Lee Jeffries’ portraits of the homeless are neither documentary photography nor the kind of detached, quick-fire street photography practiced by artists like Weegee. Each photo begins as a conversation, in which Jeffries approaches a person living on the street and simply attempts to get to know him a little better. It’s an everyday gesture, but one that most people would never make—and one that informs the resulting portrait tremendously. Jeffries’ photos, with their lyrical surfaces and intimate framing, make for one of the medium’s most empathetic and affecting tributes to a group of people who remain either de-humanized or flat out invisible in the public discourse.
     Jeffries began the project in 2008, back when he still counted himself an amateur photographer, and since then has only expanded its reach. In addition to his native England, he’s shot the homeless populations of Rome, Paris, New York, Las Vegas, and, several times, Los Angeles. His first book of the portraits, Just Talkin’, is a non-profit publication that donates all its proceeds to charity. We spoke to Jeffries as he finishes his latest collection, a series on the homeless people of Miami.

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Ghost Country is a haunting and romantic collection of images, collages and prose by Jordan Sullivan and jewelry designer Pamela Love. The book is a Memento Mori, containing 55 images with phrases such as, “Paradise is a deadman’s town”, painstakingly tracing a past that is lost and a future no where to be found. The book was born organically during a trip to New Mexico where Love was researching silver mines. Sullivan tells PLANET the two found similarity in Love’s jewelry and Sullivan’s work which naturally led them to create Ghost Country. He reflects on the process of editing and says, “It was as if seeing the past and the future at once. I realized so much of them had to do with love and death and this sort of broken portrait of America started coming together.”
     Surprisingly, Sullivan was originally a painter and the only photographs he had been exposed to as a child consisted of photographs from National Geographic and “a few pornographic shots stolen by a friend”. Now an artist in his own right, Sullivan’s solo show combining sculpture, collage and photography titled, A Room Forever will open at UTRECT/NOW IDeA gallery in Tokyo this April. Also a curator, his first group show titled, The Wild & The Innocent, will be on view next month at Clic Gallery in NYC featuring Agnes Thor, Todd Jordan, and Brea Souders among others.

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It’s not as if the food message hasn’t been delivered convincingly before. But when it’s coming from a monarch whose country’s delicacies include something called spotted dick and something else that looks suspiciously like bottled oil slick but is actually a yeast extract paste known as Marmite — well, it’s getting pretty clear that something has to be done about the way we eat.
     Last May, the Prince of Wales delivered a speech to an audience at the Future of Food Conference in Washington D.C. about the dire state of our food production systems. Making elegant quotation signs with his fingers as he spoke of “sustainability” and its prospects in “the real world,” His Royal Highness drew from his three decades of experience with the issue to present the case that in the 21st Century, as global population escalates and as strains on agricultural land intensify, it is time for us to begin rethinking how our food is produced. Soils are being depleted, water is becoming scarcer, and climate change stands to make these problems considerably worse.
     The lecture now takes the form of a newly published booklet, which environmental activist Laurie David was inspired to help put together after attending the conference and hearing the prince in person. She tells PLANET that just as she sat and listened to Al Gore’s presentation of the climate crisis years before and had the vision for a film, she was motivated in this more recent case to spread the prince’s speech more widely.

Architect Wallace Neff made a name for himself in the 1920’s and 1930’s building lavish Spanish-style mansions for Hollywood clients like Douglas Fairbanks, Groucho Marx, and Judy Garland. But his pipe dream was to fill the world with bubble houses: small, inexpensive, domed concrete structures that could be built in just a few days. A new book, No Nails, No Lumber: The Bubble Houses of Wallace Neff, tells the story of his efforts. From 1942 to 1952 Neff helped design and build thousands of bubble houses throughout the world, some of which remain in use even today. In addition to a number of individual bubbles houses in California, a community of twelve was constructed in Falls Church, Virginia, and another community of 1,200 was constructed in Dakar, Senegal. There were bubble house resorts developed in Hobe Sound, Florida and St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. And there were bubble houses built to use as grain storage bins in Litchfield Park, Arizona, as wine vats in Portugal, and as gas stations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
     The chief innovation of the bubble house was its patented Airform construction method. After a concrete foundation was poured in the ground, a heavy rubber bubble was inflated on top. Then the bubble was coated in layers of gunite (spray-on concrete), steel mesh, insulation,

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From my regular column in AnOther magazine.

Late one afternoon in November I was walking along my street in the Lower East Side when I bumped into Miguel Adrover, the influential fashion designer who left New York in 2004. It was the first time I’d seen him in several years and he looked upbeat, excited even. He’d just gotten to town that day, he said, and he was happy to be back in his old neighborhood where he had lived and worked for many years. After a moment, he leaned in and said, “I’m coming back. I’m showing in New York again.”
     This was big news from the man who electrified the New York fashion world at the end of the 1990s, and it’s been carefully guarded until just this week. Saturday, Miguel will show his first collection in New York City in nearly eight years, returning to the Lower East Side theater where he started it all with his now-legendary Manaus-Chiapas-NYC collection.
     During the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Miguel Adrover was one of my favorite New Yorkers. He truly exemplified the spirit of the city at the dawn of a new century. An immigrant from Spain, he made Manhattan his home and embraced it so completely and exuberantly that, through his work, he was able to give ordinary New Yorkers a heightened awareness of what a unique and special place they inhabited. Often, he would wax poetic about the city in the most surprisingly original and insightful ways.

Husband and wife Neil Krug and Joni Harbeck have given birth to a poignant ballad of imagery that incorporates both psychedelia and spirituality. Pulp Art Book is an examination of societal life during the 1960’s and 70’s as well as a stylistic homage to B movies and Spaghetti Westerns. Krug has drawn attention in recent years for his commercial work with the likes of Ladytron, The Horrors, and Devendra Barnhart, while model Joni Harbeck has been a muse to many and is the heroine of the print trilogy. We asked the two Kansas natives to share what Pulp Art Book is all about. 


Tell us about Pulp Art Book: Volume Two. Is there a specific story line?

Volume Two introduces a bunch of new characters and vignettes that we’ve been working on for years. It also follows the same format as the previous volume in size and similar in page count. We’ve always wanted the books to sit nicely together as a collection. 
     When Joni and I put together the themes for the shoots we almost always incorporate a storyline, even if it’s loose one. For us, it makes the experience of viewing the material more enjoyable for the collector. That being said, sometimes we just shoot something that has no meaning whatsoever, so it depends on our mood, too.

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For Julien Langendorff, the seventies never really went away—heavy metal, spiritism, violence-tinged pornography, and a growing consciousness of the world outside the body are all still pressing concerns. Langendorff’s imagery comes from the far-reaching, contradictory world of 1970s subculture, mixing psychedelia’s rainbows and galaxies with BDSM pinups. However, the minimal collages often employ just two photographs, torn and joined in exactly the right place to create a precise juxtaposition. A sculpted angel and a porn actress mirror each other’s poses perfectly. A skull and a planet, exactly the same size, orbit each other. Body parts are replaced with clouds of stars.
     The visual rhythms serve as a greater force that holistically links the small and the large, the physical and the spiritual. Langendorff leaves his edges ragged and his placement on the page seemingly haphazard, in order to present his work as low-key and handmade: the result of a momentary idea, an unremarkable and entirely organic occurrence. These images, he posits, are more relevant and interconnected than we think. With almost Zen-like composure, the work suggests that no group of concerns, no aesthetic, could possibly intrigue so many people and still be considered “counterculture.” His show Goddess Fuzz Fantasy will open at agnès b. Galerie Boutique on February 11th.

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If you needed a melodic soundtrack for hiding under the covers and grinning at the ghosts under the bed, New York’s Caveman would be the perfect candidate. To be quite honest, it’s impossible to listen to their recently released debut album, Coco Beware, without conjuring images of campfire harmonies and tribal drums leading a victory march for the musical macabre. It’s a sound born out of timing, break-up and five guys that simply inspire each other. After parting ways with their old bands, Caveman’s Matt Iwanusa, Jimmy “Cobra” Carbonetti, Stefan Marolachakis, Jeff Berrall and Sam Hopkins have joined together to create a record that glistens with pop nostalgia, hypnotic harmonies, and captivating enchantment. PLANET spoke with drummer Stefan Marolachakis to find out more about their inspirations, experimentation, and what happens when the lights go down and the music turns up.

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This Norwegian producer has the subtlest of touches when it comes to dance music. Six Cups Of Rebel marks Hans-Peter Lindstrom’s fourth album and his most ambitious yet. Alternating between belching basslines and cathedral organs, the seven tracks on Rebel are in turns peak-of-the-night stormers and experimental prog-rock. “De Javu” is a rolling, bumping, hip shaker. With its swirling rhythms “Quiet Place To Live” could easily fit onto an episode of the classic ‘70s show Fame or with its honking beats in the center of a superclub. Hitting the mark in both cases, on cuts like “Call Me Anytime” and the title track, Lindstrom manages to blend both very disparate genres, and that works too. Alas, it doesn’t always work. On album opener, “No Release,” Lindstrom drags out the organ medley and on the album closer, “Hina,” overcooks the wordless blended soundscape going into the 10-minute realm, which can task anyone’s patience.

This week, Sanna Dullaway’s colorized versions of famous historic photographs went viral on the Internet, drawing both admiration and alarm. Dullaway had picked some truly iconic photographs to colorize, from Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother to Eddie Adams’ famous shot of a Vietnamese general executing a Vietcong prisoner during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive. The young Swede (who has just launched a business colorizing old family snapshots) displayed these color versions side-by-side with the originals. Suddenly, figures and scenes long burned into our minds in their original black-and-white incarnations were popping out in glorious color—rusty reds, rich golds, the blue of cornflowers and irises. The images spread quickly on news sites and Facebook feeds—and then some people got mad.
     “A parasitical one trick pony grazing on the shoulders of giants,” Dullaway was called in one Facebook photography thread, while someone else excoriated her for “coloring that like a coloring book.” “Sickening” and “inexcusable” were other adjectives thrown out. Some were more generous, admiring Dullaway’s technique and color choices, and writing that it had given them a new appreciation of the original work.
     I was intrigued by this response, and by the protectiveness people felt toward these images. Personally I found them fascinating, and not confusing or deceptive since they were printed side-by-side with the original black-and-whites.