Rena Effendi

From transgender people in Istanbul to peasants in Transylvania, Azerbaijani photographer Rena Effendi has documented a variety of subjects with great sensitivity She shoots both black and white and color but it’s her color work that most appeals to me.. It has an almost painterly and sometimes ethereal quality that can be quite beautiful.

Naked Ambition

The human body is a beautiful thing. Particularly if it’s being used in the art of Cecilia Webber. A multimedia artist, Webber specializes in images made up entirely of nude humans. The results are beautiful and bizarre.

Noe Sendas

Belgian Noe Sendas is a visual artist whose work owes something to the surrealists but at the same time feels utterly contemporary. Images that could have been drawn from publicity shots for movies or film stills are altered by removing heads and torso to give us a feeling of looking at something that feels very familiar on …

Taming the Dragon

You know you like something when you’re prepared to brave sub-zero temperatures and snow-covered ground in order to see it. Of course there’s always the risk that you might turn up and find it doesn’t live up to your expectations but in the case of my recent winter night visit to the Highline Ballroom to …

Twilight Zone

It’s hard to think of a more quintessentially American photographer than Gregory Crewdson. His images are artfully cinematic, going so far as to use motion picture film equipment and techniques . They evoke both the Independent American filmmakers of the last twenty years and the more left field elements of Hollywood’s fifties past He is cited …

Silver Wilkinson

A few years back, while driving through the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles, one album was by constant in-car companion. Bibio’s ‘Ambivalence Avenue’, a wonderful dreamy combination of found sound and drifty acoustic pop that sounded like the very last thing you would expect to find on Warp records. Indeed the music (the work of …

Segregation Series

Lest you need reminding of why we have a Martin Luther King day, Gordon Parks photographs of an African-American family living under segregation in the deep south is a poignant and powerful reminder. Parks took the pictures while on assignment for Life magazine eschewing the more obvious images of police brutality and demonstrations, he choose …

The Act of Killing

It will take a long time to remove the memory of a confessed mass murderer dressed as a woman ogling a group of Indonesian beauties dancing out of the mouth of an iron fish. I’m prepared to bet that’s not a sentence that you will be able to read in connection with any other film …

Less is More

Zoltan Bekefy seems to be dedicated to the art of minimalism in his stunning series of black and white images ‘Less is More’. The jet stream of faraway planes, the flight of a lone bird over the ocean, the splash of water in a night sea are captured in a vast universe of emptiness. This …

Bill Evans

Is there a more beautiful sound on the planet than Bill Evans on the piano? I find it hard to believe having spent the month listening to a variety of Evans better known recordings from the fifties and early sixties Yet in writing those sentences I realize that for a vast majority of the listening …