Shiver

Colt Running

London Gun, 1993

Elvis' Gun, 1991

Monkey With Gun, 1992

Tupac, 1991

Cyclops, Albert Watson

Crea La Femme

Hedi Slimane

Peter Lindbergh

Nan Goldin

French Vogue, February 2009

Are You Trying To Save My Soul?

Presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze, The Fall is a fairytale film by Tarsem about the power of dream.

Shot over four years, in over twenty countries and largely financed by Tarsem to protect his creative vision, it is a visual tour de force. Somewhat overlooked when released in 2006, its mise-en-scene and cinematic power deserve to be viewed on the silver screen and are testament to the breathtaking power of aesthetics over idea.

Man In The Mirror

Michael Jackson Portrait by Norman Oak, 1995

The Collection of Michael Jackson

Yes?

History is made by those who say no.

Jon Savage

The Descent of Man

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Charles Darwin

Adrift On Dreams Of Splendour

Gustave Dore was a 19th century French artist. His commissions consisted of a sublime client list that included the English Bible and works by Balzac, Byron, Cervantes, Coleridge, Dante, Milton, Poe, Rabelais and Tennyson.

The Revolution Of Everyday Life

Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

Black On Black

No. 1 (Black Form Paintings) - Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko's series of Black-Form paintings in the 1960s presented a progressive way of perceiving the colour black. Black is often thought of as a plain colour, a solid sweep of a single tone, but contemplated long enough Rothko's black paintings reveal a complexity of depth and tone, layer and texture. Instead of negating colour and light, these black paintings build a more sincere and thoughtful relationship with them.

Black on black is often ignorantly dismissed for lack of immediate attention-grabbing, but what is forgot with this disregard is how such a combination invites the viewer to look more closely and holds the gaze for longer, often experimenting with elements of light, contrast and implication in interesting ways.

Giles Revell

Thierry Le Goues

Ansell Adams

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Pavla Kopecna (black and white shot in colour)

Playing Crucifiction

Andres Serrano

Sebastian Horsley

Hermann Nitsch

Loverman - Crucifiction

Art Direction : Gabriel Bruce
Photography: Sonia Melot

Safe In Nothing

I'm not insecure. I've been through way too much fucking bullshit to be insecure. But I've been humbled. That makes you grateful for every day you have.

Drew Barrymore

A Tale Of Hard Times

In September 1982, against a backdrop of the most severe recession since the Great Depression, The Face published its 'Hard Times' issue. The lead feature was written by Robert Elms. In its entirety, the article is suprisingly and pressingly pertinent through whichever lens of music, fashion or youth culture that you look at it, and is as good an example as any of the cyclical waves of culture that it propounds.

Here are a few choice cuts:

Bear with me for a while, this first bit may be hard but it is important. Read it twice if you have to because there is something that you are going to have to grasp before we can go any further. And that is the notion that Youth Culture now represents not a rebellion but a tradition, or rather a series of traditions that date back to the advent of the teenager and continue to grow along a compound continuum of action and reaction.

Imagine a spiral that begins with a birth out of affluence and post-war liberation and moves through time propelled by its own mythology and its own contrariness and is affected by technology and whimsy and economics. It is cyclical, but the circle is never completed because it is also evolutionary, therefore patterns repeat but they are never quite the same.

Now you must also accept that there is no such thing as a “generation gap” anymore; how can you rebel against the generation of Coltrane or Brando or MacInnes? What we have is a heritage that you can draw succour and inspiration from; and there’s those who do and those who don’t. That’s the only gap.

Suffice to say things are changing. What began as a desire to shed the clinging, depressive old skin of post-punk monotony and replace it with a set of bold, bright new clothes is slowly evolving into an entrenched, die-hard mentality where “Good Times” is replaced by “Money’s Too Tight To Mention”. But the dancing at least doesn’t stop.

It’s still easiest to describe as a hardening of attitude.

What has emerged is a more aggressive hedonism where sex and dancing and stimulants represent a back-against-the-wall defiance.

Soul. Now that’s a word for the times.

Just as mainstream pop culture becomes more and more produced, safer, predictably bright and danceable, so the reaction occurs. The spiral moves on by looking back, looking for some roots, searching for a little soul in a soulless world.

Political awareness is a personal thing, but everybody who can feel is feeling pain right now. People are getting angrier, the optimism that once led to bluff and bravado is now an optimism that you’ll be able to hold on, an optimism that you can defy and you can dance.

Things are changing again only this time we know a lot more than three chords. With any luck there’s even harder times ahead.