“Disarming” doesn’t begin to describe the effect Kate Steciw‘s photographs have on me. I’ve been staring at the flowers, automobiles and fingernails in her gorgeously printed zine, The Strangeness of This Idea, for hours and I still can’t put the feeling into words. Let’s take it step by step: The most obvious layer of weirdness comes from the images she’s Photoshopped to render into 3D shapes, geometric puzzles and hyper-real distortions. Enchanting as these manipulations may be, they seem like a sly MacGuffin that can only offer clues to the real mystery of Steciw’s unsettling intentions.

The compositions themselves feel dangerously loose, like the camera has supernaturally drifted out of the photographer’s hand to focus on a seemingly benign, but seriously haunted background detail: an ominous piece of garbage, or a towering wedding dress that threatens to smother us if we get any closer. It somehow reminds me of Harris Savides’ memorable camerawork in Elephant, a reference point that could also be tied into to this next factor: almost all of Steciw’s photos are in a portrait orientation. It didn’t pop out at first, but upon closer observation it seems like an intentional subterfuge. Stewciw’s rigid portrait framing often works against her static subjects, producing a eerily calm sense of photographic perversion. Savides’ decision to shoot Elephant in the unusual (for modern movies) 1.37:1 aspect ratio produced strikingly similar feelings of anxiety in me. It’s the same feeling you get from watching a video someone’s shot in a portrait orientation on a digital camera or cell phone. Weird and somehow vulnerable.

The Strangeness of This Idea is available from Hassla Books.

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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.

Photos and art pieces by Brooklyn-based Jesse Hlebo, who also makes zines, cassette tapes, and other rad objects that exist in real life, through Swill Children.

UPDATE: Jesse has curated a massive NYC art show opening this week called Short Term Deviation. It’s at EFA Project Space and includes installations, video screenings, and a zine library with work from Cali Dewitt, Sumi Ink Club, Hamburger Eyes and tons of other rad people. Check out the opening on Thursday, September 23!

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Of all the spots in the world to find work as a paramedic, fate brought Michael Julius to Putnam County– one of the poorest places in Florida. This strange and forgotten locale, which Julius characterizes as a sprawling, sandy 827 square mile plot of land “pocked with hundreds of small lakes, and tucked in tangly forests,” provides Julius’ on-the-job photo series, Rescuing Putnam, with a shockingly vivid sense of physical space. It’s the lurking presence of Putnam’s residents, living (and dying) “in trailers and shacks, along webs of unpaved roads,” that provides Rescuing Putnam with its resigned, melancholy psychological space.

Throughout a decade of bloody ambulance rides and smoldering ranch homes, Julius’ camera served as his closest confidante, silently sharing both the madness of these unsettling emergency response calls, as well as the warm, intimate world of the medics and firemen who commit themselves to this stressful way of life. Insig.ht conducted a fascinating interview with Julius, where he reflects on the growing sense of disillusionment that crept up on him over the years:

Statistically, this is a career that doesn’t lend itself to a lengthy service. The average career span for your basic garden-variety medic is 3-5 years. For me, the burnout was as much about the physical toll on the body as anything. Every three days I would essentially stay up all night. This, compounded by the repetitive aspect of the job, is exhausting. By repetitive I mean that I eventually realized that I was seeing the same people over and over. Some are actually sick though many are not, or at least not in an emergent sense. The skill-set to evaluate the needs of your sick and hurt patients eventually became a hindrance because I saw how so many of them were in fact not sick at all. It’s frustrating. Towards the end of my career I told a drug seeking patient, who had just finished performing a hilariously bad seizure, “You know, seizure patients usually urinate on themselves.” I wanted to see her piss herself. That’s pretty cynical.

We end up at the same houses. Houses full of thieves and alcoholics, with the same adolescent boys sitting on fence posts, or car hoods, or tossing footballs; and, when we arrive they pitch their thumbs, mumbling, “They’re in the back.” And in the back are the same old patients, face down in their vomit. It breaks my heart to see these boys conditioned to this. The very last patient of my career spit on me and said, “Clean that up, bitch”. It’s a river of misery and it goes on forever.

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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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There’s a buzzing in the air, a dual feeling of danger and excitement– destruction and creativity– in the fallen urban environments that fuel director Shan Nicholson’s work. His lush new video for El-P‘s haunting instrumental “Time Won’t Tell,” revels in a nostalgia for the anarchic freedom of childhood, and heralds the pleasure of building something new out of the ashes of something old.

It’s almost a direct dramatization of the themes underlying Downtown Calling, Nicholson’s first documentary and the story of New York City in the late 70′s. Narrated by Debbie Harry, it’s a movie all about self-made entertainment blossoming from an environment of social unrest and economic chaos. In retrospect, it seems crazy. What enabled the downtown renaissance in New York when many other major metropoleis just crumble with a whimper? What’s the magic ingredient that makes the boys in “Time Won’t Tell” play instead of fight?

In that same era, the EPA decided to give rad photographers money to take amazingly frank pictures of urban decay, and they called it Documerica. Somehow it feels like the whole thing would be decried as “communism” these days, making the existence of these images all the more miraculous. After the jump, take a look at some of Danny Lyon‘s phenomenal photographs of New York kids from Documerica.

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The idea of photography as a way – to experience the world as it is not, in different ways – is fascinating to me, transforming the known into an unknown unapproachable virtual reality that is able to contain an enormous power.

So sayeth artist Anne de Vries and, amazingly, his work is actually able to back it up. Take one look at his pictures and it becomes clear: anything, no matter how utilitarian or mundane, can be reconfigured, distorted, replicated, or marked in just such a way that it is no longer a familiar object, but a foreign concept. It turns out the boundary between reality and unreality is remarkably thin. Our minds are constantly on the lookout for a foothold into the abstract: stick a pair of eyes on a chunk of wood or and a soul is born. Combine colorful construction paper with eerie smut and suddenly sex is something altogether alien. A few well-placed Lose Weight Exercise balls and a couple smears of paint, and our dreamy muscle man is now inhabiting a breathtaking nowhere space.

Since his materials are digital and limitless, it’s impossible to predict the form de Vries’ next project will take or the possibilities it might reveal. But one thing you can rely on is that he will give the people what they want: something new. De Vries champions the image as an act of creation, rather than documentation. Construction rather than reproduction.

If you work as an artist with the same medium you cannot avoid the question, why make more images if there are already so many? This question became central in my practice, through my work I try to find answers and formulate more questions.

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Is Raoul Gatepin a rogue anthropologist from another planet? He must have been sent here by some sinister space committee to study humanity through the lens of chilled objectivity—but it’s clear in Gatepin’s photography that he’s fallen under the spell of this planet’s sublime strangeness. His desolate, disorienting landscapes are somehow stunningly intimate, in spite of their silence. One series of odd architectural images, Piramid, calls upon a quote by the curmudgeonly hypothetical naturalist Henry David Thoreau to frame the work within a skeptical view of the everyday world. As you sink into Gatepin’s photos, however, the referenced cynicism seems little more than a sly pretense for the ugly beauty and accidental geometry he’s secretly sharing. Sure, humans are illogical, nearsighted beasts, but look how great their weird world can be!

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How can we make it so that men look like this all the time? I’m serious, is there a petition I can sign? Dave Mead took these photos of fantastically flocculent fellas donning dapper olde thyme frocks at the 2009 World Beard and Mustache Championship in Anchorage, Alaska (where else?), but I wish I could tell you that this was just a page ripped out of a standard college yearbook in the year 2010. Why can’t we live in a world like that?

Via Share Some Candy.

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Images by New York photographer Robert S. Johnson III. Don’t miss the series of eerie and intimate found photos of WWII (taken by his grandfather) that Johnson recently shared with HUH. Magazine.

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