Namsa Leuba is an astute visual storyteller. Whether capturing candid glimpses of mundane family life or exquisitely composed fashion fantasies, Leuba hints at worlds of rich, mythological narrative just outside the frame. Although only recently graduated from ECAL/University in Switzerland, Leuba’s already managed to cover an impressive variety of subject matter in her work, including an homage to the Black Panthers and a survey of bad-ass Congolese style.

One of Leuba’s main academic interests is African identity seen through Western eyes, and nowhere does this come into focus more than her series Ya Kala Ben. In 2011, Leuba left Switzerland and traveled to her mother’s homeland of Guinea to shoot the series, which draws upon the spiritual symbolism of Guinean animist artifacts and statuettes.

Modesty, luck, fecundity or a channel for exorcism, those statuettes hold a cultural value through what they represent or symbolise. With this work, I transform these objects, cosmological symbols of a community, who traditionally have a signification when used as part of rituals.

…In recontextualizing these sacred objects through the lens, I brought them in a framework meant for Western aesthetic choices and taste.

This photographic eye would make them speak differently. Throughout my fieldwork, I had to deal with sometimes violent reactions from Guineans who viewed my procedures/practices as a form of sacrilege. Some were afraid and were struck with astonishment.

The result is a stunning series of images that draws upon documentary and fashion photography to tell a personal story of African heritage. In Happy Polish, Leuba investigates an entirely disparate branch of her family tree. From an interview with LightRa:

One of my father’s uncles is married to a Polish woman and they have been living there for many years now. They have a fabric factory there and are quite wealthy people, and I got interested in the lives of their workers and of their family’s maids.

Embedding herself deeply within the lives of these workers’ families, Leuba captured gracefully intimate images of Polish domesticity: meals, idle moments, after-school malaise, midnight hi-jinks. Wherever globally her subject is situated, Leuba approaches with versatility, curiosity and empathy– yet she never loses her distinctive voice, and her eye for composition and color remains impeccable.

What do you like to see in a fashion photograph? Is there a mood or feeling you like your fashion work to be imbued with?

Sometimes I like to do fashion projects, but in a fine art direction and to have a fashion aesthetic. I try to do something fresh. I think that most of the time fashion pictures are very boring. I want to keep on my own project. That’s the thing that’s really important for me.

In Ya Kala Ben, you “desecrate” Guinean ritual artifacts by re-contextualizing them within Western stylistic choices– but you also spent months researching Guinean animist rituals and symbols. How did the artifacts’ original meanings inform your shooting?

I selected the artifacts meticulously to function with my pictures. It’s all dependent on the meaning of the situation. I take what I need to make my own ritual.

How did you find the Guinean models and acrobats featured in Ya Kala Ben? Was it difficult convincing them to participate in a project that some saw as sacrilege?

I traveled all across Guinea to accommodate the different rituals and ceremonies in my series. I went to so many places to find the good spots and to choose the right people. I personally created all the costumes and I chose every single thing that I used. When I got ready to shoot, I could waste no time. I had to avoid the sometimes violent reactions from people, because my humans models meant something holy.

Do you feel more connected to your Guinean roots after making Ya Kala Ben?

This trip was an opportunity to reconnect with some of my roots. I have always wanted to explore and share this other culture that is part of me. And I knew that the best way to do so was to visit the village founded by my great-grandfather. This pilgrimage to the land of some of my ancestors inevitably and immediately raised the sensitive question of “origin” or “origins.” Mine, that of my parents, of others (my subjects) and of my approach.

What sort of reactions have you gotten from Guineans who’ve seen the finished project of Ya Kala Ben?

Nobody has seen my work yet in Afrika. I would like to show them. I am sure it will be very interesting.

Throughout your work, images of bodies bound by rope, as well as faces obscured by plants and fabric seem to frequently arise. What attracts you to these aesthetic refrains?

This world is rigour, everything is in its place. I try to make with them to sculpt my subject. The sculpture it is the equivalent of a sacred text.

In both Happy Polish and Ya Kala Ben, you seem to have fully immersed yourself in an unfamiliar world. How do you navigate unfamiliar social territory to produce such gorgeously intimate images? What do you like about placing yourself in those types of situations?

I like meeting people and learning new things about them that I have not known. I am a social person. I like the challenge. It is very exciting and great. I think that I like knowing new people.

Where would you like your photography to take you in the future?

I am very enthusiastic for what’s coming next. At the beginning of 2014 I will go to South Africa for 5 months for my work. I won an artist residency there. I would like to travel around the world and have the luxury to keep working on my personal projects.

Watching L’amour fou, the documentary about the art auction conducted by Pierre Bergé after the death of his partner of 50 years, Yves Saint Laurent, is a little less inspiring than watching Herb & Dorothy, the 2009 documentary that’s also about art collecting (and then unloading late in life). But I’ll get to the reasons why in a minute, because first I want to praise this movie for what it gets excellently right:

1. You get to see a tiny amount of very intimate, loving footage related to the relationship between YSL and Bergé. Bergé’s eulogy for his deceased husband is as moving a moment as you’ll see in theaters this year. And, earlier, some vintage one-on-one conversation footage where YSL playfully tells his man that he enjoys male “body hair” and that he wants to live in “a large bed, a full one,” should clear up any clueless viewer’s ideas about them being strictly business associates. Bergé was YSL’s daddy bear.

Left: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Right: one of YSL’s Mondrian-inspired dresses.

2. Bergé is not the kind of guy to waste time mourning the past. His clear-eyed approach to the dismantling of the couple’s astonishingly large art, furniture and rare object collection is a study in not being attached to things when it’s time for them to exit your life. Besides, he had plenty of time to mourn while YSL was alive and trying to simultaneously drown himself in booze and snort up all the cocaine on the planet. During that time Bergé stood by and took care of his clinically depressed, sickened, addict partner and kept all the paperwork in order so that YSL could design clothes and then hermit himself in a private room, put on a caftan and inhale a small pyramid of blow.

3. You get to see a healthy amount of Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux, YSL’s muses. One light and warm (de la Falaise), one dark and swaddled in black leather (Catroux), they are cool injections of French womanhood into YSL’s insular gayness. Catroux, especially, is like something a writer would invent, never without her sunglasses, even at night.

Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux

4. Their lives were an orgy of luxury and shopping. They bought houses, art and more houses and more art. “One fine day a Mondrian came into our lives,” says Bergé, like it flew into their window and decided it was happiest living next to that Picasso over the fireplace. And then, when it was done, Bergé sent it to the auction house, a place he describes as “the undertakers of art.”

5. Thrill to the head-scratching vagaries of the art auction secondary market where an Ensor fetches more than a Degas.

6. This sort of thing:

And if, in the end, it’s all a little less inspiring than Herb & Dorothy, it’s because of that wealth. Extreme capitalism, even when it’s predicated on the work of a design visionary like Yves Saint Laurent and subsequently used in the service of building an awesome art collection, is sort of automatically less interesting than going on a journey with two extremely ordinary, working class collectors like Herb and Dorothy Vogel, whose lives revolved around living on her librarian’s salary and amassing crazy amounts of conceptual and minimalist pieces (when no one else wanted them) on his postal worker’s income. It’s easy to see a Brâncusi and say, “I’ll take it,” when you’re swimming in cash, or getting a Warhol piece for free because you hang out with him and he decides to photograph you. It’s way more dangerous to risk your retirement savings on work you love just because you love it, become Christo’s cat-sitter and then later donate all of it to various museums without asking for anything in return.

But again, this isn’t meant to harsh on these guys. YSL backed up his decadence with a legacy of his own amazing art worn by fancy ladies the world over. The planet needs people like him, people who live their lives exactly as they please. And if that life involves getting high with Mick Jagger and flying around France in your own private helicopter and asking Betty Catroux what she wants for dinner and she says, “Cigarettes,” then that’s cool, too.

Dave White is the author of Exile in Guyville, film critic for Movies.com, a contributor to L.A.’s “Slake” and KCRW’s “UnFictional.” Find him on Facebook.

Clockwise from top: States of Matter, Natalie Portman in one of Rodarte’s Black Swan costumes, and Dave White at MOCA (photo by Chris Gardner).

I think about the La Brea Tar Pits a lot. It’s my favorite place in Los Angeles.

One of the things I like about the main tar pit is that it’s a neighbor to the LA County Museum of Art. Separating them is a permanent outdoor installation of huge concrete Donald Judd cubes. I like the way the cubes are enormously heavy, solid, orderly and immobile, but 20 feet away is a bubbling pit of tar that seems alive and chaotic and—if the movie Volcano is to be believed—possibly even going to kill us all some day and swallow those cubes whole.

Donald Judd: Untitled (for Leo Castelli), 1977

That block of land at Wilshire and Fairfax is also slugging itself around my brain while I’m inside MOCA at the Pacific Design Center at the Rodarte: States of Matter show. Because when you walk inside, the lower level is engaged in a similar kind of boxing match between the witchy, mentally ill Black Swan ballerina costumes that Kate and Laura Mulleavy created for Natalie Portman’s freakout, and several other black dresses that have been assembled from dyed cheesecloth and gauze, black feathers, metal lace and black vinyl embossed in a way that resembles a gnarled, lumpy, horror-creature dream. Hedora from Godzilla vs The Smog Monster appears to have been skinned alive after emerging from the oozing, bubbling Tar Pits and then turned into a shoulder cap for a dress. While you stare at it wondering how and why, you realize that if you took a very close-up photograph of all the elements going on at once, it would seem like a scorched, doom-landscape. Not a dress, but something that could swallow a giant Donald Judd cube. And that is fantastic.

Photo: Autumn de Wilde

Climb the stairs for more dresses and more Black Swan gear. Now the entire space on MOCA’s second floor is a strobe light show of flurorescent black and red competing for attention and, at times, simultaneously submerging the area in darkness. None of the clothes are black but the narrative is still a scary bedtime story.

At the top of the stairs is a group of white dresses suspended on wires that, in the black light, turn to into floating Haunted Mansion ghosts but, at, odd intervals, in brightest light, have the feel of a pearl-draped grandma who decided to add bedspread fringe to her sleeves just to remind you that she’s about to turn a hundred and she’s not done having it her way quite yet. Gnarled, nubbly wool pops up all over the place, and one of the dresses features a bodice that looks like a shearling breastplate. Everything here is white or near-white and, depending on when you look at it, in darkness or in light, it can feel both romantic and full of strange dread.

Photos: Ourcroissant

If you move over there are white incarnations of the black ballet costumes from below and, then, in the back corner, the film’s “Oops I just stabbed myself in the stomach because I’m crazy” costume, its hand-made open red wound popping out like a really gross flower, front and center.

The shock of that garment tempers the Dario Argento-ish smeared, streaked red dresses from a 2008 collection hovering nearby. They haven’t been splattered, though. They’ve been soaked and left to precision drip. Again, order co-existing with chaos. These are my favorite pieces in the show, because they remind me of a fake blood-stained white porcelain teapot by the Spanish artist Antonio Murado that a friend gave me, the perfect dresses to wear to a crime scene tea party or teen slasher prom night. They’re the last thing you witness. They’re the horror movie’s “Final Girl.” They’re everything beautiful and terrifying, all at once.

Antonio Murado: Salome Coffee Set

Dave White is the author of Exile in Guyville, film critic for Movies.com, a contributor to L.A.’s “Slake” and KCRW’s “UnFictional.” Find him on Facebook.

Zone out on the graceful stylings of suave Spanish skater Kilian Martin in this video shoot for British menswear magazine Man About Town.

Jay Carroll of the lovely style blog One Trip Pass shot this hypnotic little clip at the Pendleton factory.

Via 01 Blog.

Japanese label Mercibeaucoup‘s Autumn/Winter 2010-11 collection makes me happy. Yes, the skies are darkening, but your wardrobe doesn’t have to. Just because there’s black ice on the ground doesn’t mean you can’t dance through your days. Strap on some drop-crotch lederhosen or your most ostentatious knitwear this winter, and also forever.

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Dis Magazine refuses to stop blowing my mind. Every time they release a new photo set, it’s more extravagant and outrageous than the last! Their freshest fashion spread brings back the chic early 90s trend Ebola for some hot– like, “my body temperature is 110 degrees” hot– medical gear and near-death illness-inspired looks.

I was so stoked on the Ebola virus back in the day! I used to carry around The Hot Zone like a Bible. It’s nice to see my favorite Congolese Filoviridae making a comeback. Bird flu can suck it.

As promised: Harmony Korine’s new short film, Act Da Fool, featuring Provenza Schouler‘s new collection. Fashion label with imagination meets filmmaker with imagination. It makes me happy when Korine chooses to remind us that there’s a whole big incredible world out there, decaying and thriving and reinventing itself everyday. This is beautiful.

It’s about girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire. It’s about the great things in life. The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor.

Harmony Korine on Act Da Fool, his soon to be released short film for rad fashion label Provenza Schouler.
Consider us stoked. Peek at some behind the scenes photos and the film’s gorgeous poster after the jump, and read more about the collaboration at Nowness.

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Art inspires fashion all the time– but simply taking photos of an installation piece and printing them a dress? That’s some future shit! The new winter collection from Shenzen-based fashion label ffiXXed uses images of James Deutsher‘s awesome installation We are Building a Civilised Space Here (also the title of their collection) as the aesthetic foundation for the two pieces seen above. It’s an audaciously direct approach, sure, but the results are stunningly effective, and palpably romantic. What a lovely way to reimagine the “floral print” dress!

Via Real Normal.

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