. Not only that, but it also expresses a visual interest in this great subculture’s history and ethnography. What inspired you to embark on this project?
Before Surfland, I was shooting the series Ocean Details. These are large format, abstract seascapes of the ocean surface with a very narrow focus. I was positioned on a bluff ready to make a photograph when surfers found their way into my landscape. It turns out my narrow little perch was a surf break. At first I wasn’t so happy about these intruders, but then the sun broke through the clouds and cast the most incredible light on all these beings, and it seemed like we all shared a collective sigh of relief and happiness. I realized then that surfers are an essential part of the seascape.

Is collodion the closest to handmade photography as it can get, to “making” not “taking” a photo? Can you tell me a little more about this photographic process? And what is the most fascinating part of it? What about the most challenging aspect?
Tintypes are handmade and have characteristics that other methods of photography do not. There is a magical, primitive quality you cannot achieve any other way. It is chemistry, and the results cannot be totally controlled. Collodion has its limitations, and surprises. There are a lot of things you can’t necessarily prepare for or know that are going to happen – a lot of my shooting depends on the weather – it is a UV and temperature-sensitive process. That leaves a lot open to chance, and I think that is pretty spectacular.

Lone Surfer, 06.07.12

Len, 09.08.24

Are you a surf enthusiast? Why surfers?
I now think of surfers and the oceanic horizon in a similar way to the way we once thought of cowboys and the western mythology. The writer Trey Heighton describes the icon of the surfer as supplanting the place of the cowboy within the American imagination. Maybe it’s the spirit of adventure and the unknown that photographing surfers along the ocean’s edge brings each time I set out on a location to shoot.

How do you select your subjects? Are they difficult to photograph? The way I see them, these are adventurers, free spirits, wild hearts who don’t necessarily like to pose for a photograph. Catch them if you can, while in action. That’s how I’ve always considered surf photography until I discovered your one of a kind work. So how do you do it? How close do you have to get, physically, emotionally, mentally, in order to get a good shot? How do they respond to your camera?
Sometimes I go to a location with a few subjects in mind and scheduled to photograph, but most of the time, I find surfers as they are on their way in to or out of the surf. The tintype set up looks like a bit of a sideshow – usually beach goers are pretty intrigued to see what I am up to. The trickiest part of a shoot is getting my model to stay still for the fairly long exposure, especially when the sun is in their eyes!

Meg, 09.08.25

Is there a favourite moment of the day for photographing on the beach?
The first shot of the day is usually a pretty good marker for what the rest of the day is going to be like. It serves as a test of the chemistry, the weather, and my mood! Sometimes everything lines up perfectly right at the beginning and that first shot turns out to be the best one of the day.

What lead you to photography?
Art in general.

Do you also like shooting on film? Would you ever consider a digital camera?
I love to shoot film, and I typically carry a Leica with me when traveling or shooting. I also work with digital cameras (iphone, go pro etc) and love the ease of digital photography, especially with Instagram.

Yuko+Milo, 13.08.30

You are a native New Yorker. How has New York influenced you creatively?
I grew up spending summers at beaches all over New York City, and began photographing the ocean off eastern Long Island in the late 90s. The energy of a city beach is so crazy and unique – the boardwalks across NYC are just ripe with photographic material.

What is the most rewarding thing about being a photographer?
Random chance meetings with total strangers (who usually become good friends).

Four+Four, 16.02.20

Your series Promise Land, depicting the demise and destruction of homes on the eastern end of Long Island, is a stark and poignant elegy to the ghosts of failure that stalk the American Dream (and that’s even more relevant in the current situation of the country), and addresses the perception and significance of home. You are a photographer, you travel a lot. Where have you felt most at home? Do you think it’s important to feel that you belong to one particular place?
I feel most at home being and working in Montauk, Long Island. I had been working in Montauk for seven years before I started the Surfland project, so I had a pretty strong connection to its landscape and community. Over time I have watched the beach physically erode and evolve. I feel like I know its history.

In this time and age, you wish people appreciated more:
The process.

If you could be anywhere in the world right now (old or new location), preparing to make a photo, where would you want to be?
I am going to Hawaii very soon! It is a dream come true. For the past 11 years, it has been on my ultimate photography bucket list.

Kyuss + Rasmus, 11.03.14

Website: jonisternbach.com | Instagram: @jstersurf

photos: courtesy of Joni Sternbach

Posted by classiq in Interviews, Photography | | Comments Off

24 November 2017

The Mind’s Eye

Lessons in looking, seeing and simplicity,
from Henri Cartier-Bresson

The independent bookstores. What would we do without them? I believe there would be very few promising new authors, or rare, under-the-radar books to discover. It often happened that I bought the book that was shelved right next to the one I was actually looking for whenever I visited the small bookshops in my town or whenever I travelled. Henri Cartier-Bresson is certainly not new, nor new to anyone, but his essays book, The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers, was certainly new to me when I spotted it in a recently re-opened favourite bookstore in town. More about this special place and the fantastic selection of books it carries, in an up-coming feature, but, for now, here are a few lessons in looking, seeing, and simplicity from Cartier-Bresson – the pioneer of street photography and the man responsible for the term the “decisive moment”, one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century and one of the founders of Magnum Photos, and the second assistant director to Jean Renoir on the films Une partie de campagne and La règle du jeu, but who realised soon that he was never going to be a director, because a great director must treat time as a novelist would, while the metier of a photojournalist was closer to a documentary filmmaker. Henri Cartier-Bresson discovered the Leica in 1932 and would never be separated from it from then on.

“What I am looking for, above all else,
is to be attentive to life.”

“I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch.
I understand things through my eyes.”

“It is by great economy of means that one arrives
at simplicity of expression.”

“I have spent my whole life trying to be
inconspicuous in order to observe better.”

“It’s marvelous, such a sense of economy,
which is the measure of taste.”

“Then there were the movies. From some of the great films, I learned to look, and to see. Mysteries of New York, with Pearl White; the great films of D.W. Griffith –Broken Blossoms; the first films of Stroheim; Greed; Eisenstein’s Potemkin; and Dreyer’s Jeanne of Arc – these were some of the things that impressed me deeply.”

photo by me

Posted by classiq in Books, Photography | | 2 Comments

20 November 2017

Azzedine Alaïa: The Documentary

“I refuse to work in a static rhythm. Why should I sacrifice my creativity
to that? That’s not fashion, that’s industrial work.
We can hire people to design all day long and then fabricate
what they design and sell and sell and sell
— but that has nothing to do with fashion, with la mode. And it’s a shame
talents are being abused for this. I really don’t understand that.
I have to live as well. That’s what life is about: living.”

He made fashion on his own terms, in his own time. He refused to fit into the fashion system. He gave himself time, as much as he needed. He worked for years on an idea until it was perfect. He never did anything just to please someone. He didn’t advertise. He rarely gave interviews, and made no public appearances. He was exceptionally discreet in his real life. He was invariably dressed simply, in black. He was trained as a sculptor and his designs are truly a celebration of the female body. He was a master of form. He was born with it. He was relentless in his work. He never stopped creating. Everything he created, he created with his own hands. He made art, but the most extraordinary thing about his clothes was that they were wearable, too. Everything he did was a new classic, a new aesthetic, a new way of dressing for women, said Nicolas Ghesquière. He did fashion for one reason only: to make the woman more beautiful.

Azzedine Alaïa was one of a kind.

He worked deep into the night, often on the soundtrack of old movies. Maybe the fact that Joe McKenna’s 25-minute documentary feature about the designer, released earlier this year, was beautifully shot in black and white was a tribute to both the timelessness of his creations and to his love for classic movies. Watch the film at joesfilm.com.

Thank you for the beauty and legacy you’ve left behind, Azzedine. I hope you are dancing somewhere right now, just as you were at the end of this film, on the music of David Bowie, “Let’s Dance”.

photo: Joe McKenna | Azzedine Alaïa quote – an excerpt from a rare interview he gave The Business of Fashion in 2011

Posted by classiq in Fashion, Film | | Comments Off

16 November 2017

His Girl Friday – Where Are the Good Comedies?

In a magazine interview I gave earlier this year, I was saying that if there were one film genre to which the phrase “they don’t make them as they used to” applied best, that would be comedies. They are probably the second type of movie I prefer, after film noir. We need comedies these days. But not the kind Hollywood is making, being suddenly so desperate to correct the gender gap and the portrayal of women in substantial roles or in all-women leads comedies. Maybe there are good comedy actresses nowadays, maybe they are relevant for today’s audiences, but, whatever the role they’re playing, they will never match the class and wit and talent of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), or the incredibly natural comedic touch of Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey (1936), or the subtly layered performance of Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment (1960). And if I hear again that there are far more greater roles written for men than for women I’d recommend you watched more classic films, or more world cinema movies. Or just watch Woody Allen’s films.

“I rarely think in terms of male characters, except for myself only. I have a tremendous attraction to movies or plays or books that explore the psychs of women, particularly intelligent ones.” It’s not difficult to see that judging by the extraordinary female comedy characters Allen has given us over the years, proof that there is female talent out there capable of carrying a meaty role and delivering a well-timed quip. So, yes, there is hope. But I want to see more comic situations that do not involve vulgarity, or hard-partying women posing as mothers having a night off, or designer-name dropping bridesmaids wars, or bitter sarcasm just for the sake of sarcasm. I mean, really, Hollywood, is this your emancipation of women? I want to see emotional truth, verbal wit and innuendo, self-irony, even cheap sarcasm, but, please, show me some class, too. There is too much good stuff missing from the usual present-day female stereotypes.

Which brings me again to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. The normal rate of dialogue delivery in a movie has been estimated at 90 words per minute. In His Girl Friday, the extraordinary verbal sparring between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell has been clocked at 240 wpm. His Girl Friday is one of the best screwball comedies of all time, imbued with speed-of-light dialogue, intelligence and inexhaustible energy. Grant is unstoppable, and, as for Russell and her superb comic timing, it’s hard to imagine a female actor other than her who could have lived up to him.

This was the second screen version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s popular stage play, The Front Page (the first adaptation was the one by the same name directed by Lewis Milestone, from 1931, and the third one was Billy Wilder’s 1974 The Front Page), brilliantly directed by Howard Hawks, who, in a moment of inspiration, decided that the Hildy Johnson character would work better as a woman. And so it does. Russell juggles fiancé, ex-husband, rapid-fire dialogue and the hard-boiled profession of journalism, wears an extravagant hat (not the one pictured above) and does not sacrifice one drop of femininity while being an equal to men and not having her place among them questioned or explained. One of the best comedy roles of all time. She belongs. She earned those stripes alright.

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photo: movie still, His Girl Friday | Columbia Pictures

Posted by classiq in Film | | Comments Off