A year ago I went to my 1st V Magazine party. Barbara Bush was there, and I was so disgusted, I swore that V Magazine parties were a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again.
But I got over it.
The party was fantastic - most of my friends got there before the fire marshall closed the door & the DJ played "The Beach" by New Order.
Paul Rowland: Model Maker February 12, 2009 11:50 am
For Paul Rowland, “pretty” is not enough. Not that he has anything against a good-looking girl—Rowland is, after all, the founder of the modeling agencies Women and Supreme. Over the past 20 years he’s helped launch the careers of models Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Elle Macpherson, and Carmen Kass, to name a few familiar faces. So he sees “pretty” all the time, but it’s the stuff going on behind those cheekbones that gets Rowland’s heart racing—especially when he’s taking pictures. Building on his work as Supreme’s house photographer, Rowland has carved out a second career for himself behind the camera: As well as shooting Supreme’s keepsake show packages each season, his work has been featured in V and EXIT, and in December Rowland mounted his first-ever solo show at Miami Art Basel. Titled Transformations, the show spotlighted his obsession with getting his subjects to tell a story before the lens. “Models can be very hard to photograph,” Rowland notes. “Their job is to make clothes look good, and more often than not, all they can give the camera is a pose. My challenge is to coax a girl into giving something of herself.” Tonight, Transformations takes up temporary residence in New York City, opening at the Women/Supreme space in west Chelsea. In advance of his debut before the hometown crowd, Rowland talked to Style.com about the art that goes into making faces.
I understand you moved to New York city to be a painter. How did you wind up one of the grand pooh-bahs of the modeling business, instead?
Oh, you know how these things happen—you move to the city to do one thing, and then you wind up waiting tables. I wasn’t crazy about being a waiter, so when I got to know some fashion people and the fashion people told me I should model, I jumped. The modeling led to booking, and the booking led to my opening Women, and so on. There was never a grand plan. For a long time I just figured I was stashing money away so I could paint.
Both Women and Supreme have earned reputations as go-to agencies for girls with an unusual look. Was that happenstance, as well?
No, that much was purposeful. I’m not really interested in apple pie, all-American beauty. I appreciate it, but it doesn’t compel me. Whereas I have this art background seared in my head, so when I look at a girl and there’s that instant reference—like, she’s got a Modigliani face—that’s the beauty that takes me in. At the time I launched Women, unconventional beauty needed a champion. Now, I look around at who’s working, and it’s clear that I’ve managed to change our ideas about what’s beautiful, at least a little bit. But you can always push the envelope. That’s why I opened Supreme. We take some very edgy girls there.
When pictures of potential new models cross your desk, do the ones that could be stars jump out at you immediately?
Yes and no. You learn to spot potential. For one example, I remember seeing Polaroids of Kylie Bax—she was just this kid from Australia, 20 pounds overweight, with a bad perm. But you shape that, because you see something there. It’s a gut instinct.
What led you to take up photography? Were you looking for a creative outlet?
I got into photography for entirely practical reasons. You sign a new girl, it’s not like she’s out working with Steven Meisel the next day. You have to help her build the book. I’d always have these ideas in mind, the image of a girl that I wanted to convey, but no matter how hard I tried to explain what I wanted, the test shots other photographers took always came back not so great. Some of them were pretty hideous, in fact. As far as I was concerned, I could do better myself—I mean, if you’re a creative person, at some level you figure you have the ability to apply that creativity however you want. So I hired an assistant and started shooting. There was lots of stuff I did like that. I’d cut hair, too.
Many of the images in Transformations are taken from the Supreme show packages you shoot each season. Those show packages are always so ornate—they go way above and beyond the demands of, you know, here are a bunch of headshots.
I had this idea a little while ago—why not create this directional book twice a year that people would actually want to keep? I’d like them to be collectibles. I’m not sure we’re quite there yet, but that’s where my head is.
It’s great marketing. Those show packages definitely make an impression.
People really get into them. And they’re satisfying to work on, on a lot of levels. I mean, I get to work with my girls, which I always like to do, and they trust me, so I get a lot out of them. It was when I began sending out the show packages I’d shot that I began to feel like I was on to something with photography—the feedback was generally great, and people started asking me to shoot other things, too. And the whole Transformations show at Basel came out of someone seeing a show package and being intrigued.
Do you have any particular favorite images in the show?
There are a set of four nudes, one of which we used as the photo on the invitation. EXIT magazine asked me shoot a nude series, which I’d never done before, and I was really pleased with how they came out. It’s sort of an Arbus take on a nude. The lighting and everything is pretty classic, but there’s just that something that’s a little off. A little sinister. I like that. That’s what tells a story.
Those shots are very revealing. I mean, not just in the physical sense, but also in that you got something quite weird and personal from the model.
That’s what I’m always trying to capture—that weird, personal thing. And it’s the hardest part of the job. You have to convince your subject to go on this trip with you. You have to make them understand that they’re telling the story, too. The good models, they get that eventually. And the great ones, like Kate Moss for example, they get it instantly. They go somewhere off in their own heads. That’s why some people make millions and millions of dollars, and some other people fade away. Trust me, it’s got nothing to do with being cute.
Paradise is word of Persian origin (Persian: پردیس, Pardìs) that is generally identified with the Garden of Eden or with Heaven. Originally meaning a walled garden or royal hunting grounds, the term entered Jewish (and eventually Christian) beliefs as a Greek translation for the Garden of Eden in the Septuagint. It is sometimes also identified with the bosom of Abraham, the abode of the righteous dead awaiting Judgment Day. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a penitent criminal crucified alongside him that they will be together in paradise that day.
Paradise gardens Sources as early as Xenophon in his Anabasis report the famed Persian "paradise" garden. In Achaemenid Persia, possibly earlier (in Mesopotamia?), the term was not just applied to 'landscaped' gardens but especially to royal hunting grounds, the earliest form of wildlife reserve, destined for hunting as a sport; in various cultures in contact with nature, paradise is portrayed as eternal hunting ground, not just in relatively primitive cultures (e.g. native American) but also in more advanced, essentially agricultural civilisations, e.g. the Egyptian Reed fields and the Greek Elysian fields.
Christianity The form of the word that is now understood as "heaven or any environment that is ultimately pleasurable" is derived from the Greek παράδεισος paradeisos Persian loanword used in the Septuagint (LXX) Bible translation to mean the Garden of Eden. In the New Testament, paradise meant a paradise restored on Earth (Matthew chapter 5, verse 5 - the meek shall inherit the earth), similar to what the Garden of Eden was meant to be. However, certain sects actually attempted to recreate the garden of Eden, e.g. the nudist Adamites. On the cross, Jesus told Dismas that he would be with him in paradeisos (Luke 23:43). There are two other references to Paradise in NT: 2 Cor. 12:4 (there are things beyond human expression), and Rev. 2:7 (there is a tree of life).
In the 2nd century AD, Irenaeus distinguished paradise from heaven. In Against Heresies, he wrote that only those deemed worthy would inherit a home in heaven, while others would enjoy paradise, and the rest live in the restored Jerusalem. Origen likewise distinguished paradise from heaven, describing paradise as the earthly "school" for souls of the righteous dead, preparing them for their ascent through the celestial spheres to heaven.[3] Fra Angelico's Last Judgement painting shows Paradise on its left side. There is a tree of life (and another tree) and a circle dance of liberated souls. In the middle is a hole. In Muslim art it similarly indicates the presence of the Prophet or divine beings. It visually says, 'Those here cannot be depicted.'
Islam In the Qur'an, Paradise is denoted as "Firdous", the etymologically equivalent word derived from the original Avistan counterpart, and used instead of Heaven to describe the ultimate pleasurable place after death, accessible by those who pray, donate to charity and read the Qur’an. Heaven in Islam is used to describe the Universe. It is also used in the Qur'an to describe skies in the literal sense, i.e., above earth.
Paul Rowland photographed Alana Zimmer & Rachel Clark in Casablanca, Morocco on the 2nd & 3rd day of August 2008. The head of the desert is palpable in these photographs. The length of the shadows cast makes it hard to tell if they were taken at the beginning of the day, or the end.
The physical intimacy of Alana and Rachel, in the Moroccan location, reminds me of Paul Bowles' novel The Sheltering Sky.
An Allegory of Man and His Sahara By Tennessee Williams The Sheltering Sky By Paul Bowles. After several literary seasons given over, mostly, to the frisky antics of kids, precociously knowing and singularly charming, but not to be counted on for those gifts that arrive by no other way than the experience and contemplation of a truly adult mind, now is obviously a perfect time for a writer with such a mind to engage our attention. That is precisely the event to be celebrated in the appearance of "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles' first novel.
It has been a good while since first novels in America have come from men in their middle or late thirties (Paul Bowles is 38). Even in past decades the first novel has usually been written during the writers' first years out of college. Moreover, because success and public attention operate as a sort of pressure cooker or freezer, there has been a discouraging tendency for the talent to bake or congeal at a premature level of inner development.
In America the career almost invariably becomes an obsession. The "get-ahead" principle, carried to such extreme, inspires our writers to enormous efforts. A new book must come out every year. Otherwise they get panicky, and the first thing you know they belong to Alcoholics Anonymous or have embraced religion or plunged headlong into some political activity with nothing but an inchoate emotionalism to bring to it or to be derived from it. I think that this stems from a misconception of what it means to be a writer or any kind of creative artist. They feel it is something to adopt in the place of actual living, without understanding that art is a by-product of existence.
Paul Bowles has deliberately rejected that kind of rabid professionalism. Better known as a composer than a writer, he has not allowed his passion for either form of expression to interfere with his growth into completeness of personality. Now this book has come at the meridian of the man and artist. And, to me very thrillingly, it brings the reader into sudden, startling communion with a talent of true maturity and sophistication of a sort that I had begun to fear was to be found nowadays only among the insurgent novelists of France, such as Jean Genet and Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
With the hesitant exception of one or two war books by returned soldiers, "The Sheltering Sky" alone of the books that I have recently read by American authors appears to bear the spiritual imprint of recent history in the western world. Here the imprint is not visible upon the surface of the novel. It exists far more significantly in a certain philosophical aura that envelopes it. There is a curiously double level to this novel. The surface is enthralling as narrative. It is impressive as writing. But above that surface is the aura that I spoke of, intangible and powerful, bringing to mind one of those clouds that you have seen in summer, close to the horizon and dark in color and now and then silently pulsing with interior flashes of fire. And that is the surface of the novel that has filled me with such excitement.
The story itself is a chronicle of startling adventure against a background of the Sahara and the Arab-populated regions of the African Continent, a portion of the world seldom dealt with by first-rate writers who actually know it. Paul Bowles does know it, and much better, for instance, than it was known by AndrÈ Gide. He probably knows it even better than Albert Camus. For Paul Bowles has been going to Africa, off and on, since about 1930. It thrills him, but for some reason it does not upset his nervous equilibrium. He does not remain in the coastal cities. At frequent intervals he takes journeys into the most mysterious recesses of the desert and mountain country of North Africa, involving not only hardship but peril.
"The Sheltering Sky" is the chronicle of such a journey. Were it not for the fact that the chief male character, Port Moresby, succumbs to an epidemic fever during the course of the story, it would not be hard to identify him with Mr. Bowles himself. Like Mr. Bowles, he is a member of the New York intelligentsia who became weary of being such a member and set out to escape it in remote places. Escape it he certainly does. He escapes practically all the appurtenances of civilized modern life. Balanced between fascination and dread, he goes deeper and deeper into this dreamlike "awayness."
From then on the story is focused upon the continuing and continually more astonishing adventures of his wife, Kit, who wanders on like a body in which the rational mechanism is gradually upset and destroyed. The liberation is too intense, too extreme, for a nature conditioned by and for a state of civilized confinement. Her primitive nature, divested one by one of its artificial reserves and diffidences, eventually overwhelms her, and the end of this novel is as wildly beautiful and terrifying as the whole panorama that its protagonists have crossed. In this external aspect the novel is, therefore, an account of startling adventure. In its interior aspect, "The Sheltering Sky" is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience. This is not an enticing way to describe it. It is a way that might suggest the very opposite kind of a novel from the one that Paul Bowles has written. Actually this superior motive does not intrude in explicit form upon the story, certainly not in any form that will need to distract you from the great pleasure of being told a first-rate story of adventure by a really first-rate writer.
I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.
The Sheltering Sky was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci into a 1990 film by the same name starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich, with screenplay by Mark Peploe. In Bertolucci's interpretation, the bleak, sinister tone of the latter part of the book becomes a desert love story. The movie is filmed in Morocco, Algeria, and Niger and features powerful visual scenery.
Christina Kruse is a model and a photographer. She has spent eleven years focusing the camera on her own persona to produce a series of works that explore the idea of self-portraiture. Most of her photographs play with feminine stereotypes.
In 1997 Christina bought a Mamiya camera and began the first of her "books" (an ongoing project), a series of mixed media journals chronicling her world travels and composed of call ages, drawings, writings in several languages and photographic self-portraits. As an artist, working primarily in photography and mixed media, she has had shows in Paris (at the Sanchez Galley, 1998, and the Cueto Gallery, 1999), New York (Spencer Brownstone, 1999), and in Hamburg, Germany ( at the Galerie Robert Morat, 2007).
Christina's recent projects include three series of photographs (Women On Beaches and Religious Affairs, Perspective People), a performance art piece printed on canvas (No-Series). At present, in addition to her ongoing "books" project, Kruse has two additional series of photographs in progress (Domestic Affairs and Underwaterworlds), a series of sculptures and a 2-panel video installation.
