It’s nearly halfway through the I Willie Love America Shirt but in fact I love this year, and despite the onset of summer for some countries around the world, the art books that have been released so far will encourage even the most eager outdoor enthusiast to stay in and flip through their pages.Whether it’s documentary photography chronicling the lives of Black communities in the American South, or an ode to the cultural roots of British-Indian designer Supriya Lele in collaboration with Vogue photographer Jamie Hawkesworth, or never-before-seen Polaroids by artist Jim Goldberg from the late 1980s to early 1990s—there’s opportunity to expand your collection.The Austin-born, New York-based photographer’s second book is a highly personal visual documentation of the past five years. Shot exclusively in medium format, the project features intimate portraits of individuals and families, as well as urban landscapes and textures. With family roots and southern culture deeply embedded in his images, Fortune delivers a heart-wrenchingly honest body of work.View on InstagramSubverting the traditional codes of historical paintings, visual artist Bourouissa has photographed his friends in Paris’s suburbs to reflect modern life in the metropolis. Be it confrontations, looks or frozen gestures, each image depicts over-dramatized, yet motionlessly graceful scenes, resulting in a documentary style balanced with formal compositions.Fascinated with different people’s interpretations of the same idea, Myatt asked a host of well-known guests (including designers Vivienne Westwood and Charles Jeffrey, singer Beth Ditto and fashion photographer Nick Knight) to draw their personal take on the penis. The result? An eclectic range of perspectives, from the delightfully abstract to overtly sexual.For dog lovers out there, Magnum Dogs is the ultimate collection of canine photography, featuring 180 sublime images from around the world. From the streets of Colombia to elaborate dog shows in the U.K., these stunning pictures of man’s best friend are captured by Magnum photography legends such as Martin Parr, Harry Gruyaert, Eve Arnold, and Dennis Stock.View on InstagramIn this heartwarming tribute to life in the U.K., Hawkesworth showcases photographs spanning 13 years. Whether it’s schoolchildren and families or housing estates and building sites, the Vogue photographer sensitively captures the terrains and individuals that make up his homeland.Exploring the connections between uniforms and dress codes, Chelbin spent five years photographing young people in Ukraine at matador training academies and military boarding schools. Challenging the viewer’s perception of gender stereotypes and the performative effect that uniforms can have, the Israel-based photographer delivers a portfolio of striking portraits.This book offers a precise and distinct perspective of one of Japan’s most revered photographers. Over 20 years, Yamamoto has accumulated a prolific collection of thought-provoking images of inanimate objects, landscapes, and textures, as well as people and animals. Despite an array of subjects, the stillness of each frame captures a softness, while evoking emotions and memories.The British-Indian designer, in collaboration with Vogue photographer Jamie Hawkesworth, documents a trip down the Narmada River in central India. Shot before the pandemic, the book is a touching ode to the people and the spiritually rich culture of the region where the designer’s family hails from.Documenting the lives of schoolchildren on his home island of Nevis in the Caribbean, Jeffers captures the vivacious essence of Nevisian youth in his new book. The photographer not only stirs up nostalgia, but also celebrates the individuality of each subject, from the shy to the boisterous.In Raised by Wolves, his acclaimed 10-year project from the 1980s to 1990s, Goldberg documented the youth of California via photographs, installations, texts, and films. This new book features 45 of the photographer’s never-before-seen Polaroids from that first project, giving us a glimpse of the rawness and beauty of the younger generations of Los Angeles and San Francisco.To coincide with her first solo exhibition at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum in Japan, Ishikawa delivers a body of work that features portraiture and documentary photography, as well as essays by an array of experts. The Okinawan photographer intimately captures the strength and endurance of life in Japan in this compelling book.View on InstagramIn the middle of the pandemic, British photographer Coulson ventured outdoors to photograph her friends and characters in London parks. The result? An uplifting and joyful record of a strange, yet unique period. With a focus on documenting young people, all proceeds from sales go to the charity YoungMinds.
I Willie Love America Shirt, hoodie, tank top, sweater and long sleeve t-shirt
The first time I got a tattoo, I was 19. On my own in Berlin for the I Willie Love America Shirt but in fact I love this summer and palpably lonely, I swayed into the door of the local tätowierung shop in the airy, tree-lined neighborhood I was living in as a nanny, drawn helplessly to the sight of people around my age talking, laughing, and sipping Club-Mate. As I sat down and presented my ankle to be inscribed with Cyrillic text, the mix of nerves and excitement temporarily crowded out my homesickness and discomfiture. I couldn’t chitchat with the tattoo artist in my broken German, but he didn’t seem to care, expertly swabbing my skin before beginning a process I was surprised to find more uncomfortable than actively painful. For about 20 minutes, in that artist’s chair, I felt like I belonged.Seven years later, in August 2020, I was lying on another tattoo artist’s chair—this one in Crown Heights, Brooklyn—as he inked a swirl of blues, yellows, and greens into my thigh to form the shape of a mussel. I was in my own city this time, with many of my friends a mere 10-minute walk away, yet loneliness still haunted me; I’d spent the preceding five months alone in upstate New York, trying not to complain about my solitude when I knew how lucky I’d been to escape the COVID-19 pandemic with my health, job, and housing secure. I’d become something of a stranger to myself in those five months, my body growing and changing as an erstwhile eating disorder reared its head again; my stomach was bisected with angry-looking red and purple stretch marks that I had to work very hard to accept, and I sought out my mussel tattoo as a way of reclaiming what suddenly felt unfamiliar and out of control.Those are just two of the times tattooing has briefly saved me, providing me with an alternate script for how I saw my identity, my body, and my physical and spiritual presence in the world. Coming out as queer at 24 rocked my understanding of who I was to the core; suddenly, I had new friends, new dates, new clothes, and a whole new way of looking at myself, and when it came to feel somewhat overwhelming, I’d save up my money and schedule a tattoo appointment, letting the prick of the needle turn my body into something that felt like home. Most recently, a tough-looking man around my age (heavily inked himself) tattooed an overtly sapphic Egon Schiele sketch into my upper arm before I went to meet friends at the reopening of Cubbyhole; before long, I was giving him a brief history of the city’s few remaining lesbian bars, enjoying the reliable—if momentary—camaraderie that comes with trusting someone to permanently alter your appearance.Unfortunately, this sense of trust isn’t always the norm for LGBTQ+ tattoo aficionados. Queer tattooing has been described as a “chosen family,” formed partly in response to the often white, cisgender, and heteronormative face of mainstream tattoo culture; anecdotally, I can attest that almost every queer person I know has at least one tattoo, yet too often, we still think of tattooing as an art practiced by and for cis men. When I speak to Tann Parker, the 29-year-old founder of Ink the Diaspora, a tattooing platform created to challenge colorism in the tattoo industry, they’re very clear about what they see as the industry’s barriers for members of the LGBTQ+ community, and queer and trans people of color in particular: “It’s like, ‘No, look at this body like you’re about to tattoo.’ I feel like a lot of cis men don’t want to be told, ‘Oh, you need to be gentler; you need to be more thoughtful and caring about how you interact,’ especially when it comes to tattooing. It’s such a weird masculine thing to associate pain with tattooing right off the bat.”Samantha Robles, also known as Cake, is a 31-year-old artist who got her first tattoo at age 15 and began tattooing at 18. Since then, she’s noted many instances of casual transphobia and homophobia in tattoo shops, which led her to open a Coney Island studio designed specifically for women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. “[Tattooing] is a very intimate experience, you know?” Robles notes. “You’re showing parts of your body, you’re spending a bunch of hours with this one person and putting a lot of trust in them, and you’re vulnerable, so you just always want to feel good from the beginning to the end of that experience.”While LGBTQ+-friendly tattoo shops can provide a haven from toxic masculinity, they do so much more than that; often, they help people discover aspects of their own queer identity, even if they happen to be the ones holding the needle. “It just felt like the people I was drawn toward when I started tattooing were queer, and they were doing their own thing. I think doing your own thing is queer in and of itself,” muses Ella Sklaw, 25. “When I was getting started, the first person who ever showed me how to set up a tattoo machine was, their name is Buck, and their Instagram is @bigolebrat. The people walking in my door were queer, trans, nonbinary; when I started tattooing, I didn’t really know that I was queer, and when I did get to that, it changed the whole world for me. Having young queer people who were living these queer lives in their queer bodies, walking through my door and asking me to give them more tattoos—that was what showed me my own queerness.”View on InstagramUltimately, even the most meaningful of tattooing practices may not change the lived reality of many LGBTQ+ people; queer and trans people of all genders, races, and ethnicities still struggle with housing and employment discrimination, increased risk of violence, higher suicide rates, and a host of other vital issues. Still, the practice of queer tattooing provides a possible glimpse at what queer identity could look like outside of all that trauma. What if we allowed LGBTQ+ people’s existences to be as bright, as beautiful, and as permanent as curving lines of multicolored ink adorning the body?
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.