Tag: The Fader

Creative Brief: Emily Keegin, The Fader

Asked to describe the style of photography featured in The Fader, the celebrated music journal launched in New York in 1999 championing contemporary style and emerging artists, Keegin shoots back with, “All-you can-eat buffet”. The magazine’s photo director since 2015, having previously worked for Time and Bloomberg Businessweek, she describes her preferred aesthetic as “manic”, explaining, “I like all kinds of photography and am happiest when genre, style and hue smash into each other on the same page”.

While her predecessors championed intimacy and authenticity, gaining unusual access to musicians and shooting them in relaxed pose in natural light, Keegin’s approach injects flash, colour and surrealism. “To me, great photography is the result of an emotional connection between a photographer and her subject,” she says. “This form of interpersonal magic is not genre specific or the result of a certain set of aesthetic constraints.”

15 October 2018

Greg Halpern’s dreams of California in ZZYZX

“It’s hard to know when to stop,” says Gregory Halpern. “I remember putting my camera away on a trip home and being relieved it was out of sight. I never feel that way, so that was clearly a sign. I haven’t kept track, but I shot maybe 700 to 1000 rolls of film.”

He’s talking about ZZYZX, which he’s worked on for five years, partly supported by a Guggenheim fellowship. Shot in Southern California, starting out on the eastern fringes of the state then moving slowly westwards towards Los Angeles and the Pacific, it’s named after an ‘unincorporated community’ in the Mojave desert, and has a similar sense of the outsider. The opening picture shows a gnarled hand, with a callus on the thumb and dirt in the fingernails, outstretched to show seven stars tattooed on the palm. The next shows stark black trees in the desert in the wake of a fire.

27 June 2018

David Brandon Geeting’s Amusement Park on show in New York

There is something frantic about David Brandon Geeting’s photography. In his latest collection, Amusement Park, the Greenpoint, Brooklyn-based artist creates a mood that is exhilarating and vibrant, but also verging on collapse, as though its tether could snap at any moment. Where his 2015 book, Infinite Power, was energetic and kinetic, with Amusement Park he’s aiming for “information overload”. “I’m not afraid of making people confused or dizzy,” he says. “I wanted it to be an onslaught of colours and forms and things that don’t make sense.”

29 January 2018