My feedback
When receiving feedback and further research I was given a photographer to look at called Mark Borthwick. For London-born, New York based photographer Mark Borthwick; love, art, life, music and even food all seamlessly meld into the other to create work that is like no other. He forgoes digitized perfection and moody nihilism to capture intimate moments in the lives of his models, family and friends, usually in the throes of happiness and love. By experimenting with overexposing film, he creates an almost otherworldly light that saturates the images. Borthwick was a defining photographer of the 90’s, helping then-fledgling magazines like Purple, Self Service and Another traverse the interstitial territories between art and fashion that’s almost taken for granted today. He celebrated the recent release of his retrospective monograph with Rizzoli, ‘Not In Fashion’ with a weeklong series of performances at the Journal Gallery in New York that mixed poetry readings with live performances in a way that generated a communal intimacy, much like his work does.
Questions
Dazed Digital: How did you start in fashion?
Mark Borthwick:
As a teenager, from a Punk I became a New Romantic and I was really into make-up. Through wearing make-up and living in squats around London, I met other friends and the opportunity arose to do people’s make-up. I slowly got introduced to bands and people in the fashion industry, and I became a make-up artist.
DD: Your work is like no-other but who do you see as contemporaries in photography?
Mark Borthwick: That’s a complicated question! First and foremost I always find it easier to talk about friends. And some of them may be people you’ve never heard of before. I’m happy to respectfully congratulate other photographers whose work I think is fine but outside of that world, I think it’s about relationships. You’re surrounded by friends who have the same feeling. It’s always been important to me to nurture that feeling. For me photography is less about the documentation that it is about a shared experience. Once the experience is shared, then it’s very much the feelings other people get from the image, what the image is trying to say to them.
I don’t find photography right now to be the most exciting medium. It’s become closer to painting. There’s an incredible amount of opportunity but most people are shooting digital.
DD: Is digital anathema to you? Photos look so airbrushed today but there is a rawness to your work.
Mark Borthwick: As long as I can buy film, I will continue to work with film. I’m interested in the transparency. It’s the luminosity, the nothingness. It’s something that’s quite fragile and doesn’t actually fit. When I work, a lot of things happen by surprise. It’s trying to opportune a little voice in myself where I let go of control of the image and let things happen. I think that’s something that has happened with visual photography, it’s become so controlled. It’s like a mechanism, you look at the computer, you don’t have the time to feel the images. I recognise that a lot of people work like machines and I could never do that. I’ve learnt to find another way of working.
DD: The light in your work is ethereal, a whole other presence in the image. Is it a process of carefully controlled chaos or trial and error?
Mark Borthwick: Truthfully it’s still a surprise. It’s different every time. It really does depend on the temperature of the light, the brightness of the light, if I expose the image directly to the sun or directly to the shade or candlelight. It’s a little bit like a mindgame, it gives you the opportunity to lose yourself a little bit and play a little game with yourself where you are losing control. The control itself is not so much that I know what’s going to happen but that there’s different ways to doing it. For sure I get an enormous amount of joy because it does eminently produce these images that are otherworldly and come from another time. They have a vibrational effect and make me go, ‘Wow!’ and make me tickle and feel good. That’s something new.
DD: You seem to have an ambivalent relationship to fashion. What makes you dip your toes back into fashion every now and then?
Mark Borthwick: I don’t feel like I’ve never been part of it because I still have quietly been doing things but I just didn’t want to participate in the hierarchical side of it. The older I got, I realized I got a lot of joy out of doing what my voice was telling me to do. But I wasn’t given the opportunity to practise it. I’m not really allowed to do the images I like for a magazine like Purple anymore. I’m really interested in fashion and styling but I have no interest in participating in the daily rigmarole of what’s happening right now. That’s really boring and completely unfashionable.
For me fashion images has to be about something that’s true, this is the way that we dress. I don’t want to create images that are contrived and sensational. I don’t want to be putting too many images out there otherwise it’d end up all looking the same. I feel like I had my time. There was an extreme luxury to work with a mag like Purple, Another at that time and get 30 pages to do whatever you want. There’s a new generation of kids out there and they should have those pages. Then again I was really happy with my recent story in Another. It gave me great joy to see a magazine that was laid out in such a fresh way.
Sinnika thought i could explore how you could dress yourself with memories....? or perhaps taking a similar shot as the picture above, and explaining my thoughts as to how much clothes we consume?....
She also suggested exploring Purple fashion magazine?
When reading and researching i learn that Purple is a French fashion, art and culture magazine founded in 1992.
HISTORY
In 1992, Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm started the magazine Purple Prose as a reaction against the superficial glamour of the 1980’s; much as a part of the global counterculture at the time, inspired by magazines like Interview, Ray Gun, Nova, and Helmut Newton’s Illustrated, but with the aesthetics of what usually is referred to as anti-fashion. Based on their personal interests and views; Purple was, and in a sense still is, made much in the same spirit of the fanzine. The magazine quickly became associated with the "realism" of the new fashion photography of the 1990’s, with names like Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Mario Sorrenti.
In the introduction of the Purple Anthology, Zahm writes:
" We launched Purple Prose in the early 1990s without any means, and without any experience, because we wanted to make a magazine that was radically different. We wanted to support the artists around us that noone else supported, much less talked about. It would be a form of opposition of our own, different from the critical jargon of the generation of ’68. From a visual standpoint, we represented the break from ’80s imagery (like Richard Avedon’s photography for Versace, for example). From an artistic standpoint, the artists of the early ’90s were rising up against art as capital fetish . In saying that Purple is the portrait of a generation, I mean it’s a portrait of those who embody their times. At the same time, it’s a portrait of myself and Elein Fleiss, our ideas, our lives, and our aesthetics."
Sinnika also suggested researching into the Green living, recycling clothing, benefits …? National geographic website.
| “ | [...] We launched Purple Prose in the early 1990s without any means, and without any experience, because we wanted to make a magazine that was radically different. We wanted to support the artists around us that noone else supported, much less talked about. [..] It would be a form of opposition of our own, different from the critical jargon of the generation of ’68. [..] From a visual standpoint, we represented the break from ’80s imagery (like Richard Avedon’s photography for Versace, for example). From an artistic standpoint, the artists of the early ’90s were rising up against art as capital fetish [..]. In saying that Purple is the portrait of a generation, I mean it’s a portrait of those who embody their times. At the same time, it’s a portrait of myself and Elein Fleiss, our ideas, our lives, and our aesthetics |
Thrift shops are a great resource for donating or buying used clothing!
Whean reading the articles on this website i learnt....
Recycling unwanted clothing reduces landfill waste as well as the amount of resources needed to produce new clothing. It also lessens the waste produced by the manufacturing process --- clothing scraps end up in the landfill, too. Used clothing can be donated, sold or disassembled for the fabric.
Discarded Clothing
Americans discard an estimated 68 pounds of clothing a year, while buying 10 pounds of recycled clothes. In 2006, 2.5 billion pounds of fabric were kept from the landfills by used-clothing purchases (see References 4). Yet about 99 percent of what is thrown away can be recycled. Clothing and household textiles, consisting of fabrics such as cotton, polyester, nylon and rayon, make up almost 5 percent of the total garbage in landfills.
Environmental Benefits
There are multiple environmental benefits associated with recycling clothing. It reduces the amount of pesticides used in growing cotton or to make fabrics from petroleum sources and the water needed to dye fabrics, and cuts down on the pollutants, greenhouse gases and volatile organic compounds released into the water and air from manufacturing processes.
Donation and Resale
Clothes are typically recycled by donating them to charities like the Salvation Army or Goodwill Industries, which will provide tax forms for deductions. You can also sell them at consignment stores for store credit or cash or on the Internet through auction or donation sites. Charities will either sell the used clothing and use the proceeds for their work, or donate the items to the needy. About 20 percent of clothing donations are turned over to thrift shops. The remainder, sold to textile recyclers, can end up as wiping rags, insulation, upholstery stuffing, ingredients in paper products or used clothing exports.
Benefits to the Consumer and the Industry
Customers who buy used clothing also benefit from what are usually substantially lower prices, compared to the price of new clothes. Recycled clothing also creates jobs at charity organizations, consignment stores and businesses that reuse the fabric to make products for sale. Cleaning rags, blankets, new clothes and even the U.S. dollar are examples of products that may contain fabric from recycled clothing. The U.S. textile recycling industry consists of about 2,000 companies, most of which are family-owned. They provide about 17,000 jobs and account for gross sales of $700 million every year.
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