RYAN TRECARTIN BOOK

“I’ve always wanted to write a novel, ever since I was a little kid growing up in Ohio,” says Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine’s editor-at-large, over lunch at a Nolita café not far from his office. He fulfills his childhood dream this month with the release of his début novel Lightning People, a forcibly honest study of a group of wayward New Yorkers in their thirties who are pushed around by the forces of fate and circumstance. “I wanted it to be about not so much youth, but people who are no longer young, which I thought was a much more interesting take,” he says. “That feeling when the youthfulness and excitement and the fervor of being new to a city and young, when you can be anything you want to be and you can fuck up as many times as you want because nothing matters and you’ll still be alright and you won’t pay a price. I was more interested, maybe because of my age at that point, in people who are of the age that no longer allows for that kind of easiness and excitement. It’s about the painfulness of waking up and realizing you’re an adult and you do pay a price for the company you keep and what you do and where you are.”

Gidropark, from Yelena Yemchuk, is a celebration of the successful marriage of content and form, a foray into naturalism from a photographer whose high-fashion editorials are staples of a much glossier industry. The images, black-and-white 35 mm prints, bring us from the bright lights of her work in Vogue, i-D, and Another to a recreational complex in Kiev, Ukraine, where pages of dark hair and tangled grass stir a complex reaction in the Western reader. The standard relief is there—children asleep across acres of sand, a woman drifting through a soft wake, families paddling out to sea—but subtle signs of gloom sneak in from the horizon: deflated rafts and crumbling auditoriums, picnics atop discarded planks, heavy artillery strung from tree to tree.

It has taken many years, but in the first decade of the 21st century, a separated peace has come to the Balkans. The area has settled into so many nation-states, but the legacy of centuries of turmoil continues. This dichotomy, the crashing confrontation between generations-old traditions and the bleak emptiness of modernity, provides the tension […]

During Art Basel Miami Beach, The Last Magazine curated a one-day exhibition called The Last Space at the Webster Miami. Half our masthead (Aimee, Alastair, Magnus, and Tenzin) was there working hard to make the magazine come to life—carrying, building, hanging, and dressing with great help from our local friend Lauren Gil and our Intern Samantha Tobias.

Presented by The Last Magazine, THE LAST SPACE is a reinterpretation of the magazine through a physical exhibition of the art, fashion, film, poetry and personal effects featured in the current issue. As the contemporary idea of what a magazine is and could be continually changes, through an influx of one-offs, iPad editions and digital downloads, we have begun to think about a shift in perspective toward actual experience and human involvement.

It is perhaps the ultimate testament to a photographer’s vision when the images they produce become as famous as their subjects, à la Bert Stern’s infamous photographs of Marilyn Monroe. To that end, it’s hard to think of either Björk or Antony Hegarty without instantly recalling one of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin’s stark, […]

American war reporting is going through a strange phase at the moment. With soldier-produced images and text so easily and readily available—and, often, so poignant—the idea of journalists and photographers giving us in-the-thick-of-it reportage seems anachronistic. Aren’t all those pros just hanging out in some hotel in Baghdad drinking whiskey, forming alliances and cultivating throwback […]

The environmentalist Edward Abbey once said, “You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light,” but David Nye is out to prove him wrong. In his new book, When the Lights Went Out, Nye traces the 20th-century significance of a blanket of night falling over society. The imposed blackouts during World War II make […]

Newly published by Rizzoli, SHOOT: Photography of the Moment embraces a genre of lo-fi, “caught moment” photography that depends much more on the ecstatic promise of a well-timed shutter click than on the magic of pre- and post-production tinkering. Surveying the work of 26 photographers—from legends like Nan Goldin and Boris Mikhailov to younger artists […]