In the early hours of Saturday 28th August 2010 British photographer Corinne Day died after a long battle with cancer. Born in 1965, Day became known for her raw aesthetic and documentary-style. She first picked up a camera while working as a model, recording the everyday lives and struggles of her colleagues – and returned to the UK with a prolific body of work. In 1990 The Face magazine gave Day her first editorial commission – an eight page story featuring the scrawny teenage beauty Kate Moss, styled by Melanie Ward and entitled ‘3rd summer of love’. The resulting collection of black and white shots of a freckle-faced, squinting Kate Moss launched the careers of all three women.
Corinne Day’s career has been punctuated by controversy – not least for her 1993 Vogue shoot of Kate Moss in her Soho flat wearing boyish underwear and framed by fairy-lights. Yet it’s her hard-edged, grunge style that made her so influential. Like her contemporaries Juergen Teller and David Sims, Day helped to distort, disturb and reinvent the glossy face of fashion photography. But by the late Nineties she’d became disenchanted with the stale and airbrushed look of magazine editorials, turning instead to reportage. This body of work was collected in the book ‘Diary’ published by Kruse Verlag in 2000 – her anti-fashion antidote to the world of glamour.
Honesty was at the heart of Corinne Day’s life and work. On discovering her terminal illness in August 2009, she insisted on recording her entire hospital experience – combating despair with documentary. In her own words: “Photography is getting as close as you can to real life, showing us things we don’t normally see. These are people’s most intimate moments, and sometimes intimacy is sad.’’
Poet Kate Tempest was possibly our favourite feature in issue two of Twin. We love her attitude, her words and her new video for Line in the Sand directed by Joe Roberts.
A steady hand, super sharp vision and infinite patience make artist Dalton Ghetti’s impossibly tiny pencil tip sculptures possible. For the last twenty-five years the Brazilian-born, Connecticut based carpenter has been spending spare moments carving everything from boots to buttons into graphite with the aid of a blade, needle and knife. These miniature masterpieces can take years to complete, and are so delicate that inevitably they often break. But Dalton persists, making miraculous, microscopic art to give away to his friends. So he’s a carpenter, his works defy the rules of convention and he’s generous to a fault. Remind you of anyone?
You don’t often hear Mexico and Sheffield mentioned in the same sentence – but Mexican cover band, The Limits, are the exception. Named after the cult Sheffield club which closed in 1992, The Limits play nothing but covers of songs by the likes of Pulp, Def Leppard, Human League, ABC, Joe Cocker and the Arctic Monkeys.
The truth is, The Limits are the invention of Mexico City artist Laureana Toledo. Her brilliant project – ‘The Name of the Band is The Limit’ is a 30-minute documentary, and a magazine that borrows from the iconic format of The Face – all in their honour. Page after page of primary coloured layouts leave you wishing that the band – and The Face – really existed.
Laureana Toledo’s debut book, ‘The Limit’, is available at Trolley Books, £24. www.trolleybooks.com
Twins share a relationship unlike any other. This was the starting point for psychology student Amber Gayle’s thesis, ‘The Twin Survey’. This rather beautiful hand-sewn tome is published by Evil Twin Books as a small edition, and is put together with Gayle’s identical twin sister, Stacy Wakefield. A personal study, it looks at relationships between 150 twins across the world, shedding light on the closeness, co-operation and complications of twinship. Made for twins, by twins we like the look of this book on a one-of-a-kind attachment.
Fusing dark synth, surrealist lyrics and the occult – you can’t accuse Swedish pop band The Knife of being predictable. Working out of Stockholm, the brother/sister duo, Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, have been making electro hits together since 1999. Staying deliberately secluded from the mainstream, the twosome seem to want their music to stay a dark secret. The enigmatic band are touring one of their most unusual projects to date – an opera entitled, ‘Tomorrow, in a Year’.
Commissioned by experimental Danish theatre group, Hotel Pro Forma, the libretto is all about natural selection, taking inspiration from the father of evolution, Charles Darwin. We caught the show at The Barbican last month. It’s an astounding amalgamation of art and science – covering everything from evolutionary theory to Darwin’s love letters about his daughter, Anne. Innovative, enthralling and chilling – it’s opera, but not as we know it.
‘Tomorrow, in a Year’ the album is out now. The opera will be showing at the Melborne International Arts Festival from 21st – 23rd October.
This season, Yohji Yamamoto has created a Y-3 collection that returns to his avant-garde roots. Asymmetrical kilt skirts, big knit one-pieces and zipped-up jumpsuits all recall the Yamamoto of old, one set on both breaking and applying the traditions of his native Japan.
We love the collections’ brooding, moody and functional feel – T-shirts and coats read: “33 With You” and “23 Years In Prison”. This melancholic, prisoner of love theme has been brilliantly translated onto the small screen for a short fashion film starring brooding French footballer Zinedine Zidane, and a huge model clan. Its tough, heady and undeniably urban.
Watch it here….
Creative Direction: Lloyd & Co.
Still Photography: Alasdair McLellan
Cinematography: Theo Stanley / New Mountain
Editing: Frederic Taxi
Styling: Nicola Formichetti
Music: David Salom
Hair & Make-Up: Didier Malige & Gucci Westman
Location: Pier 54, Hudson River Park – New York City
Identifying a comfortable and trendy dog cloth is turning out to be difficult, as more and more cute dog clothes are venturing in the global market on regular basis.
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