This world is filled with too many people who are content with being
empty. Yet, every now and then, an underground wildcard pops up, full
of intrigue and ready to redeem everything. Band of Bikers, a photo
book recently published by PowerHouse (and a must-see photo exhibition
opening tonight), is a collection of photographs that the poet and
gallerist Scott Zieher found in the basement of his apartment
building. The photographs, which had belonged to a recently-deceased
man who had lived in Zieher’s building, depict a group of gay bikers
meeting up at 1970s summer outings (members from motorcycle gangs
including the Vikings, the Praetorians, the Scorpions, the Unicorns,
the Druid are all depicted in the images). Accompanying the book is a
beautiful, intensely readable essay, written by Zieher, on both the
nature of these images and of found photography and ephemera writ
large. “I’m straight and married and have never driven a motorcycle,
but I’m a poet and a contemporary art dealer, so I certainly have
exposure and sensitivity to aspects of gay culture,” says Zieher, of
his intrigue when discovering these images. “For that matter, I first
saw Kenneth Anger’s films and read his books as an undergraduate in
Milwaukee in the mid-1980s, and came of age in an era when gender and
sexual politics were pretty rampant issues at the university level.
And the poets that made their most indelible impression on my younger
self were often gay: Whitman, Crane, Ginsberg, O’Hara. Suffice to say
one can’t call himself a decent poet and not find some affinity with a
good portion of the predominant contemporary canon. [And] I have
always had a fondness for vernacular photography. The fact that a
completely unassuming amateur captured these weekends is what appeals
most to me. It’s a marvel how much information [the photographer]
managed to capture in such an offhanded way. These photographs
comprise a gorgeous microcosm.” Like Anger’s 1964 masterpiece, Scorpio
Rising, the images in Band of Bikers depict a fringe coterie of
like-minded spirits, who seem to delight in finally finding their
place in the world, if only for motor oil-scented weekend. The men in
these photographs, living in a time post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS,
represent a Halcyon moment in gay male sexual emancipation. There is a
sense that the men depicted in these images, momentarily salvaged from
the tyranny of status quo employment and disapproving families, were
perhaps enjoying their truest moments of liberation.

Band of Bikers opens on February 25th at ZieherSmith Gallery, 516 West
20th Street, NYC

We are proud to present a unique film collaboration between The Last
Magazine and Y-3: The Third Wave. Directed by The Last Magazine’s
Magnus Berger and co-directed by Jacob Sutton (who also photographed
still images from the project, which appear in our new issue), the
film will be shown on thelast-magazine.com and in Y-3 stores
world-wide. The Third Wave was choreographed by Benjamin Millepied,
with music by Patrik Berger, and features Millepied, a principal
dancer at the New York City Ballet, together with four young dancers,
including Jessica Saund from American Ballet Theatre.

Aimee Walleston: Benjamin Millepied has been featured in the magazine
before, and now you’ve done this project together. How did you two
meet and how did you decide to collaborate on this piece?

Magnus Berger: I met Benjamin through our mutual friend Asa Mader.
Benjamin normally choreographs ballet, and I felt it would be fun for him to
do something that was more about movement rather
than dance, and to use the clothes as a part of that rather than
having a costume designer adapting to an existing piece. I wanted to
work with him on something like this for a long time because I knew
that he would get it. The key is that I wanted it to feel really
fluid. One thing that struck me when I saw Benjamin’s work the first
time was the sense that he was controlling time in the movements. So I
thought that it would be really cool to do something when you don’t
really know when you are in real time or not. But basically it was
also just an excuse to work together.

AW: Performance is notoriously difficult to film, since the real-life
experience of performance is in three dimensions, and film is only in
two. How did you deal with this challenge?

MB: Well the main thing is that this piece is choreographed for film
as the final medium—not for the stage. But what I find interesting
here is that we have all these disciplines connecting with each other.
It’s not a music video, a fashion shoot or an isolated dance
performance. Instead these elements are of equal importance in this
piece. I wanted to do something where it all came together and it
became something that felt new for everybody who were involved.

AW: Why did you choose high-contrast black and white? And can you talk
about the music?

MB: I wanted to do it quite contrast-y in black and white to make it
more graphic and about shapes. And our favorite pieces from this Y-3
collection were all black and white. I went back and fourth with my
brother, Patrik—he created the music—until we had something that felt
connected with the idea of the movements and how we wanted to light
and shoot it all. The editing is very important so I knew before that
we needed music that could carry that. Everything is shot in 100
frames per second so we could really work with different speeds and be
very flexible with the footage. Everybody that was involved was really
feeding of each other and Alastair’s (McKimm) styling was very
connected to Benjamin’s and the dancers movements—and the other way
around. This is something that me and producer Tenzin Wild spoke about from the beginning. To make it a real collaboration between everybody involved.

AW: And you worked with Jacob Sutton as dp and your co-director. Another Last Magazine contributor, right?

MB: Yes, and we also shot still photography with Jacob for The Last
Magazine #04, so it was important that this would connect with the
film, and natural that Jacob would work on the film as well. The
layouts in the magazine are these disconnected combinations of images.
When you take them out of the magazine, they create four separate
poster sheets. We decided to print that story with an additional fifth
color (a silver pantone) on a light glossy paper stock, rather than
the matte paper than we normally use. It really makes the images pop,
and they become their own thing in the magazine.
THE THIRD WAVE from THE LAST MAGAZINE on Vimeo.

The Last Magazine No. 4 Preview from THE LAST MAGAZINE on Vimeo.

The Last Magazine No. 4 featuring Mariacarla Boscono
Photography by Daniel Jackson. Styling by Alastair McKimm

Alexander McQueen was a huge inspiration to so many of us. I was always drawn to his fearless and confrontational approach, and his shows were the most emotionally provoking I had ever experienced. He will be remembered as a fearless designer with extraordinary talent, and as someone who pushed the boundaries of fashion to the very limit.

PRINTING ISSUE #04 OF THE LAST MAGAZINE

The inconsistencies and broken promises of Hawaii are fascinating. A godlike postcard of beauty made mortal by greed, war, drugs and development, Hawaii illustrates the human condition at its most destructive. For every perfect beach and unforgotten native tradition, there’s a shady real estate deal gone wrong, a tourist-trap hotel claiming an unspoiled landscape’s chastity, and a heartbreaking meth addict living in squalor—all of which brings a dose of the all-too-human to a landscape beyond imagination. In a new body of work, titled “Hawaii,” iconic Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama trains his lens on the most unknowable state, bringing his own uniquely aestheticized honesty to each image. A master of image-making that exposes as much as it exalts, Moriyama has spent the last half-century creating photographs with a vague, persistent sense of unrest percolating beneath a surface of inky black outlines. The photographer’s super high-contrast black-and-white images—the dark, devilish twins to Man Ray’s angelically haloed, solarised works—appear almost as drawings, abstractions that somehow remain devoted to knowable content. An image of a woman’s crotch in fishnet tights is, in Moriyama’s gaze, never simply an arresting, sexy picture. It is a study of form akin to Minimalist sculpture, and it’s also, like many of Moiyama’s works, an analysis and depiction of desire that doesn’t hide behind insincerity or white glove gentility. Which is why, as an emblem of paradise almost-lost, Hawaii is infinitely plausible as the master’s new muse. Moriyama reportedly visited the islands five times before feeling prepared to undertake this body of work (which took him three years to produce), and this scholarship and interest in true understanding is felt in the images. Like black cats prowling between hibiscus and birds of paradise, Moriyama’s images underscore the fact that, unlike the utopia we dream about and think we know, the true Hawaii isn’t bathed in innocent, golden light.

Hawaii opens at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York on February 13

His expressive, color-drenched photographs distill the essence of his native Brazil, but for his upcoming book, photographer Marcelo Gomes is going darker. Experimenting with longer exposures but sticking to his now-signature journalistic style and layout, the aptly titled Taciturn Heart explores the moodier yin to the artist’s cheerful yang. Some images of dark blue oceans and mysterious women fill the limited-edition book with a sense of longing, while others prove that Gomes’s optimism is never lost.

Taciturn Heart is out now from Hassla Books
http://www.hasslabooks.com/