Zakary le Stéle S/S 13 Lookbook

When approaching the creation of the Zakary le Stéle Spring/Summer 2013 Lookbook, photographer Tsasha Olivier looked to his chosen themes such as claustrophobia and mental disintegration to create a world locked inside a rural Portuguese villa. The photos swallow the viewer into a compound-like setting where the model, Lien Vieira, is unravelling, revealing her inner turmoil, an effect heightened by the hypnotic abstract prints of the collection. The theme is harshly juxtaposed with the designer's floaty, windswept vision. Soft, fluid, diaphanous silks billow in the breeze peacefully and freely, with wild tilapia fish leather accents and structured camel wool cut sharply to the body in a modern sweep. View rest of the photos after the jump.

Photography by Tsasha Olivier / Model: Lien Vieira / Stylist: Abri Ferebani / Hair & Makeup by Pat McLou

A New Fashion Shoot by Javier Ferrer Vidal

This new fashion shoot comes to us from photographer Javier Ferrer Vidal featuring jewelry by Spanish based Ma Jewellery from the collection entitled On The Road Leopard. Designer of Ma Jewellery, Marina Figueiredo says, "The leopard owns something unique and paradoxical: its speckled coat. It’s something rare, but it gives a very good camouflagte when this big cat has to go unnoticed. Its life is quite more nocturnal, above all when the hour of hunting is coming: darkness, silence and agility define this moment." See more photos after the jump.

Photography by Javier Ferrer Vidal / Models: Diego de Ramón and Pauline Deleplancque / Photo assistant: Marta Benedito / Jewelry by Ma Jewellry

Faking It At The Met by Michael Barrie

CAT + I,, Wanda Wulz, Italian, 1903-1984, Gelatine silver print, 1932

What do people have against reality? Real reality, that is. I don’t know, ask Republicans, reality show producers, or long-dead 19th century photographers. You won’t get a straight answer from any of them, but at least the latter has a good excuse. And the really unreal, but often real-looking doctored images of many of these lensmen (plus some 20th century pros too) can be seen at a new exhibition entitled Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop on view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. See more after the jump.

Audrey Hepburn, New York, January 1967, Richard Avedon, American 1923-2004 Collage of gelatin silver prints, with applied media, mylar overlay with applied media, 1967

It seems that right out of the starting gate –- photography was invented in 1839 –- early shutterbugs were tinkering with images, tweaking in the cause of art, commerce, practical necessity or laughs. Some fiddling was the result of inherent limitations of the nascent medium; the required long exposure times washed out skies, so landscape artists like Carlton E. Watkins would expose clouds separately and combine two or more negatives for a moodier, even more “realistic” look. When Matthew Brady arranged a sitting for Union General William Tecumseh Sherman & his generals and one failed to show up, Brady snapped the group without him, posed the tardy fellow later and dropped him into the shot. (Frankly, it looks it. But, hey, we’re talking 1865.) I was impressed with the 3D-ish effect achieved by a couple of small relievo ambrotypes, in which a painted background behind an image on glass pushes out the foreground without the aid of a stereoscope. Check out these early craftsman and artists who were photoshopping long before Photoshop, and with no tech support. Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop will be on view through January 27, 2013 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue, New York, New York.

Text by Michael Barrie for Pas Un Autre. (Michael Barrie is a writer for the Late Show With David Letterman, he has been nominated for 20 Emmys, he has also contributed to The Huffington Post)

Grete Stern, Argentinian, born Germany, 1904-1999 Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home 1948

Wildfox White Label Fall 2012 Collection

Wildfox presents a new collection of intimates as part of their White Label for Fall 2012 – "This collection is for girls who only have whiskey in the freezer, milk and leftover cheesecake in the fridge, dream constantly, and love to gaze at the canals from their window in Venice. They bike everywhere, kiss strangers and waltz through the house to Frank Sinatra on vinyl." 

[Wait In Vain] by Adarsha Benjamin

Wait In Vain is a new series by photographer Adarsha Benjamin shot in the Bowery Hotel in New York that explores the loneliness and longing of waiting. Starring artist and actress Nina Ljeti, Annakim Violette–daughter of Tom Petty and talented artist in her own right, and make-up artist Jordan Bree Long this  series is an introspective view of solitude, femininity, strength and beauty. Set in informal and natural lighting, Benjamin's subject inhabit the hotel room's walls like beautiful and romantic ghosts. 

All apparel provided by Condor

My dOCUMENTA (13) by Perry Shimon

Documenta is a contemporary art exhibition that happens every 5 years for 100 days in the decidedly uncool town of Kassel, Germany. Armed with a map, a new friend and a bicycle, I set off on a tour of museums, galleries, train stations, bakeries, hospitals, libraries, planetariums, back alleys, parks, public squares, contentious religious sites, campy hotels, department store windows and nondescript, unmarked sheds to engage with art of nearly every conceivable medium. There are hundreds of artists who participate under the curatorial purview of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the past head curator for P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin.

Experiencing the expansive breadth of the work could very well take the full 100 days and I spent 4 days there, which allowed me to see the majority of the show and much of it in haste. Walking into the Fridericianum, the central museum of the Documenta which houses the 'brain' of the exhibition, I got a feel for Carolyn's distinctly light touch - works like “I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull),” by Ryan Gander, which is nothing more than a cool breeze blowing through the cavernous gallery and Ceal Floyer's 'Til I Get It Right,' a warm, scratchy, saccharin loop of 'so I'll just keep on…til I get it right." These pieces set the tone and my expectations for the show; restrained, intelligent, subtle, poetic, conceptual, lyrical - a change of pace from super-sized commercial art fairs, Deitch grandiosity, YBA-ness, Louis Vuitton Collaboration's and the such. What followed next, was a sprawling, city-wide, choose-your-own-adventure. The sheer amount of relationships between artists, viewers and spaces is immeasurable, that is to say, there are infinite ways to experience the documenta and what follows here are my most resonant impressions and pictures:

Sitting in a wooded patch of Karlsaue Park encircled in the sound cathedral created by Janet Cardiff and George Buress Miller. A cleansing rain washes away a soaring airstrike and blooms into a transcendent choral piece which blends into the light filled spaces between the gently pendulating leaves.

The metronome of Kader Attia's slide projector, firing images of extra occidental masks, objects, scarification, deformation and repair in concert with western faces, deformed and mutilated, in the dark shadows of colonialism. 

William Kentridege's locomotive, swirling, immersive, existential, mathematical, fantastical Refusal of Time; hommage to Georges Méliès with a Loie Fuller phoenix rising and a dramatic procession of silhouettes summoning Kara Walker and Plato.

Geoffry Farmer's field of American LIFE. 

Opening a door and walking into the pitch black of an unmarked shed in the lushly green courtyard of the Hugenottenhaus. Inching forward into the complete darkness that begins to hum with the sound of layered voices warming-up and then erupting into a celebratory a-capella arrangement of Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. The paling of the dark and recognition of the dancing and singing performers around me. The joy of dancing and harmonizing human voices. The new visitors cautiously inching into the complete unknown. The feeling of seniority, knowing, belonging. The quickness of the cycle. (Tino Sehgal)

Rabih Mroué's pixelated, obsessive exploration of technology's role and implications in the Arab Spring. 

Entering the baroque orangerie, ambling through the Cabinet of Astronomy and Physics and happening upon the love machine synthesizer, lovingly constructed by the finnish philosopher-composer Erkki Kurenniemi, which requires the touch of 2 or more people to generate sound. The inborn ability of his machine to bring together complete strangers in giddy wonder and human touch. People from disparate ages, countries and social strata holding and touching each other in different ways to change the tones. The universality of music. The power of human touch. 

Goshka Macuga's bright and ethereal mash up of history and medium, arcing around the broad rotunda of the Fridericianum - self-referential, anachronistic and vertiginous

Listening to the almost uncomfortably candid thoughts of Janet Cardiff in my ears, as I followed her augmented video tour of the old train station on an iPhone.  Experiencing the very real, ebb and flow of station as I simultaneously experience Janet's augmented, non-temporal, immortalized experience of the same space - Perplexed staring from onlookers - Wandering through the back staircases of the station. 'No matter how much you love someone, no matter how hard we cling to hold onto them, we will always be separate from them.' - Jeers from a young man I cut off stepping back into the realtime flow of station - Standing in a carnally vacant, digitally augmented corner, with tears in my eyes, watching lilliputian dancers in a pas de deux expressing that echoing, magnificently lonely sentiment. 

Text and photography by Perry Shimon for Pas Un Autre

Kham

Dress: Diana Matias/Shirt: Ricardo Andrez/Sweat: Maria Gambina/Leggins: Sara Maia

Kham is an editorial directed and styled by Nelson Vieira and photographed by Aloisio Brito and their brilliant creative team based in Oporto, Portugal exclusively for Pas Un Autre. Kham paints a dusty, bucolic landscape, replete with sheep and their restless herder who meanders dirt roads and jagged mountainous byways perhaps begging longingly for whats beyond the great horizon. 

Left:Dress: Ricardo Dourado/Shirt: Luis Buchinho Right: Sweat: Estelita Mendonça/Troussers: Hugo Costa/Coat: Luis Buchinho
Left:Dress: Ricardo Dourado/Shirt: Luis Buchinho
Sweat: Ricardo Dourado/Skirt: Diana Matias
Knitted sweat: Claudia Garrido/Skirt, Leggins and Shirt: Sara Maia
Sweat: Estelita Mendonça/Troussers: Hugo Costa/Coat: Luis Buchinho
Sweat: Ricardo Dourado/Short: Maria Gambina/Leggins: Diana Matias

Photography by Aloisio Brito/Fashion Stylist and Art Director: Nelson Vieira/Hair Model: Joana Castro, Best Models Stylist: Juliana Lamares with Style Master Revlon Professional products/Make-up: Tinoca with MAC products/Assistant Photography: Luisa Rodrigues

[REVIEW] Nicolas Jaar @ Salon Zur Wilden Renate, Berlin

I'm welcomed to the club by my gracious host Tony, who I emailed just a few hours before about checking out the quite sold out Nicolas Jaar show. Nicloas Jaar seems to be a big deal in Berlin. His music plays all around town in the cafes and bars and every time I mentioned him I'm met with warm approval. His father Alfredo Jaar is currently having a retrospective at the Berlinische Galerie. Tony meets me at the door to walk me in, casually asks about who I'm covering the event for and instructs me to have 'the very best time possible.' I walk into a big sun filled courtyard that immediately makes me think about Never Never Land. Gigantic trees blooming with disco balls, a giant swinging viking ship soaring above a dance floor, sunbathers by the kiddie pool, half a dozen 20-somethings spinning on a truck-tire swing, enormous brightly colored balloons bouncing around the crowd, a food truck churning out gooey crepes, and whole lot of dancing going on everywhere you look. I walk through the VIP where the easyJet set are reveling in plumes of smoke and on frosted horizontal mirrors, wearing a mixed bag of 80's future glam, ironic thrift store scores and skinny-fit riviera chic. I wander through the crowds taking in the colorful scenery and allowing myself to get taken in by the by the driving sounds from NY DJ's wolf + lamb. Around dusk Nicolas Jaar comes on with a long rambling intro that silences the crowd before his airtight, signature drop sets off the night. The next couple hours are a pastiche of Nicolas' varying musical ideas and influences turned up past his normal chill level to a velocity better fit for the dance floor. I overhear a tall and serious Italian man saying 'he's really the best of the best, and you know why? He has is own style - completely original.' That seems to be the general sentiment. The open air series at Renate closes early, so by 1am the crowd starts pouring out into the night where many of the clubs stay open throughout the entire weekend. As I get swept out into the street I can't help thinking to myself, this just might be Never Never Land.

Be sure to visit Nicolas Jaar's website for more info and to find our about upcoming shows. You can also click here to listen and download Nicolas Jaar's amazing BBC Essential Mix. Text and photography by Perry Shimon for Pas Un Autre

Rosewater by Charley Greenfield

Rosewater is a series shot for Pas Un Autre by Melbourne, Australia based photographer Charley Greenfield. Charley says she has "a deep, sometimes obsessive love for film, roses & of course, beautiful girls...and has been shooting film since [she] was a little 6 year old girl." The beauty and ethereality of  Charley's photographs is evident in Rosewater. See more photographs after the jump. 

Rosewater Art Direction & Photography by Charley Greenfield. Model: Shona: Make-Up: Kim

Studio Visit With Artist Richard Goldberg

Richard Goldberg is an artist based in San Francisco. I was lucky enough to be invited into the inner sanctum of his studio which holds nearly three decades of his incredible, and mostly never seen to the public, oeuvra. His drawings, paintings, and three dimensional sculptural objects are created with a plethora of mediums and cover a broad range of subject matter ranging from the darkly humorous and extremely violent. Richard Goldberg's website is currently being developed and will show almost his complete works up to date and in color.  See more photos after the jump.

Love Land Invaders

Love Land Invaders is brought to you by the ingeniously creative minds of Cologne, Germany based artists Lagoi & Lace. Inspired by "entertainment and pop/music culture, Japanese culture, nudity and porn, fashion, design and art," Ralph Lagoi and Kate Lace create surreal worlds with vibrant, luxuriously psychedelic palettes that contain a certain pop art poetry that is half cartoonish and half brilliantly absurd, but that collectively represents a broader philosophy of freedom, love and art. Love Land Invaders, one of their latest, wildly inventive photographic stories, was shot in Japan's stunningly decorated love hotel rooms and includes specially designed masks, jewelry, clothing and ribbons. Even the artists themselves posed for the photographs – transforming themselves into elaborate characters with names like "Miss Takehito Quadruple," "Mister Hyde Dobuita Speertraeger," "Mr. Seiuchi Sivuch," "Shika Shika Chan" and "Miss Ayanami Oenshi" who each represent different ideals of beauty - like the the beauty of dark elegance, the beauty of a gentleman, the beauty of play, the beauty of wilderness, and the beauty of pink. Its the kind of blatant campiness that can make one overlook its originality, but if you see if for what its worth you'll notice its extremely original artistic merit as a bold statement on the glossy, hyper-surreal, absurdity of post-modern contemporary art. It brings to mind the the balloon statues and installations of Jeff Koons and art of Murakami as larger than life statements of a philosophy that Lagoi and Lace call Luxurious Pop. 

Be sure to visit the psychedelic world of of Lagoi & Lace to see much more mind-blowing imagery.....

England Uncensored

How they drink, how they fuck, how they love – UK Uncensored is Peter Dench's Matin Parr-esque type of seaside freak show and penultimate survey of British culture. Even if Peter Dench's biography is an unrelenting reminder of his Britishness, his photographs are a reminder of a certain unrelenting brilliance.  Painterly, yet journalistic, Dench's photographs capture a society  and a country with the power to take over the world or shrink backwards and digress into infants too drunk to stand or be appropriate in public. "England has never exactly been glamorous. Many of the English still insist on embarrassing themselves, wearing laughable clothing, eating terrible food and behaving inappropriately." See more photos after the jump.

You can buy the book England Uncensored here.

Peggy Moffitt Exhibition Opening – Pacific Design Center

Jhordan Dahl, co-curator of  The Total Look: the Creative Collaboration Between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt and William Claxton with Peggy Moffitt herself at the opening event of the exhibition now on view until May 20 at the Moca - Pacific Design Center. Photography by Brad Elterman. 

Left: Vidal Sassoon & Peggy Moffitt Right:Jhordan Dahl, Jeffrey Deitch, Paige Powell

China Chow & Peggy Moffitt

Left: Jeremy Scott & Peggy Moffitt Right: Jhordan Dahl & Peggy Moffitt

Munch Ado About Nothing

Edvard Munch (pronounced Moonk) is best known for The Scream – the painting itself is an expressionistic exclamation point marking an emotional era in art. After walking through the recent Munch exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Scream seemed to me to be the culmination of a life's work; an exasperated attempt to express the entirety of life's frustrations and anxiety. The exhibition portrayed the work of a man gripped with the beauty and fatality of every moment. Images of vampires, sick women, and the famous painting entitled "two lonely ones" standing by the water's edge (pictured below).

Munch was also obsessed with self-portrait photographs. I was overcome with a sense of earnest loneliness walking past his 4 x 6 washed out photos of Munch in bed, or gazing sternly out the window, or of his own profile. Was he trying to see if others' saw his paintings like he saw them: full of color, visceral objects in constant motion, jumping off the frame, still for a moment, and then gone?

He seemed to be overwhelmed with the beauty and solitude in life – using color and exaggerated reference points to impose a sense of urgency, of tragedy and stillness at the same time. Figures with faces stand out in great detail – serving as the proverbial punctuation marks, while the supporting roles stand as auxiliary auras – holding still in space. Munch instills the unbelievable power to feel within one figure the emotion of the entire room – with empathy to the all-to-common human experience of standing alone in a room and with many.

Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye just concluded at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, but will resume at the Tate Modern in London this summerfrom June 28 to October 14, and in the meantime Edvard Munch's Masterpieces is on view now until May at the Munch Museet in Oslo, Norway which houses a majority of his works including 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings and 18,000 prints. Text by Angelina Dreem for Pas Un Autre. 

Photo by Angelina Dreem

Frieka Janssens' Smoking Kids

Beligum based photographer Frieka Janssens' series of children smoking is a stark reminder of the perverted glamour of something that once deemed a symbol of cultural cool, but what is now as good as poison. Janssens says, "A YouTube video of a chainsmoking Indonesian toddler inspired me to create this series, "Smoking Kids". The video highlighted the cultural differences between the east and west, and questioned notions of smoking being a mainly adult activity. Adult smokers are the societal norm, so I wanted to isolate the viewer's focus upon the issue of smoking itself. I felt that children smoking would have a surreal impact upon the viewer and compel them to truly see the acts of smoking rather than making assumptions about the person doing the act.....The aesthetics of smoke and the particular way smokers gesticulate with their hands and posture cannot be denied, but among the different tribes of "Smoking Kids," - Glamour, Jazz, and The Marginal - there is a nod to less attractive aspects, on the line between the beauty and ugliness of smoking." But not to worry, these kids weren't actually smoking.  Much more after the jump.