Tag: Humanity Mag

MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov is considered among the greatest ballet dancers of our time, perfecting the art form insofar as any art form can be perfected. Although, as he’s quick to point out, perfectionism in itself is not what he strives for. “Perfection it’s a theory, you know, you cannot be a perfect human being, and you cannot be a perfect artist, you cannot be a perfect husband, you cannot be a perfect father,” he says. “All you have is that hope that, as you go through your daily routine, by the end of the day you will be a little better in all respects, and do something meaningful, rather than have a day which just passed by senselessly, you know, just like ‘poof’ disappearing in fog of life.”

Baryshnikov, affectionately called Misha by family and friends, clearly remembers the moment he fell in love with dance, the moment from which each day would be imbued with meaning. He was just five years old or thereabouts, living in the Soviet-occupied town of Riga, in present-day Latvia. His mother, Alexandra, a dressmaker obsessed with the arts, took him to see a ballet. “The curtain was up and people were dancing, and it was beautiful, light, and lovely music. And I was hooked. I asked her a few days later, ‘can she take me again to see some dance?’ And the journey began.”

When he was nine, he began his life as a performer. He was shorter than most male dancers, but his exceptional talent carried him all the way to the elite Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. His interest in avant garde choreography, however, was not encouraged within the traditional Soviet system. In 1974, he defected to Canada, eventually joining the New York City Ballet as a principal dancer. “New York is an extraordinary place, you know, in all respects. In the 70s and early 80s in New York, the city was more generous and more welcoming to young people. You could live in Manhattan, and you could afford to go to the theater, and Broadway, and ballet, and opera, and the philharmonic; and it’s almost impossible right now for young people from, you know, Beaumont, Texas, to come and spend, their summer in New York. Or, God forbid, a year, and try to find their luck, because it will cost you, if you’re not the kid of rich parents, and it’s impossible.”

 

Mikhail-Baryshnikov-SI1

 

Embraced by the West, Baryshnikov explored his talent for acting, earning an Oscar nomination in 1997 for his role in “The Turning Point”. Later, he starred with Gregory Hines in “White Nights” and Gene Hackman in “Company Business.” Fans of “Sex and the City” will remember him as Aleksandr Petrovsky, Carrie Bradshaw’s artist beau, in the final season of the hit show. As beloved as he is by Hollywood, decades since moving to the US, he is and truly remains a New Yorker at heart. Through his arts foundation, BAC, he’s doing his bit to help young artists who want to live and work in New York, despite the prohibitive nature of the cost of living now. “I want to help the emerging talent to find their place. I’m always like, ‘we are not producers, we are providers, trying to provide opportunity to any kind of creative people to help them to produce their work in the most pleasurable way, without any commercial pressure.’”

On par with his philanthropic work, he remains incessantly active as a stage performer. He recently he appeared in “Beckett Shorts,” a compilation of four short Samuel Beckett plays, and “In Paris,” based on a short story by writer Ivan Bunin. Later this year, he will perform opposite Willem Dafoe in an adaptation of “The Old Woman” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His creative restlessness is, he says, perhaps a result of the great freedom he enjoys as an artist. “I do rest sometimes, but it’s always a short rest, you know? I am blessed with the ability to do what I want to do in my life. I don’t restrict it myself with my financial goals. I don’t have to climb up, to prove to anybody, nothing like that. I can just be myself. Perhaps I’m afraid to get bored with myself.”

Read more on Mikhail Baryshnikov’s participation in Citizens of Humanity’s “Just Like You” philanthropic film series: http://www.citizensofhumanity.com/justlikeyou/mikhail-baryshnikov

 

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CLEON PETERSON

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Cleon Peterson was born in Seattle in 1973. That’s perhaps where the boring bit begins and ends. Raised in an open, intellectual and creative family (it was the ’70s after all), young Cleon rode skateboards and read comic books in between home-school assignments from his grandfather. This inspired guidance may have helped to foster careers for the two boys—Peterson’s brother is photographer Leigh Ledare, known for his series of provocative photos of their mother, Tina, titled, “Pretend You’re Actually Alive.” Cleon is featured in a few of Ledare’s portraits as well, as the family served as Leigh’s preferably taboo subject matter at the beginning of his burgeoning fine art career. Unfortunately, this was also during a time of personal strife for Cleon, who was wrestling with drug addiction, a diagnosis of mental illness and a severe asthmatic condition causing him to be deathly allergic to oil paint (and cats).

However, Peterson rewrites his story and it begins again. He has made the incredible journey of overcoming these impossible obstacles and is thriving, using his past experiences to inform and develop his amazing talent for design and art. Peterson went on to receive a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and kids. When he’s not painting in his studio, he works as a freelance graphic designer. Peterson has shown at New Image Art in Los Angeles, Alice Gallery in Brussels, Lazarides in London, Joshua Liner Gallery and Deitch Projects in New York.

With all his hard-earned success, he can see things from the other side now; however, his view is not necessarily pretty upon closer inspection.

Stripped down to the most concise visual information he can offer you, Peterson’s paintings portray only slightly ironic nightmares born from years of personal struggle, street violence and ultimate survival. There is no escape from Cleon Peterson’s work and his exorcised demons, which sometimes wear uniforms or just underpants. His narrative is dark and uncomfortable, a car wreck you can’t look away from. The canvases provide a catharsis for the painter and, depending on individual experience, his audience.

 

Cleon Peterson SI #1

 

Peterson’s street fighters remind us there are sinister, very personal ways to die by knife, stick, fist or claw. Rarely will you see a gun. This is absurd, graphic violation in spot color—the flat fields of red, black and white contribute to the anxiety, the rawness and the inescapability of the static chaos in his compositions.

The faceless, generic violence that Peterson depicts is at its most frightening in that it lends itself to any neighborhood, any ethnicity, any gender. Anyone in Anytown, USA. It’s Dante’s Inferno depicted for a modern age. Heavily influenced by comic masters Dan Clowes, Charles Burns and Robert Crumb, as well as his own unwavering ability to design the hell out of a blank page, Peterson’s quality of line and perspective drawing is flawless. He provides beautifully rendered street corners at alternative angles and battlefields viewed from above for his imaginary urban territories, even if the society he’s depicting is massively askew.

 

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CHRISTOPHER “NICELY” ALAMEDA

Posted on by Taylor Norman

California’s Venice Beach has no shortage of star attractions, from the carnival-like boardwalk to its peaceful canals. The beachside destination also boasts culinary cred, as home to some of Los Angeles’ most respected restaurants, including Gjelina, known for its farm-to-table fare, and institutions like Joe’s, which has presided over Abbot Kinney for more than two decades.

Increasingly, Venice is also earning a reputation for its world class coffee shops, thanks in part to Christopher “Nicely” Alameda, who has not only played a part in the opening of Intelligentsia’s über-popular Abbot Kinney location but is also the barista behind buzzed-about java joint Menotti’s Coffee Stop on Windward Circle.

“It gives me something to live up to,” he says of his nickname, which was bestowed upon him after he played the part of Nicely-Nicely Johnson in a high school production of Guys and Dolls—and for being voted “Most Courteous” three years in a row.

It’s a moniker that suits Alameda, whose warm demeanor, can-do attitude and passion for coffee brought him to Venice by way of Seattle. “That’s where I found coffee and coffee found me,” says the Queens, New York, native, who moved to Seattle at age 15 with his mother to study vocal performance and art. In true Seattle fashion, it was a job at Starbucks that first ignited Alameda’s love for coffee, but it wasn’t until he landed a job at a grocery store that he had his true a-ha moment. “I realized I want to be in coffee, period. I could see myself working there for 40 years, getting a great paycheck and really hating life,” he says.

Alameda’s epiphany led him to Seattle’s Espresso Vivace, a coffee shop and roaster he refers to as the “godfather of specialty coffee techniques.” Within four years, the up-and-coming barista had caught the attention of Intelligentsia, which wooed him to Los Angeles. And three years after opening the company’s Abbot Kinney space, Alameda joined a handful of friends to break ground on downtown’s Handsome Coffee Roasters coffee shop and roasting facility. “I basically went to the University of Espresso Vivace, graduate school at Intelligentsia, and then I had an accelerated business course at Handsome Coffee Roasters. It taught me a lot of lessons, including essentially how not to screw up.”

Now, Alameda has taken all of his experience and poured it into Menotti’s Coffee Stop, located a stone’s throw from the Venice Boardwalk. Owned by Louie and Annette Ryan (the same family behind neighboring Townhouse), the coffee shop’s name pays homage to original owner Cesar Menotti, who transformed the place into a speakeasy during the Prohibition era.

Today, Alameda presides over the small spot as head barista, serving San Francisco’s Four Barrel beans in drip coffee or espresso, topped with his award-winning latte art (he’s a three time Coffee Fest World Latte Art champ). Alameda, who lives in Venice with his wife and son, was inspired to create a community hub in an area that attracts a lot of tourists. “I have an appreciation for the locals and what they want.”
 

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PETE THOMPSON

Posted on by Taylor Norman

How did you get into photography?

My grandmother. She was fairly unique in the way she looked at the world. She bought me my first camera when I was probably around 12. Then, from there, I was mostly shooting skateboarding, which led me to the first part of my career, working for Transworld. I was a sponsored amateur and so most of my friends were pretty good skateboarders. I was living in Raleigh at the time and was sort of the only guy photographing.

What was it about photography as a medium that interested you?

Initially, I feel like it was just mostly the passion for documenting skateboarding that started things out. As my career developed, I was driven to be more creative with it, which was a bit of a confusing place to be, because a big part of shooting skateboarding is about showing what’s happening in a way that the trick that your shooting can be measured and evaluated. It’s also a real challenge to be creative when you have very little time and are constantly getting harassed by cops and security guards. After I stopped shooting skateboarding, it took a while to step away from that mindset and reconnect with what I truly loved about photography, which is capturing a moment that speaks to me. Sometimes, that moment is a reflection of how I feel about the subject and other times its about capturing someone or something in a truly authentic moment of its own. It’s a bit like a conversation. At times you step back and listen to what someone is saying and try to understand how they feel, and sometimes you speak and express how you feel. Hopefully, whoever is looking at the picture can share in that truth.

When did you move to NYC and what prompted the move?

I moved to New York City on November 19th 2008. Anyone who has come to New York remembers the exact date. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and I was just kind of wandering in the world of photography odd gigs here and there, not really sure what I wanted to do. Then I was at a wedding for a friend of mine, and I met Paul Gilmore who convinced me to come stay with him in Brooklyn and check things out.

The lessons you learn from surviving in New York City are lessons that you can’t really get anywhere else. New York forces you to take a hard, honest look at yourself and then everything gets thrown at you. New York doesn’t care about you, your problems or your excuses, and so you really have to tread water till you figure things out. However, if you can dig deep and survive, then the City can become like a friend (that has occasional tantrums).

What were your first thoughts when you moved?

My first thought right when the cab dropped me off from JFK was “umm, I think I fucked up.

What are your favorite aspects of the City?

The energy, it just can’t be overstated. There’s no other reason why I can be somewhere far away, on a beach in the sun in the middle of January and at the same time feel  the need to get back home.

Who are some of your artistic heroes?

Stanley Kubrick, Bruce Weber, Peter Lindbergh, Terrance Malik, Paul Thomas Anderson, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Muhammad Ali, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Maya Angelou, Richard Avedon, Milos Forman, John Lennon, ThomYorke.

 

Pete Thompson SI #1

 

 

 

 

 

What are your favorite places to shoot/work?

I really like shooting on location. It’s obviously much more challenging than working in a studio, which is something, I learned when I was working as an assistant for Anders Overgaard. But, it is far more rewarding and can be much more organic in telling a story when you give an image a sense of place. Cape Town is unreal; it has so much to offer in terms of landscape. Northern California is amazing too.

What are your favorite places to relax?

That’s a bit tricky. I have a hard time relaxing, ha! I think if I’m with my family/friends in SF or DC, then I’m usually pretty content. Somewhere quiet, where I can have one-on-one conversations.

Is there anywhere you want to go, but haven’t been?

I’ve been all around the U.S., but I’ve actually never been to New Orleans. I wish I had gone there before the hurricane, I’d also love to go to Cuba. Iceland is also on my list.

Where do you like to spend down time?

When I’m in New York City, I like to hang in my hood (Carroll Gardens). It’s quiet, peaceful. There are great restaurants, and its low key. So, I hang out around home quite a bit when I’m not working.

What’s a good day for you?

Sometimes it’s a day when I’m shooting and everyone on set is enjoying what they do and the vibe is just right, creativity is in motion. And, it’s beautiful outside. Other times, it’s just a day when I wake up, the sun is out, and I’ll listen to NPR, and step outside for coffee, meet a friend and have a good conversation.

What should anyone who visits New York City do while they are here? Do you have a guide for taking in the city?

Well, the main thing that I would suggest is to just wander around. Each corner of New York is so different from the rest. There is no other city like New York; its the ultimate laboratory. It’s the first place that people from all over the world came to inhabit together. The history of New York is fascinating and the energy is seductive. I would try to grab a few slices. I recommend, Grimaldis and Lucalis are my favorites (both in Brooklyn).

But, the main thing is to just go explore and avoid Times Square at all possible costs.

 

 

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What is the best advice you ever received?

One lesson I learned from skateboarding is that when you fail, you have to get back up and try it again and again… and that your own particular style is what sets you apart from others.

What is your best advice for someone who hopes to find a career in the arts?

It won’t be easy. Finding your own way is very challenging, and you will have to make considerable sacrifices, but ultimately you have to be still and listen to what your heart tells you. You have to keep moving forward, keep evolving, and accept that it’s not something you can just rush through.

It’s a long road, and there will be periods when you think your just wasting your time. But, you have to just keep going and believing in whatever it is you do. Don’t compare yourself to anyone, and surround yourself with people who share your passion to create and think.

Take time to develop yourself. And, really get to know who you are; that’s crucial. I think part of being successful is also understanding and developing the skill of looking at what you do from other people’s perspectives which can help you find a way to make a living doing what you love. And, don’t make big decisions based on money or fear.

Are there any specific words you try to live by?

Always do your best, and treat people with respect.

How do you define success?

Doing what you love, and understanding who you are.

 

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ED RUSCHA

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Traveling through Tennessee recently, I could still see the impression legend Clark Byers’ hand-painted SEE ROCK CITY signs have left behind. Some are vinyl knockoffs, but some of the original boards remain, acknowledging the lost Americana art that has suffered against modern printing technology and the bombardment of digital advertising. Artist ED RUSCHA has fond memories of these signs, just as America does for the many similar ones that adorned big businesses and small communities around the country for generations. Ruscha was inspired, and there’s no doubt his body of word paintings are a close relative to the hand-painted sign—his necessity being to communicate an idea rather than something for sale. Of course, art is for sale, so there are comparisons on many conceptual levels. The message is in the hand-painted letters nonetheless. In the 1980s the advent of precise die-cut vinyl lettering and ink-jet printers made the art of necessity cheaper and quicker, but the beauty of the hand-painted symbol has survived. The magic of a hand-painted sign isn’t just in the eye of the beholder; it really lies in the hand of the painter. The perfect brush to pull a line, the optical illusion of letter size, the planned spacing for the optimum read—all these techniques are unique and can’t be replicated by any machine. The human craft of creating one-of-a-kind signage is historic, and though the experienced sign-painter journeyman may be fewer and farther between, the art is alive and well thanks to a resurgence recently in art galleries, books and even as the subject of documentary film. Sign painting is not a science; it’s simply an amazing way to use color and paint to build up letters and words on metal or wood, and it speaks directly to you. Ed Ruscha, like many artists, recognizes this beauty. I was fortunate to have a conversation with him about the art of the hand-painted sign.

What are your earliest memories of seeing hand-painted signs?

I watched a heavyset man squat before a sheet of metal and hand-letter the complete menu for a drive-in hamburger stand in Oklahoma City. He was quick, facile and had everything preplanned. Another time I watched a man do gold-leaf lettering on the translucent glass of my dad’s office door à la Sam Spade. It was for the Hartford Insurance Company.

What attracted you to their craftsmanship?

It was all showmanship, and neither man was distracted by observers. One used matchsticks and toothpicks to correct over painting, while the other used a comb run through his hair for static electricity. These guys were artists!

You had an early interest in typeface in your fine arts career. How did that originate and how did it develop into a fascination with language?

Walking past a bakery always gets the good sniff responses, but in my case it was the aroma of printers’ ink. Especially freshly printed material. It was only a matter of time before I noticed the difference between typefaces.

Do you consider yourself to be a typographer (or a sign painter) since so many of your pieces contain words as the primary subject?

Anyone who makes pictures of words is doing so as though they are carving that word in marble, to make that word solid and last forever. It’s like making a word final and official.

 

 

 

Los Angeles didn’t really have a sign-painting movement like San Francisco or NYC. It really developed here later. We had more neon, oil-based and plastic signs. Do you think there is a connection between sign painting and pinstriping and that could’ve influenced the movement in Los Angeles?

The custom-car culture of Southern California used paintbrush features associated with sign painting, such as pinstriping and embellishments. This set L.A. apart from other sophisticated centers like New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

What is it about the casual look of hand-painted letters that is more appealing than corporate logos?

Handmade letters are more compelling because they are just that: handmade. They call back to the individual rather than a refinement of an industrial idea.

How is the art of optical illusion used in sign painting and why is it important?

Many tricks and devices are used, and in sign painting, these novelties are necessary and, as most sign guys say, “to catch the eye.”

How and why did you adapt that technique in your own artwork?

It’s only coincidental that I lay paint on a surface with a brush like a sign painter. Sign painters might be more “correct” than me since my stuff might be more cerebral.

How does sign painting use color as a necessity?

Again, it’s like that “to catch the eye” concept.

How do you implement your choice of what graphics (ground) vs. graphics (typographic) you use in your word paintings? Do you think that decision is inspired from a sign-painting perspective?

All of us use the ground/subject format. I think about these oldtimers using one-stroke show-card lettering. They get results I envy for.

Is graffiti related to sign painting? How so?

For urgency if not for commerce. These two things might be blood brothers.

How is the psychology of sign painting (in terms of having a very specific purpose) related to the concepts in your word paintings? Is there a connection?

My painting may not sell hamburgers, but I’m aiming for the same high ideals.

Do you have a favorite memory of a hand-painted sign that you really appreciate?

Yes, there was one on the back of a truck in Chickasha, Oklahoma, that said “MELNS 25 CENTS” sitting against a bed full of freshly picked Jubilee melons.

What do you think you would you have done if you weren’t Ed Ruscha the artist?

I would have been Ed Ruscha the meteorologist.

 

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DEREK RIDGERS

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Though he’s captured frames of some of the most iconic performers, artists, politicians and even gangsters, it was snapping through rolls of film in London’s club scene in the ’70s and ’80s that established Derek Ridgers as a talented photographer. Ridgers was already in his late 20s when he trekked out to Skin Two, The Blitz and other London venues where British youth were rebelling and reacting to the right-wing agenda ushered in by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with brash fashion steeped in fetish and the extremes of underground culture.

The youth Ridgers caught on film were stretching the boundaries of convention, sporting tattoos on their faces, necks and hands—something that wasn’t only taboo but often dangerous to have etched on your skin in public. Skinheads, new romantics, punks, goths and every other subsect of youth culture were commingling, with a total disregard for societal boundaries. It was ripe for documentation, and that decade has now been illustrated in a rich monograph titled 78-87 London Youth, in which Ridgers’ images and John Maybury’s text tell the story of the evolution, punch and panache of the disenfranchised and the historic scenes they inhabited. 

 

Derek Ridgers SI #1

 

How did you first get interested in photographing club kids, and were you met with any resistance initially?

Back in the 1970s, I was an advertising agency art director with easy access to a camera. By night I was a keen music fan and I started taking a camera to gigs, forcing my way to the front, pretending to be a photographer and shooting photos of some of the bands I liked.

In the beginning, it was simply an excuse to get a bit closer to the musicians themselves. But eventually I started to quite enjoy looking at the results as well.

Then in 1976, punk happened.

One really would’ve had to have been blind not to see how photogenic the punks were. So I turned the attention of my camera around and began to photograph the audience at the punk shows as well as the bands.

I really never had much resistance from any of the kids I was photographing. Maybe because I was keen on portraiture rather than reportage, I usually used to ask people first and if they declined, I’d just move on.

The only exception to that was in the early fetish club Skin Two. Most of the punkers didn’t want me there because they wanted to keep their fetishism private and they didn’t think outsiders should be around, let alone outsiders with a camera. Which is fair enough. I had a few of them offer me physical violence a few times—I remember one guy grabbed me by the throat. But my charm eventually won through. Plus, I’m quite a big bloke to be grabbing by the throat.

I used to get left waiting on the pavement for a long time by [Visage frontman] Steve Strange at The Blitz Club too. Steve Strange was already a legend in his own mind, even before anyone had heard of him, but having people wait out in the cold was all part of his shtick. But I’ve found you get nowhere in life if you take “no” for an answer. I simply wore Steve down with my persistence.

Can you explain the shock value of seeing kids with face, neck and hand tattoos back then?

I think that back then kids that chose very visible, very antisocial tattoos felt themselves to be ostracized by society and they were expressing themselves in one of the only ways they had. By getting themselves tattooed in that way they were saying, “I know I’m never going to be a conventional member of the society like you, and I don’t want to be.”

There was another, darker side to it as well. Most of the facial tattoos were done by unlicensed backstreet “scratchers,” and the majority of them in London were done by one man who, for a few cans of lager, would tattoo pretty much anything on anyone—provided you were young and male. Happily, I never met this guy, but I reckon an element of coercion could have been involved. Recently a guy that was subject to just such a facial tattoo from a scratcher—not sure if it was that particular guy—described the experience as being like a 30-year sentence.

He’s now hoping to get it removed.

At that time, the only people to have very visible, antisocial tattoos were people at the margins of social acceptability. Bikers, skinheads, teddy boys, prostitutes, rent boys, etc. I photographed all of them and never found approaching any of them difficult, but one does have to pick the right time, be polite and avoid being patronizing. If you have a big macho guy who’s in a bike gang, for instance, they are used to people looking away when crossing the street. They expect to be able to intimidate people. They don’t expect to be approached with an open mind and a friendly manner. Then my camera and its proximity often intimidates them and you get to see the real character. Often there is a real vulnerability in faces like that. They might take on a dozen men in a bar fight but they don’t always feel so comfortable with the close scrutiny of a camera.

 

Derek Ridgers SI #2

 

What do you think was happening in England that spawned so many flamboyant and over-the-top looks then?

It wasn’t really what was happening culturally but politically. The key event of this time period was the election of the Thatcher government in 1979 and the circumstances that allowed such a cynical, right-wing government to take power. Margaret Thatcher had a very anti-trade-union, anti-working-class agenda, and a lot of the teenagers from that time didn’t think they would ever get a decent job and so they had very little to look forward to. I think their fairly understandable response to having, quote, “no future,” was that they may as well try to have fun whilst they were still young.

There was a tremendous flowering of young creativity under Thatcher which I don’t think we’ve ever quite seen since. Though unfortunately the country is still suffering from a lot of the rightwing policies she started—like the selling off of Council housing and the selling off of publicly owned assets. I was not a fan of Margaret Thatcher. Not by a long chalk.

What were you mainly shooting with for the photographs in the book and what were the challenges shooting in club settings?

Throughout the period I was taking the photos in the book I used a small SLR Nikon. First, a secondhand Nikkormat and eventually a Nikon FM. I used either a 50 mm or 24 mm lens, and I used a small and very underpowered flashgun, which I had mounted on a contraption I had made from a bent coat hanger. The purpose of the unconventional flash bracket was to get the source of light as close to the lens as possible and therefore reduce the effect of shadows.

Around 1984, I fell asleep on the train one night, on my way home from a club, and had the first camera and very unconventional bracket stolen. I simply reproduced it a second time, but the second version was never quite as good as the first. I used this wacky bracket that was covered in Sellotape right up until I started using digital cameras in 2004. I never once saw anyone else use that idea. I’m not sure if that means it was a bad idea? The big challenge to shooting in clubs is that it can often be very noisy, very dark and it can be very, very crowded. This aspect isn’t always obvious from my photos. This is why an awful lot of my photos are taken in corridors and stairwells. That was the only place I could see, make myself heard and stand far enough back from my subject to get them all in frame.

There’s a sharp contrast between punk now and even what Malcolm McLaren was selling as punk in the ’70s and what the average kids are seen looking like in your book. Can you explain the difference?

With the exception of the Malcolm McLaren/Vivienne Westwood stuff and a few items from BOY, the original punks only really had clothes they had made or adapted themselves. I shot extensively in the original London punk club—The Roxy—and there was a lot of augmented school uniforms, painted leather, stencil work and bin-bag clothing. The mass-market punk clothing from places like Miss Selfridge didn’t come until later. But not much later.

A lot of the multinational brands had wholeheartedly jumped on the punk bandwagon by the end of ’77. Which for the original punks, spoilt things somewhat. That was why a lot of them then rejected the punk look and went for what was, in many respects its antithesis. The new romantics and their high fashion and overdressed approach, which started the following year, was initiated almost completely by ex-punks.

Back then I don’t think the various youth cults you mention were seen as being a part of the overall fashion scene. That they were almost all quickly subsumed by the requirements of big fashion chains, that have to have something brand-new to sell each season, was not a surprise. But I was surprised by the speed that it happened. In ’77-’78 I worked close to Oxford Street and I saw the punk styles appear very quickly in Miss Selfridge. Even before punk had rolled out to some of the less hip provinces.

Nowadays the fact that so many aspects and styles of the past have become present-day fashion memes is to do with commercialism and nostalgia. And I suppose partly that some of those things, like the leather jackets of the bikers and rockers or the Dr. Marten boots of the skinheads or the parkas of the mods, always were destined to become design classics. A lot of the brands that were associated with the various youth styles are always going to endure because their qualities were intrinsic.

Who were you photographing back then that eventually became famous and did you see that “star power” in them?

The most famous of them all was Boy George, who for a while in the mid-’80s must have been as famous as anyone anywhere ever. I certainly did not think he had any star power before he was famous and he just struck me as quite a friendly bloke with a lot to say for himself. Everyone thought of themselves as being at the bottom of a certain trajectory and only a few of them were correct in that assumption. Quite a few of my photographic subjects went on to become pop stars for a while [Siobhan from Bananarama is also in the book], and in every case, you could have knocked me down with a feather if you’d told me they would achieve fame.

I was at art school with Freddy Mercury [then Bulsara], and we were friendly. It was the same with him. A guy less likely to achieve worldwide fame I couldn’t have imagined. Maybe I’m just no good at picking them?

I’d rather not pick a favorite, but what I would say is that there were some exceptional women around then. Myra Falconer, who is in the book twice, had a very unconventional beauty but I’d rather shoot her any day than a conventional beauty. And that’s not supposed to be a backhanded insult either—she always looked sensational.

What one image captures the title 78-87 London Youth to you and why?

Well I didn’t make the choice of what photographs were used in the book and I also didn’t make the choice for the cover photograph. Never in a million years would I have chosen that image to go on the cover of my book. But in retrospect I think it was a very good choice, and this factor shows why I am not a book designer. Kudos there to the books designer Rupert Smyth. So for one image that captures the title London Youth it would have to be that one.

But if you asked me to say which is my favorite image, it would definitely be the last one inside the book—the skinhead girl Babs, shot close to Carnaby Street in 1987. She was such a beautiful young woman with such sad, expressive eyes. And with the back-to-front tattoo on her cheek, I guess she was very mixed up and probably a rather troubled soul. I’m fairly sure she was a troubled soul because I have other photos of her taken in ’84 and she had her whole life roughly sketched out in an amateurish way on her arms.

I haven’t seen her since the day I took the photograph and I sincerely hope she’s had a happy and productive life. The look in her eyes is one that can bring me to tears. That’s why it’s my favorite.

 

Derek Ridgers SI #3

 

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CHRISTIAN HOSOI

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Skateboarding in the 1980s needed a new radical. It was suffering a dip in popularity following the burnout of the Z-Boys, the gnarly Southern California team who a decade earlier were the first to liberate the sport from the confines of gravity, launching theirboards and themselves into the air.

Enter Christian Hosoi. The Cali youngster with a Hawaiian attitude spent his early adolescence at the Marina Del Rey Skatepark, where his artist father Ivan Hosoi worked as the manager so he wouldn’t have to pay for every visit, since they were there all the time anyway. At the skatepark the younger Hosoi could go for hours watching original Z-Boys like Jay Adams and Shogo Kubo, who in turn would soon see Christian Hosoi’s potential and start treating him like a younger brother. They taught him tricks and grew his confidence, their techniques and outlook rubbing off on him.

Hosoi began amazing other skaters and growing crowds with his ability to fly higher than anyone else on the scene. The mid- ’80s soon became a new boom time for skateboarding, both commercially and creatively. “Tricks were being invented on a daily basis in the ’80s,” say Hosoi now. “It was so spontaneous and radical and fun.”

Hosoi’s most notable contribution to skateboarders’ arsenal was the Christ Air, a move where he took flight and stretched both arms out to the side, the board held in his hand, separated from his feet. Though there were definitely other skaters Hosoi looked up to as he rose up through the ranks, he always drew from other childhood idols as well. “I wanted to be like Bruce Lee. I wanted to be a martial artist. I was going to be the best in the world,” Hosoi says. “But I got introduced to skateboarding, and I was like, oh wow, this is something no one has done. I can actually be the Bruce Lee of this sport. I wanted to be the dominator. I wanted to smash people like Bruce Lee did. I wanted to be the best, and that was my goal at 10 years old.”

Christian Hosoi and Tony Hawk became the biggest stars of the era. While Hawk was renowned for his technical ability and dedication to perfecting tricks, Hosoi was famous for his outrageous sense of style. That style was not only reflected in how he skated but how he dressed while he skated, the boards he skated on, the print ads for those boards and the lifestyle he led away from the skate ramps. He grew out his mane of hair (sometimes supplementing it with extensions). He wore leather pants, multiple Swatch watches on his arm and the clothes his apparel sponsor had designed for women. He became a hard-partying fixture in the Los Angeles nightlife world. “What I grew up around—the art world, the Hollywood scene, the club scene—got me to want to look a certain way,” he says. “That’s where all the style comes in. That’s how you create your own image and be yourself.”

 

Hosoi SI #1

 

Hosoi was always consciously looking for ways to differentiate himself. “I definitely didn’t follow the trend,” he says. “I wore spandex and said, ‘No one is going to wear this, that’s why I’m wearing this.’ I didn’t think, ‘I can’t wait until everybody starts wearing this.’” Still, there were plenty of skaters and fans who coopted his looks, though few, if any, could pull them off like he did.

But even as he took his look to the outer reaches, there was a functional aspect to many of Hosoi’s choices. Shogo Kubo, one of the predecessor skaters Hosoi identified with, used to cut up his T-shirts. Hosoi went extreme, shredding the sides, getting rid of the sleeves and necks, using those sleeves for headbands and armbands, then stuffing more T-shirts in his back pocket so they trailed him like a tail. He deemed it “the love shirt,” but it served a purpose. “We were all about looking cool and feeling cool, because we’re sweating, we’re up there working hard,” he says. The T-shirt tail accentuated the moves he was doing for everyone who was watching.

When he debuted the Hammerhead board 30 years ago for his company Hosoi Skateboards, its fish shape looked drastically different from the egg-shaped boards all the other riders were using. When they treated him like he was crazy for it, he explained that it was a high-performance skateboard that he had custom designed to serve his needs: The cut-out sides lightened it up, the swallow tail allowed him to pull off tricks usually prevented by the plastic coping used on ramps during competitions, and the notched-out flat nose made it easier for moves where he’d hold the front of the board. The Hammerhead not only became a classic but caused others skaters and brands to start rolling out their own experimental board designs, for better or worse.

 

 

 

In the early 1990s, skateboarding went through another recession. While Christian Hosoi embraced the sport’s transition into street skating and continued to innovate there, he also further descended into drug addiction. This prevented him from capitalizing on the huge skating boom that the X-Games helped facilitate just a few years later. In 2000 he was sent to prison for drug trafficking. Today Hosoi has been out of prison for 10 years and is 14 years sober. He’s a married father who has become a pastor at the Sanctuary Church in Westminster, California. His story has been chronicled in the documentary Rising Son and his own autobiography, Hosoi: My Life as a Skateboarder Junkie Inmate Pastor.

In late March, Vans opened a three-years-in-the making 43,000- foot skatepark in Huntington Beach, the Orange County town where Christian Hosoi has lived for almost 20 years. Along with skaters Ed Templeton and Tosh Townend, he was one the inaugural members of the park’s Sole of Fame, dedicated to local skate legends. Just now he’s coming off a toe injury that sidelined him for six months, but Hosoi is still competing, prepping himself for a Red Bull–sponsored event in Brazil. As he says, “It’s time to start skating every day.”

 

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LEE CLOW

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Lee Clow is responsible for some legendary advertising campaigns—not just effective and popular ones, but ones that penetrated popular culture and changed the game: the Taco Bell Chihuahua, the Energizer Bunny and, along with Steve Hayden, the 1984 Apple commercial that launched the Macintosh computer and the hugely successful “Think Different” slogan. From his lifelong home of Los Angeles, the chairman and global director of media arts at TBWA shared his insights on the ad world then and now.

How did you get into advertising?

I grew up surfing and paying not too much attention in school, but I was always drawing in my notebooks and doodling and taking art classes. I figured that I better make this art thing into a career because I’m not interested in much else. I grew up in California, admired Walt Disney—I’m old, so I was here when Disneyland was built. He was my first kind of artist hero because he was an animator; he did this artful thing, and at the same time made it into a business, and with his passion and his focus, wanted to do great things. So I didn’t know if I wanted to be an animator—did I want to be an illustrator? Did I want to be a fine artist?

The thing that seemed missing in graphic design or just becoming an illustrator was the totality of having ideas and storytelling. As I studied in school it was right at the middle ’60s, when advertising was taking on a whole new status or stature. The intelligent advertising that was being done in New York by [Doyle Dane Bernbach]. The Volkswagen campaign—taking the ugly little car designed by Adolf Hitler and making it interesting, famous and popular. Somehow that really appealed to me. The idea of putting something out into the culture that the public responded to.

What was the first campaign you worked on?

I got my biggest and most important opportunity when I got hired at Chiat\Day, a young creative agency. The first really important assignment brand I worked on was Honda. The account got in trouble after we had it a couple years; they were growing and getting bigger and they kind of challenged the agency to add people and treat them with a little more respect. And we were kind of a cocky, arrogant group and maybe didn’t appreciate the potential and opportunity we had, and now all of a sudden they say, “We’re going to talk to another agency.” Unfortunately we lost the account. So it was kind of frustrating, but that was the big opportunity I had with a big brand, and I also learned some lessons about managing and dealing with the client and understanding the reality of being an applied artist.

Has your approach toward the client changed over the years?

Having an idea is one thing. Showing it is probably just as important, and so I think I always had the passion and the artistic design skills. The storytelling sense came along, and I don’t think that’s changed a lot at all, because I just got more and more passionate and intense—almost in a perfectionist zone. I try to make my work smart, special and relevant.

But learning how to convince clients, convince people on how good and how special an idea is and guarding it is kind of what your life is in terms of all of the pitfalls, all of the ways an idea can be lost. I think being an advocate for my work is the reason why I’m still around when there are a lot of young, talented people I came up with that are long since out of the business. I’m still there because I can nurture young people to develop great ideas and I can help them sell them. I can help them see the light of day, even though it’s getting harder and harder in this kind of new media world we live in with all the constituents you need to deal with.

Traditionally, it seemed like advertising was always about a specific product, but you kind of shifted it to make it about the brand. How did that idea come to you?

The advertising I like to do is to find the brand story and figure out how to tell [it]. You go back to Volkswagen: Here’s a car designed by Adolf Hitler in World War II, and the challenge was to sell it in a country where we were buying cars 30 feet long with giant fins on them and there’s this dopey little car. That was exciting to see that potential, not just to do the individual ads for a brand like Volkswagen but to give it a story that became infectious—that driving a VW became almost a status symbol of a kind of young, free-thinking, spirited people.

Finding a voice as a tone for a brand is the art of what I do. I want to consider myself now as a media artist, not an advertising person, because advertising is kind of defined these days and has a negative stigma attached to it. But to be a media artist is to take a brand and find its voice and tell its story and make it interesting and likeable. I think brands are very much like a person. If you can create a personality for a brand that deals with it like a person and not just a one-dimensional entity—sometimes you’re funny, sometimes you’re smart, sometimes you’re thoughtful. Selling who they are and not just what they make is the exciting dimension of doing what I do, I think.

How was the 1984 Apple campaign created?

Well, of course the most important, being-in-the-right-time aspect of my career was meeting Steve Jobs when he was 25 years old and decides that he’s going to change the world with this thing called a personal computer, which nobody knew what it was, why they needed one, how it fits into their life.

So Macintosh, although we were working on Apple products for a while, was trying to come up with a voice for technology nobody knew they needed or knew why. Steve had this computer that was going to change everything, and he wanted advertising that was as big and important and smart as his product was.

Lee Clow SI #1

 

The headline [of a newspaper ad] was “Why 1984 won’t be like 1984,” and it was offering the generic [thought] that says someday everybody is going to have technology—it’s just not going to be for the big companies having this giant computer in their basement. “Someday everyone is going to have a computer” was the spirit of that ad, but it never ran as a newspaper ad.

I was sitting with an art director and another director-turned-writer and we remembered that headline and that just started images in our head—the Orwell of 1984, the Big Brother that kind of controlled everyone’s lives versus the liberator Apple who’s going to take on Big Brother and democratize this thing called technology and give it to everyone. So it just painted this story in our minds, started small and it got bigger and bigger, and we found Ridley Scott, who had done Blade Runner, to give it a stature and style that was not typical of advertising at that moment. And we built it and grew it and it got bigger. [This all] with the promise that Apple was going to change the way the world works, and we called it the democratization of technology. So we have this amazing commercial and were going to run it on the Super Bowl and the board of directors of Apple got cold feet and almost didn’t run it all.

Why did they get cold feet?

Oh, because they were scared of it—it didn’t show the product, it didn’t demonstrate how it worked, although there was a whole ad campaign that went with this commercial, and IBM was coming into the business and threatening them. But luckily we had Steve Jobs, who was one of the bravest businesspeople I’ve ever known, who basically finally drew the lines: “We’re going today.” And it ran and it became pretty famous, and it did put the stake in the ground.

Where do you go for inspiration?

I built a house right on the ocean 20 some years ago here in Palos Verdes, so when you get up in the morning with a cup of coffee and nobody is up yet and you watch the sunrise and look over the ocean—it’s a pretty good place to have a clear head and kind of focus back in on the problem you are trying to solve, what idea you’re searching for. A lot of creative people in particular want to work at night. I’m actually the reverse.

 

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MIKE D

Posted on by Taylor Norman

CURATOR, FATHER, RAPPER, SURFER— “INTERDISCIPLINARY” IS A GOOD WORD TO USE TO DESCRIBE MICHAEL DIAMOND, A.K.A. MIKE D. GROWING UP IN NEW YORK CITY IN THE 1970S AND ’80S THE SON OF RENOWNED ART DEALER/ COLLECTORS HAROLD AND HESTER DIAMOND, MIKE EXPERIENCED THE BUBBLING BOUILLABAISSE OF PUNK ROCK AND HIP-HOP AMIDST A CLUB AND GALLERY SCENE THAT RECOMBINED THESE DISTINCTLY DOWNTOWN FLAVORS. BEASTIE BOYS, THE RAP GROUP HE FOUNDED ALONGSIDE CHILDHOOD FRIEND ADAM YAUCH AND ADAM HOROVITZ, EVOLVED FROM BRATTY BEGINNINGS TO DEFINE MUSICAL DIVERSITY AND CONSCIOUS FUN OVER A MULTIDECADE CAREER.

MARRIED TO THE FILMMAKER TAMRA DAVIS, DIAMOND IS A PROUD PARENT OF TWO BOYS, AND THEIR FAMILY LEADS A BICOASTAL LIFESTYLE THAT ALLOWS FOR DIVERSE INTERESTS AND PROJECTS. IN 2012, MIKE CURATED TRANSMISSION L.A.: AV CLUB, A 17-DAY MULTIMEDIA ART FESTIVAL AT MOCA IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES. IN 2013, FOLLOWING THE DEVASTATION OF HURRICANE SANDY, DIAMOND AND VISIONARY RESTAURATEUR ROBERT MCKINLEY DEVELOPED ROCKAWAY PLATE LUNCH, A HEALTHY-EATING FOOD TRUCK THAT SERVED AN ESTIMATED 20,000 FREE MEALS TO RESIDENTS OF QUEENS AND BROOKLYN WHO WERE LEFT WITHOUT POWER.

HERE, DIAMOND SPEAKS WITH HIS FRIEND, LONG BOARDING SURF GODDESS KASSIA MEADOR, ABOUT WAKING UP, WAVES AND THE BENEFITS OF BEING A DAD.

 

Everyone has their different times of day that they get inspired. What are your peak hours of creativity?

In different times in my life it’s been different. For so long I was only a night person. I could only create at night and work until 4 in the morning; that was my zone. Then it totally shifted. I cycled around to the opposite, where now I’m so psyched to get up while it’s still dark and take a shower before it’s hot and know that when I come out the sun is going to just be up and I can really focus. I have all this access to my mind and that’s a really cool free moment.

Do you vibe more when it’s rainy or sunny?

Rainy moments are good for me to focus on music because then I’m less distracted. When it’s sunny I always get a little bit jealous when I’m inside in the studio. You tell yourself, aw it’s so nice outside. Life’s better in the sun—what can I say?

That’s why I love California. So, who are your heroes?

Why are heroes such a big thing? There are so many musicians that I look up to that are incredible artists. Artists that I think are incredible. They’re not necessarily heroes. Gandhi is a hero. Gandhi should inspire my daily life, but maybe he might not inspire my daily life as much as a musician might or a book that I’ve read.

What is your all-time favorite book?

I’m not good with all-time favorites, but there’s a book called Ringolevio that I read when I was a kid, and I’ll still go back and read it. It’s kind of like how Basketball Diaries is a coming-of-age type book. I always related to it. I don’t even know if it’s in print. The title Ringolevio comes from the name of a street game in New York City that you played, like stickball.

Like stickball? Cool. I love that!

Emmett Grogan wrote it. He was a New York City street kid who moved to San Francisco and ended up in this whole movement the Diggers, who were like pre-hippie radicals. And the book is about the Diggers too.

What are the movies that always stick with you?

Probably Wes Anderson’s movies, like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. He has this crazy eye for detail that makes his movies real works of art, but then they have this incredible emotional heart to them too.

I just saw his new one, The Grand Budapest Hotel. 

I don’t even want to know if you liked the movie, I just want to see it!

My friend Spike’s new movie Her I really loved. That was incredible. It operated in this surreal circumstance but then all of the issues are just relationship issues that we always have. What’s real, what isn’t real, what’s love, what are the boundaries? Can connections last? Are they meant to just come and go?

And even the connection of the emotional and physical, which is so interesting.

I thought it was really cool that he set it in the future but it wasn’t people in silver spacesuits—it actually seemed plausible. That gave it a surreal edge and added another dimension of meaning to these questions.

In that future, people can’t even connect anymore because they’ve been so virtualized.

But we also have that now. You can have that because of technology, but you can also have that without technology being the factor.

All right, what’s your favorite grub spot in New York? Maybe your favorite spots for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

I would work backwards. For dinner there’s this place called Marco’s in Brooklyn that’s not that far from me. It’s traditional Italian. The same people have this other restaurant called Franny’s that’s also really good. I feel like the trend right now in New York is that everyone’s trying to top each other. There are so many talented chefs and such good food, but everybody’s trying to come up with something that somebody else hasn’t done. Simple is good if you can do it. That’s almost harder to pull off because then you have nothing to hide. Marco’s is like that. There’s a restaurant called Charlie Bird in Manhattan that has super good wine and really good food. And they play good hip-hop so I give them props. Then for breakfast or lunch, it’s Mogador in St. Mark’s Place.

You’ve done so much in your life. With your kids, are you concerned that everything you’ve done is going to overshadow them or make them insecure about their own dreams?

That’s a good question. I get so fueled by my friends that I’m lucky enough to work with, so I just keep my kids incorporated into my world, so they’re exposed to all the same people that I’m excited about. I think that’s a positive thing because what’s normal to my kids is that people create stuff. I mean, we’re all freaks, but they don’t think we’re freaks for doing that!

It’s funny the way things can stick with you from when you’re a kid. I remember when Brittany Leonard would surf in Malibu all the time. Joel Tudor said she’d developed something called Point Break Syndrome because all she ever did was surf a right-hand point break. And I was maybe 15 at the time, and I was like dude, Point Break Syndrome? I don’t wanna get that!

Point Break Syndrome—that’s funny. This morning we surfed Drain Pipes. We looked at the cam online and the surf looked super small so we just grabbed long boards, lines, threw them in the car, went down and surfed. It wasn’t that it wound up being even that big, but I would’ve actually been much better off on a smaller board. Instead I had a long board and no leash, which in a way made it so much more fun because it was so much more challenging.

When you play music, then, do you see the things that you’re playing? Do you see the sound that you’re creating?

Sometimes you’ll make music and you’ll imagine a mood, you know? It’ll be more of a visual mood. As a band we were always super stoked and excited to work on visual stuff because it was another part of the challenge. We were always just as excited to figure out what our record cover was going to be or what the music video would look like as we were making the sounds. Those things went together.

We’d go on tour and talk about what projections we’d use as the backdrop. When I got the opportunity to curate the MOCA show, even though it was completely crazy for me to do it, I was able to because I had had that experience combining visual elements and music. It gave me the tools, I guess.

That was such a great show. It was like you could really feel all these passions together inside the space.

Yeah. I think with the heaviest pieces—and this might be corny to say—but it can be a photograph or a painting, or even when you walk into a building, it’s almost like it will create this frequency. It’s a frequency you’ll feel.

Totally, I feel that. It’s like that low hum.

That’s it. And I think what we all chase is that moment when you just connect with something and it really moves you. You can have that in visual art, photography and painting and you can have that in music or while you’re watching a film, where you’re completely inside an experience. And that’s why those things intersect with surfing, and skateboarding too. You’re just completely sucked into that experience.

Growing up, you were definitely in the hype scene in New York in the ’80s when New York was really blowing up. Talk about that and how all the art and the rest of the city influenced you.

Growing up in New York City, I was always around visual art and totally stimulated by it. Art and music always seemed the same to me. Music grabbed me and I went like into it 180 million percent, but visual art was always around me, you know? And it was always super important. I feel grateful to have grown up in New York at that time. First of all, I was a kid running around clubs and doing crazy shit. At that time people moved to New York because they were a writer or a photographer or a musician or maybe they didn’t even know yet. Somehow New York was affordable enough. Now you couldn’t do it because it’s prohibitive. But then, you really could. You had music from all different takes all happening in New York. And now you can get that on your laptop or phone. But back then the only way you could get it is if you were there. I mean, if I were 13 years old now, I would still have that same process of discovery, right? But I could be anywhere. Still, it’s not the same as actual physical proximity to something. I think New York is the same in that it’s still a place where there’s all kinds of rad creative stuff happening, but it’s kind of shifted in that you can’t just move to New York and survive. One of the things that keeps me in New York is that almost every day I’ll see somebody who’s like a walking freak show, and I mean that in a good way! I mean, why do you live in Venice? Because there’s stuff happening that you feed off of probably, right?

Absolutely. And in places it’s quiet as a bell, and you only have yourself to inspire you. Finally, what balances you?

Friends, surfing, breathing. [Laughs.] And more than any of it, my kids, definitely. Because you can be completely frazzled and caught up in your mind, but you have to be present with your kids. It’s great to have people that you just have to be present with, and let all your stuff go.

 

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CHRISTY TURLINGTON BURNS + ROGER ROSS WILLIAMS

Posted on by Taylor Norman

MAKING BOLD STATEMENTS REQUIRES BOLD FILMMAKING AND AN OPTIMISTIC VISION.

Citizens of Humanity nurtures documentary short filmmakers to inspire global awareness and influence a course of action. Christy Turlington Burns and Roger Ross Williams both share this passion and bring the human experience closer to all of us in their new documentary shorts, no matter how much distance lies between. Model and advocate Turlington Burns has gone behind the camera to shed light on maternal health issues in the developing world as well in the United States. Her organization, Every Mother Counts, ran a 200-mile relay race to create awareness for mothers’ preventive health and wellness. Her short film, Every Mile, Every Mother, documents the experience and parallels the endurance of the runners to the women who have limited access to health care resources in rural areas of the world. Ross Williams is a seasoned documentary filmmaker whose experiences shooting heartfelt stories in Africa about the human experience have led him to create Tutu: The Essence of Being Human, a short film that examines the strength the Tutu family shares in its mission to fight racism and advocate peace through humanity.

These two talented storytellers sat down together and discussed the challenges and blessings they encountered to bring light to stories set far from America that affect us all.

Christy Turlington Burns: I was curious when you said you almost chose [Malawi’s] President Banda for your film, how did you ultimately make the decision to go with Desmond Tutu?

Roger Ross Williams: Jared Freedman [of Citizens of Humanity] had already been talking to Tutu. They came to me with the project. But I had in my last film, God Loves Uganda, focused on faith leader Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, so there was that connection to the idea. When Jared saw that part of the film, he was like, “I really want that, what you captured from Bishop Senyonjo, to translate that to Tutu.” Tutu is very different, though, because he is such a public figure and press surrounds him all the time. He can’t walk out of the store without paparazzi around him. So it was very different, where as Bishop Christopher, he’s a private citizen. It was interesting with the Tutu media frenzy around him, which was a challenge in the film.

C: How big of a crew did you have?

R: I just had a South African production company. I had a South African producer, sort of a production coordinator, my DP from New York, and local sound. Just a small documentary crew. How about you? How did you decide to do yours?

C: Well, I have only made one other film. I made a documentary called No Woman, No Cry a couple years ago. It came out in 2010. . . . We filmed in Tanzania, Guatemala, Bangladesh and here in the U.S. looking at maternal health, the challenges and also the solutions in those countries. It’s funny, because I’ve wanted to make a documentary film for a long time, but it was only when I had a complication with my own delivery of my first child, I was like, this is the subject that I want to explore and I want to understand more what’s happening globally. Which women have access, which women don’t. It kind of grabbed me as a subject matter and then got me to take the risk to go into unfamiliar territory and take that journey.

R: I think documentaries have to be personal. You have to be passionate about it. It’s such a commitment; it’s such a long-term commitment too. That’s really what sparked me and sparked a lot of people when they make theirs, especially their first film.

C: Yeah, my husband is a filmmaker and he’s made probably four movies since I made my one documentary, so I got the sense of like, oh my god. It’s really like a child in the sense that it took me this long to be like, OK, I think I can actually start to make something else again.

 

 

 

R: Tell me about the film. Let’s talk about Every Mother Counts. How did you start that organization?

C: It started with the experience. I had this complication with my first child, who’s 10 now. I started to hemorrhage after I delivered her. I was in a birthing center here in New York City. I had a midwife, I had a doula, I was in the right place at the right time and they knew what was happening and they managed it the best they could. But in the weeks afterward, when I was trying to understand, how did that happen out of nowhere—like, why? Why me?—was when I came across the global figures of maternal mortality. I learned that my complication is often a cause of death for girls and women in a number of countries. Ninety-nine percent of them are in developing countries, but they happen here in the U.S. too. We have two deaths per day, and half of those are preventable as well. Once I learned the information, I had to know more about why. This isn’t one of those issues where we don’t know how to save the lives of women. It’s a matter of whose life has equal value or doesn’t. That part of it got me to want to do more. My mom’s from El Salvador and I’ve traveled a lot besides that, but I grew up going to her country, which also has a lot of issues around maternal health.

R: I’ve spent a lot of time in El Salvador.

C: I grew up going there quite a lot, but I went after I had my first child. I went back with CARE, one of the humanitarian organizations, while pregnant, with my mom, to El Salvador. That’s where I had the experience of traveling to a remote village and thinking if I’d had that complication here I probably wouldn’t have made it. Then going back and having my son and no complications and then really deciding then that this was an issue that, first of all, nobody knew it was an issue. I mean literally, I was shocked to find out women were dying. But I started to educate myself. I started traveling a bit with CARE and then also with ONE, just looking at maternal health in a number of countries. I then applied to Columbia University to get my master’s in public health.

The film actually just became a way that I thought. I was writing a column when I first started traveling with CARE for Marie Claire magazine, and I thought it was great to bring some of these stories of women that I’m meeting to life and closer to other women who otherwise wouldn’t get to travel. Then I thought those are great and useful, but film is such an incredible medium to really transport people and to really get someone to put their feet in the shoes of another human being.

The film became very clear. I just saw it. In Peru, I was coming back from a really remote area and thinking, this is my documentary film. I’m going to get out there, I’m going to look at this and examine this as an issue and hope that people want to see this. We were able to get a lot of people to learn about the issue from the film. It really has turned into an organization once I finished the movie. The film feels really good, and I think it’s going to make an impact. But then what? What are you telling the audience to do when people feel, like, how can I help?

R: Exactly. So that’s how you developed the organization? Because that’s really the big thing right now in documentary film is outreach and engagement around the film. Now it’s a whole industry. So now your budget for the film, actually your outreach and engagement budget, equals the budget of the film almost. And we develop pretty extensive campaigns. Now you have your film producer and we have our outreach and engagement producer.

C: Yes. Initially, we thought of it as a campaign, and I had it very much tied to the Millennium Development Goals. It came out in 2010 and I thought, OK, for the next five years I’ll use the film and my platform as best I can to get this to be a mainstream issue. But of course, after about a year or so, I thought, OK, that’s helpful, but a lot of organizations asked, “Can I screen your film? Can I raise money off of your film?” I thought, OK, yeah, that’s sort of satisfying, but not really that meaningful in the end. Not for me and also not for the audience that I’m touching. I think the audience was sort of like individuals like me who, whether they had a complication or not, they’d come through the experience. And just simply having come through the experience they felt connected and wanted to have that tangible connection with another woman and another mother. We really wanted everyone to come be that.

R: How did you decide to use the race as sort of the structure of this film that you did?

C: A couple years ago in New York City, we were invited to join the New York City Marathon as an organization. There was a dad in my kids’ school, “Oh you have a nonprofit? Would you like 10 spots for the marathon?” And I think he thought we might turn around and sell them or give them away in some kind of contest or something and I thought I know at least a handful of runners who would run this. And I kind of always had in the back of my mind maybe one day I’d run a marathon. So we responded and said, “Yeah we’ll take the 10 and we’re going to run it.” We were only three people at that time as a staff. So the three of us are definitely in, and then our next level of friends in our circle who are runners and could handle it, no problem. We started training and as soon as I started training—I wasn’t really a runner but had run up to four or five miles before, running and trying to increase my mileage a little bit. And I thought as all that time was going by, like, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” But it also to me became really clear that one of the biggest barriers for women to access care is distance. I thought a lot of people raise money and awareness in marathon running. But for us specifically in our issue and how many women live in rural areas and can’t get to health care when they need it, especially in emergency situations, like that will be the way we communicate around this. Five kilometers being the minimum distance women have to walk to seek care; 35 kilometers is nothing, but it’s average probably for emergency transport. Just to get people again to put themselves in the seat of another human being.

So we ran it the first time. We ended up making it a team of 50  the next year because it was resonating with people, the idea that distance is a barrier. “Oh, wow, I can make that connection— women should have a ride or be able to have access.” So we got this opportunity to then run this 200-mile relay race. As soon as I learned about it, I thought what a cool idea. But it also takes that running metaphor that much further, because 200 miles is a very long way. Running as a team and thinking about how you really have to share this experience when one person is sort of losing energy, losing steam, you can switch them up and give us the support that we need to keep going. . . . I wanted to make a film of it but I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of making a film like this or finishing it this quickly. I would’ve thought, maybe we’ll shoot it and we’ll see what will happen down the line, but I didn’t have any real reason for it. When we started talking to Jared at COH, I said, “Well, we have this thing coming up that I want to film anyways.” He was like, “That sounds great, and that sounds interesting. Let’s do it.”

R: It’s great because you have a structure. You have a beginning and you have an end.

C: Exactly. And we want to inspire people to get involved. I hope that is ultimately what it does.

R: Yes, it’s very inspiring.

C: Had you done a short before?

R: I did a 30-minute short, called Music By Prudence, which won the Oscar in 2010. But I started it actually making a feature. I shot a feature and then I took it to HBO and I showed it to Sheila Nevins of HBO Documentary. Ten minutes and she’s like, “This is an Oscar short. It’s going to win the Academy Award.” She’s like, “Cut your feature and then you’ll see that I’m right.” They let me just spend six months cutting my feature, and I sat and watched my film and I was like, she’s right. I could do so much more. We could possibly win an Oscar, and then we did, which does so much unbelievably for the issue, which was about disability in Africa.

C: That’s incredible. The moral of the story—you finished it full length and then you reapproached it? That must be so hard.

R: It was painful because you’re just cutting out this and that, and you’re so married to this material. It’s like cutting your heart out.

C: Do you always work with the same editor?

R: No. Actually the last film, God Loves Uganda, is a different editor, an amazing editor, actually—one of the best in the business, Richard Hankin. I work with the same DP. Editors I sort of tailor it to the project. Some editors have strengths in one area and not in another. But God Loves Uganda is my first feature. This Tutu short my partner edited. . . . The great thing about making films is you get to meet people like Tutu, who is a hero of mine and a hero to many. Being around him was extraordinary. He’s such a down-to-earth guy considering everything he’s gone through and the history and the amount of people around him. He’s very moved when he talked about his life; it’s just amazing.

C: Yes, I loved that. There’s that old expression of behind every great man, behind every human, there is another who is making it possible for them to do great things. They, too, have made such a commitment to the world and there are a lot of sacrifices that they have to make. To see the impact not only on the world but also on his family—he has a very big family and a close family, but that’s just such an incredible thing to be able to get insight on.

R: He’s out being a person of the world and his wife is actually there in South Africa fighting that battle. What’s amazing about her is that she’s sort of different because it was his 80th birthday last year and he had his big party in the cathedral with Bono and Clinton and everyone, all his friends, and Richard Branson. She is a person who likes to be in the township with the people. She wanted to have her 80th birthday in this one-room church. All of the dignitaries have to come and cram into this one-room church because this is where she wanted to be. On the day of her birthday, she built a playground for the kids in this township who didn’t have a playground and she wanted to dedicate the playground and be with the kids on that day. She doesn’t want media attention; she doesn’t like the cameras. She’s just amazing—he actually teared up talking about her because she’s his rock. She’s the rock for all his family. He has three daughters and all of them do the work, they all do the work of Tutu, they all work in women’s rights and they’re all ministers and they all are inspired when they talk about their mother. Their mother was the real rock and, as he said, she is much more radical than he is.

C: I think it’s more common than has been told or shared over history. I think about Bob Marley’s wife, and one of his daughters wrote a song for our city and she also tells that story . . . he was off doing what he had to do, but she was really the rock and she was the one who’s still there, keeping the name alive.

R: Motherhood. There’s a theme. Strong, the woman behind the man, and it’s really behind motherhood for her. She raised pretty extraordinary daughters. Without Tutu—he wasn’t there much. I look at even Winnie and Nelson Mandela. She became very radical because she was in the streets fighting and he was away in prison. The women are the real sort of backbone of the clan and probably the world. Definitely in Africa.

 

Christy Turlington Burns + Roger Ross Williams SI #3

 

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