It’s been a year of Firsts, embracing the New, ending with new writings reflecting on the power of the arts and culture in these troubling times:
1/2 Photoshoot and interview in German cultural magazine, @cytemagazin by Editor @stephanziehen
3 Walking the runway with confidence @berlinfashionwe ek thanks to @marcelostertag
4 Winning commission with @ciaociao_design for the London Festival of Architecture
5 Opening a new Project Space in Venice with @jacek_arte and curating my first exhibition @fondazione_martaczok
6 New article for @artichoketrust on The Gallery without Walls: An Experiment in Cultural Democracy
7 Forthcoming article on the value of mass cultural gatherings for new handbook on Trauma-informed Placemaking, thanks to @caracourage
8 Essay for catalog for artist @hrair_sarkissian on Making the Disappeared Reappear, for his nomination for this year’s Deutscheborse Photography Foundation Prize, @thephotographersgallery
Happy New Year to All, with thanks for your support, invitations and creative collaboration
#intelligentmodelling#newmodelface#koreanmodel
Double portraits, double lives, multiple selves. A double portrait with the Mona Lisa, which, like Leonardo, I carried with me in my move to a new life in a new country.
Taken a few years ago by the brilliant @elenaheatherwick , it’s a portrait of a Renaissance scholar in her studiolo, rich in symbolism of a life and self that now feels a lifetime away.
At the time It seemed impossible that this image could be the beginning of the life and self whose story I am now creating.
Still, some of the things remembered here I carry with me still: the books, for always learning, and the sword, an inheritance from my Spanish mother, a reminder of the fighting spirit that keeps me going these days.
Thanks to @deshamiltoncasting for reminding me of this moment.
We are never far from our own history, and the history of images we consume in particular shapes the way we present ourselves in the world, more than we realise.
Certainly Albrecht Dürer was far from my mind on this recent shoot. Yet the instinctual form of my „power pose“ bears an uncanny resemblance to his bold self-portrait at 28, in which he consciously adopts the figure of a famous icon of Christ. Now that was a real power move. And as the Renaissance was the beginning of a heightened sense of self-fashioning, it’s little wonder that our present popular „icons‘ such as Beyoncé embrace this term, and are the source of similar emulation.
Albrecht Dürer, Self portrait 1500
#renaissance#fashion#intelligentmodelling
Having a play with my two worlds as Renaissance art historian and model. Part 1✨✨
What makes an image or look iconic? We owe much to the development of portrait painting in 16th Italy for the now canonical three-quarter pose, a formal invention with ancient origins in Roman painting and Byzantine icons, with the power to evoke a person’s presence in their absence.
The more radical innovation here is more difficult to see: that is the direct gaze of the female sitter to address the viewer, granting her a new subjectivity beyond object of desire or muse.
In this regard we owe much to Leonardo da Vinci, who carried the Mona Lisa with him until his death at the court of Francois Premier. Did you ever wonder why she is in the Louvre, and not the Uffizi in Florence or the Pinacoteca in Milan? Such is the fate of images.
La Belle Ferronnière 1490-99
Leonardo da Vinci
model photo @milianeyes#renaissancewomen#portraitphotography#models1
