Dear readers, I met Filep Motwary almost a year ago. Filep is a costume designer, photographer, and fashion features editor for Dapper Dan magazine. He founded  Un nouVeau iDEAL in 2006. We have corresponded regularly since, sharing our views on fashion. We finally realized that we should share our insights with the larger audience [...]

When in 2006 the German art book publisher Steidl first released the book by one of the most famously provocative photographers, Guy Bourdin – A Message for You, it quickly sold out. The gorgeous two-volume series documented a period of Bourdin’s work from 1977 to 1980 with the dancer-turned-model Nicolle Meyer as his muse. Seven [...]

The work of the Swiss photographer Rene Burri is well known, especially the iconic photos from his Magnum Agency days. Just search Google Images for Che Guevara and his famous shot of Guevara smoking a cigar is one of the first that pops up. Though most of Burri’s famous images are black and white, he [...]

“I’d say most of my inspiration was drawn from old-school American values mixed with a little punk-rock enthusiasm.” – Mike Brodie in Q&A with The New Yorker I’d say that’s about accurate if by old-school American values one includes the freedom of the open road, the color palette and compositional story-telling sensibility of a Winslow [...]

So finely attuned is Peter Hujar’s (1934-1987) photographic voice that the eighteen black and white photographs comprising the mini-retrospective at Pace/MacGill are more than sufficient to present his world and his take on it. A prominent artist in 70s and 80s New York, the at-ease portraits of William Burroughs, Vince Aletti, Paul Thek, John Waters [...]

Fashion can be many things, likeable or not. Among these, fashion as theater is one aspect that gives it a certain kind of excitement. And by theater I don’t mean a mere parade of lavish outfits, but a convergence of the immaterial, in the form of designer’s ideas, with the material, in the form of [...]

Pattern, the new volume aiming to survey contemporary fashion from Phaidon ($79.95) is quite a tome to behold, with over 400 gorgeously laid out pages, printed on high-quality paper and with a beautiful cover, embossed and gold-foiled. It also comes in a paper Tyvek tote (no, you cannot rip Tyvek, ask me how I know). [...]

That graphic design can unite fashion, art, and music is an unusual proposition, certainly one I haven’t thought about, but going through the new book M to M of M/M (Paris) (Rizolli, $85) was an eye-opening experience. It makes sense on a basic creative level. All three disciplines demand visual representation and M/M, the design [...]

Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama is so prolific that his official website can hardly keep up: the ninety-one-book list is already out of date and omits a lot of past titles too. If we wanted to, we could bury you with book reviews for this septuagenarian artist. In this blur one particular title, Labyrinth, co-published by [...]

It was the last night of their North American tour and Enslaved, the Norwegian black metal band, did not seem tired in the least. Coming off a stretch of shows to promote their new album RIITIIR, Enslaved toured the states with fellow bands Pallbearer, Ancient VVisdom and Royal Thunder. The Bowery Ballroom was sold out [...]

Dear Internet, Here is my aural journey: Beginning with When Gravity Fails, two tracks, Moving through Cast By Shadows, Field Dressing, and up through Circumsolar, the birth of my son and the songs that put we sing to entertain or put him to sleep, and most recent collection Concentrated – these are the various and [...]

The nine grand Dan Flavin works and one big five-unit Donald Judd aluminum cube installation, now collectively up at the David Zwirner gallery on 20th Street will serve as a slap in the back of the head for anyone who thinks they’ve had enough of minimalist art. And, as much as I want “to get” [...]

“Romanticism is a grace, celestial or infernal, that bestows us eternal stigmata.” Charles Baudelaire In recent years museums have paid quite a bit of attention to the dark side of human emotion, from the brilliant 2006 Czech exhibit “In Morbid Colors,” to the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met in New York, where McQueen’s own [...]

Dear all, These songs were my daily bread in the 90s, when as a teenager I would speed my skateboard through the stony streets of my Traunstein suburb that were so ill-fitted for skating. It felt like total freedom to me and it still does today on the smooth, skateable streets of Barcelona. I really [...]

To stand in front of a painting by Luc Tuymans means accepting that while you can “get” what it’s about you can never really say you fully understand it. This later point stings in that his paintings calmly stand as a rebuke that so much of what we think we have independently earned in terms [...]

Christopher Wool the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris To think of Christopher Wool only as a painter is to deprive oneself enjoyment of his accomplishments as a bookmaker and photographer.  For three decades now Wool has brought to bear his trademark attention to detail, professionalism, intelligence and disquieting use of copy and [...]

Here is a mix by our editorial photographer Jeff P Elstone II, who has worked with us since volume one and has created unforgettable images based on Herman Hesse’s book Narcissus and Goldmund, Joseph Beuys’s infamous “I Like America and America Likes Me” performance, and the Norse goddess Freyja. “Autumn is a melancholic and magical [...]

As I was packing for Europe last Monday I got an email about the opening of Deborah Turbeville’s new show “Unseen Versailles.” It was to be on the one full day I was in Paris, and Turbeville would be attending. There is something especially joyful about meeting someone half way across the world from whom [...]

Here is my StyleZeitgeist mix. These are some of the songs that I hold dear for various reasons; some reflect my thoughts and emotions, some have influenced my style, some possess the sheer excruciating beauty that needs no comment. Naturally, quite a few of the songs are from the 90s and the 00′s – the [...]

It takes a show like the current exhibit of early Russian photography at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York to remind us of several things. One, that the visual age we live in is neither as sophisticated nor as original as we think. Another, that the size of a photograph is part of its [...]

While the rest of the world is showering you with street style porn from the New York Fashion week, we would like to do something different. Here is our second installment of StyleZeitgeist mixes. This one is by Karlo Steel, the mastermind behind the iconic men’s boutique, Atelier. In our first volume, Cintra Wilson interviewed [...]

Here is the new section of our blog, where we invite people who have participated in StyleZeitgeist Magazine, whether as subject or contributor, to create their own mixtape. Fashion is often intertwined with music, so we thought why not? Our first mix is by Rick Owens. Rick contributed the flagship piece on his role models [...]

To hear “Quay Brothers” is to instantly think of filmmakers famous for handmade, dusty, stop-motion puppet films that harken to some marginal eastern European animation tradition legible to a select few is more a result of the haphazard way we have come to know their work. The principal achievement of the Quay Brothers retrospective at [...]

At StyleZeitgeist magazine we count the menswear editorial, “America Still Likes Me,” one of our proudest moments. Based on the Joseph Beuys’s 1974 infamous performance piece, “I like America and America Likes Me,” it was published in volume 2. We have tried to recreate everything as it was, down to the hay, the felt, and [...]

Acrylic sheets, neon tubes, cement, steel plates, glass, rubber, cloth, paper, cotton, sponges, light bulbs, electrical outlets, wire, stone, earth, water, fire, wood, charcoal, and oil – industrial materials, household products, and natural materials were placed together in neutral arrangements. They were brought into temporary involvements or confrontations with a variety of spaces and phenomena, [...]

For her current show in the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, titled “Now and Then,” the photographer Sarah Moon had the following quotation from T.S Eliot stenciled on a column – What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present While Moon may be associated in the popular mind [...]

The Aperture Foundation’s description of their newly opened exhibition, “Delpire & Co”, is that it “showcases [Robert] Delpire’s rise to prominence in the world of photography through his pioneering and seminal work in magazine and book publishing, films, curatorship, and advertising for the past fifty years.” This it certainly does — in a herculean installation [...]

A question relevant to contemporary concerns quietly resonates in the elegantly understated show of 30 or so vintage prints shot by Constantin Brancusi in the 1920’s and 30s, currently showing at Bruce Silverstein gallery in New York, and it is namely one of intent. What are we to make of photographs taken by an artist [...]

Upon parting ways with the 120 or so vintage photographs, artist books and short videos installed in the Guggenheim’s Francesca Woodman retrospective, I found myself feeling, oddly, a little more solid in my own skin.  Because these photographs emphatically exclude any sense of exterior setting, color, narrative, time, the weather even, and, in withholding anything [...]

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and not because of Christmas. The super-duper limited edition definitive Sarah Moon monograph “12345,” whose first printing several years ago sold out in weeks, has been reprinted by Thames and Hudson. The five soft cover volumes come in a sturdy slip case and it is the most comprehensive body [...]

We reviewed the newest Deborah Turbeville’s book, The Fashion Pictures, in the first issue of SZ magazine. This week I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a selection of Turbeville’s photography is on view at Staley-Wise gallery, hidden above the hubbub of Broadway in SoHo. The exhibit consists of twenty-one prints that transport you [...]

If the thought of peeking into a wealthy woman’s closet makes you feel uncomfortable, you are not alone. Surely there’s something odd about finding in a museum context what is ostensibly a display of personal taste (and a taste made possible by vast and inherited means, at that). And isn’t there also something improper — [...]