Though our interview was recorded almost nine years ago, it is still a really interesting, engaging listen. As the earliest episodes were recorded under a different podcast name, I took this as an opportunity to finally re-record the intro and to revisit my love for his photographs.

Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

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Duane Michals worked across a number of different genres: art, portraiture, interiors, fashion and advertising. I met him in the fall of 2017 in his Gramercy home, the stage set of many of his most memorable images and sequences, several months after his partner of 57 years passed away. Sitting and talking with Duane was a great honor. A Pennsylvania native, Michals moved to New York City in the mid-1950s. A master storyteller, he pushed the boundaries of the art photography world in the late 1960s and 1970s with his innovative use of “sequences”, which are stories told through a series of photos, as well as his use of handwritten text on photographs.

Across all his work, Duane’s vision and personality is clear. At times melancholy or humorous, his photos are often poignant and speak to greater ideas about love. In person Duane was just like his work: immensely engaging, funny, pensive, serious and loving.

One part of this conversation with Duane Michaels that particularly stood out for me was how he never kowtowed to conventions about how a photographer should act and what their work should look like. Instead, he created his ideal life and produced the work that he was inspired to. For him, this meant no studio and usually only one assistant, just working from home on his personal work and taking on large commercial jobs as a method of experiential learning.

At eighty-five years old at the time of our conversation, he was still producing new work across a range of new media. He continued working on photographs, sculptures, and films up until his death this week at age 94.

Paradise Regained, a sequence from 1968:

A random selection of photos I love by Duane Michals:

In 2011, New York Magazine published a piece on how 1978 was New York’s Greatest Year, when “New York at its most New York”: “The preoccupation with the suburbs had peaked, and people were flowing back into the city—often young, creative, interesting people. It was possible to have entire conversations that did not involve real estate or bedbugs. The fiscal crisis was just past, recreational drugs were easy to get, and everyone was having sex all the time.” It’s in the midst of this that GQ decided to construct an editorial tour of men’s fashion in the city, area by area, for its November 1978 issue. Of course, for the editors of GQ, only Manhattan counted as New York; the outer boroughs don’t even qualify for a mention.

GQ’s New York is a very white New York. Blacks are represented solely as “The Uptown Man” in Harlem, with references to Black religious/cult leaders Father Divine and Sweet Daddy Grace.1 There are eight sections in this article/editorial, seven designated by neighborhood, with “The Latino Man” the sole one by ethnicity; confusingly, from the map, it looks like they’ve sequestered Latinos around the Meatpacking District and Chelsea, areas never known for having a dominant Latino population (why not Spanish Harlem or the Lower East Side?) Using every possible euphemism, “The West Village Man” is out-and-proud without saying so at all; what could “the life many Villagers feel they’ve left behind” be but the closet that GQ has returned them to?

This New York is a much smaller city than it is now. Gentrification has shifted populations and, for better and worse, expanded the boundaries of where certain groups live. Even those first artist explorers into SoHo have long since sold their lofts, leaving behind an area unrecognizable in its wealth and prestige. Yet other areas are much the same as ever, particularly “The East Side Man,” denizen of the unchanging Upper East Side (come autumn, you will definitely find some rich Europeans dressed in these exact outfits outside Sant Ambroeus).

Perhaps what is most fascinating is charting which of the noted retail establishments still exist, almost fifty years later. Most are long gone, with others hanging on as shadows of their former selves, desiccated by private equity and consolidation. The few stores that remain are an odd bunch taken cumulatively: Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf’s, Saks, and Macy’s of the department stores; Gucci for luxury, though in a very different form; J. Press, Paul Stuart, and Brooks Brothers continuing to service the traditional male; Paragon Sporting Goods sticking to what they know best; The Gap, for basics (though this article was truly from a different era, before The Gap did private label and when it was primarily a Levi’s reseller); I. Buss Uniform Co., which GQ describes as carrying military surplus, but now solely supplying uniforms; and Reminiscence, which has moved a few streets but continues to sell vintage clothing. Taken together, this list seemingly points to the longevity of traditional men’s clothing and of department stores, but that disregards all the department and specialty stores lost in the intervening years (and many more we are likely to lose with continued consolidation of nameplates).

Whether or not you are a New Yorker, I hope this is an enjoyable tour through the city and an invitation to think about the shifting populations and “territorial imperatives… that shape the philosophy of entire schools of fashion thinking” of your home.

All text below is from GQ; no editor or writer is credited on this editorial.

“That New York Style”, GQ, November 1978

Photographed by Albert Watson; Styling Consultant Mark Golderman

“If you can make it there, goes the song, “you’ll make it anywhere.” Of course, it’s referring to New York. Simply stated, to make it in the Big Apple, you’ve got to be good. And you have to dress for it. But there are as many ways of making it in the city as there are neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, different groups have settled in various sections of the city, stamping them with their own energy and look. To understand Manhattan’s approach to personal styles of dress, GQ surveyed the territorial imperatives all over town that shape the philosophy of entire schools of fashion thinking. The result covers such familiar turf as Wall Street and Madison Avenue, while it also ventures into some new realities—the offhanded elegance of SoHo and street-smart flash of 14th Street. But they’re New Yorkers all.

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Below I am sharing a short essay that I love by Cecil Beaton on Marilyn Monroe, originally published in Harper’s Bazaar, June 1956. He’s such an evocative writer of fashion and celebrity (how could someone be so talented across so many fields???) that re-reading this piece makes me wish I could clear my schedule and spend the day re-reading one of the greatest fashion books of all time, Beaton’s The Glass of Fashion.

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Little Girl Alias Femme Fatale

by Cecil Beaton

Miss Marilyn Monroe calls to mind the bouquet of a fireworks display, eliciting from her awed spectators an openmouthed chorus of wondrous ohs and ahs. She is as spectacular as the silvery shower of a Vesuvius fountain; she has rocketed from obscurity to become our postwar sex symbol-the pin-up girl of an age. And whatever press agentry or manufactured illusion may have lit the fuse, it is her own weird genius that has sustained her flight.

Transfigured by the garish marvel of Technicolor and Cinemascope, she walks like an undulating basilisk, scorching everything in her path but the rosemary bushes. Her voice has the sensuality of silk or velvet.

But the real marvel lies in the paradox—somehow we know that this extraordinary performance is pure charade, a little girl’s caricature of Mae West. The puzzling truth is that Miss Monroe is a make-believe siren, unsophisticated as a Rhine maiden, innocent as a sleepwalker. She is an urchin pretending to be grown up, having the time of her life in mother’s moth-eaten finery, tottering about in high-heeled shoes and sipping ginger ale as though it were a champagne cocktail. There is an unworldly, a winsome naiveté about the child’s eyes that, quick as a flash, will screw up into a pair of sexy, smoldering slits and give you a synthetic “come-hither” look. Just as obligingly, the delicate, flexible mouth, half-parted in springtime ecstasy, will burst into a generous grimace, displaying flawless seed-pearl teeth while the surrounding lips quiver nervously and seem almost shocking in their mobile suggestiveness.

Behind this brilliant, pseudo-fatal façade is the real Marilyn Monroe. She might be the latter-day incarnation of a Greuze portrait, the quintessence of partridge-plump prettiness with full, high breasts, eighteenth-century rump and a delicately modeled face eyes felicitously wide apart, chin appealingly small, putty-like nose created expressly for wrinkling up with delight, or for photography (though in profile the urchin is apt to gain the ascendancy).

Passing across these enviable features, like blips on a radar screen, is an incredible display of inspired, narcissistic moods. With the possible exception of a Scotch landscape, there has seldom been such an everchanging subject for the photographer. He may miss recording one mood, but a dozen others will assault him with machine-gun recompense.

In her presence, you are startled, then disarmed, by her lack of inhibition. What might at first seem like exhibitionism is yet counterbalanced by a wistful incertitude beneath the surface. If this star is an abandoned sprite, she touchingly looks to her audience for approval. She is strikingly like an overexcited child asked downstairs after tea. The initial shyness over, excitement has now gotten the better of her. She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps onto the sofa. She puts a flower stem in her mouth, puffing on a daisy as though it were a cigarette. It is an artless, impromptu, high-spirited, infectiously gay performance. It may end in tears.

Equally impromptu is her general appearance. This canary blond nymph has been so sufficiently endowed by nature as to pay no attention to the way she looks. Her hair, her nails, her make-up, have a makeshift, spontaneous attractiveness. It is all very contemporary: Marilyn Monroe conjures up two straws in a single soda, juke boxes, sheer nylons and drive-in movies for necking (does she not project a hypnotized nymphomania?).

This, then, is the wonder of the age—a dreaming somnambule, a composite of Alice in Wonderland, Trilby and a Minsky artist. Perhaps she was born the postwar day we had need of her. Certainly she has no knowledge of the past. Like Giraudoux’ Ondine, she is only fifteen years old; and she will never die.

I will probably write more on the yearbooks soon, but these are just some pages for fun!

Below are some of the things that fascinated and intrigued me this month:

reading

The Ordinary, Extraordinary To-Do Lists of Keith Haring: “Order canvas.” “Aim toothpaste.” “Call Yoko.”

As this is a pro-ephemera newsletter—and as I am an inveterate to-do list writer—I was captivated by this Curbed piece on Keith Haring’s to-do lists: a mix of the truly mundane, the creative, and the famous. Only eight lists are included in the article, though there are supposedly about 400 in the archive (please someone, make a book).

I found 9 secret diaries of a French teenager who had Mussolini’s photo on his bedroom wall in 1922. His psychology is disturbingly familiar.

From r/ephemera, a French rare book seller writes about the secret diaries of a French teenager kept between 1916 and 1923, documenting this tortured poetic soul, caught between the passions of unrequited love and lust and the moral strictures of Catholicism and his family’s Monarchism, and how without any support for his pains, he falls headfirst into fascism. The OP is a French speaker who used an LLM to organize his analysis in English, so the language is annoyingly AI, but if you can read past that, the journals are incredibly interesting—as are the comments, where others have helped the OP construct what happened to him next in his life.

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Of the New York shows, so far I have made it to Ortuzar’s “Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show,” which recreates the 1986 “Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs” exhibition held at the East Village gallery Gracie Mansion. It was Hujar’s eighth and final solo show, before his death from AIDS-related complications in November 1987. The show features seventy photographs arranged in a long, two-row grid in the exact layout Hujar decided: “Portraits of friends and fellow artists appeared alongside nudes, landscapes, animals, and images of abandoned buildings, with genres and subjects freely intermingled. In honor of its fortieth anniversary, Ortuzar’s exhibition presents a version of the original 1986 layout, offering contemporary viewers a chance to experience Hujar’s work as he conceived it, with its non-hierarchical sequencing encouraging open-ended associations and offering rare insight into how he understood the relationships between his images.”

“Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show” ends May 30th, so get there today or tomorrow!

Next on my list is “Hujar:Contact” at the Morgan Library & Museum, which features more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements from across his career—charting his ascent from studio assistant to freelance magazine photographer to artist. “Hujar:Contact” is on until October 25, 2026; the Morgan also has a very interesting looking exhibition on Tarot opening in late June, so its definitely worth a visit to see both this summer!

Among the magazines he freelanced for was GQ. For the March, April, and June 1971 issues, Hujar shot three fashion editorials and two musician portraits (Iggy Pop and Isaac Hayes). I do not know why his freelancing career with them was quite so short; taken from the vantage point of over half a century later, it feels like a travesty that he didn’t do more men’s fashion work for GQ. Last week, on Instagram, I shared one of the editorials: beach fashions from June 1971.

Hujar’s first editorial for GQ (for March 1971) features eight men posing with their parents in what appears to be their family homes. Rather Arbusian in their form and technique, the portraits tell so much through the posing, facial expressions, and carefully organized tchotchkes. As with the Hujar photos in the editorial above, it is particularly interesting to see his use of colour as we so often think of him as solely a black-and-white photographer.

I haven’t seen this series shared online anywhere, so please enjoy!

Mr. and Mrs. William F. Wilson and their son, William, 22. William is wearing a blue campaign-style suit in a twill-effect double-knit (Leisure Ltd., about $70). The unpadded jacket has snap-closure front and flapped patch pockets with metal rings. Skinny ribbed, placket-front pullover by Europe Craft.

Mr. and Mrs. Edward Boehm and their son, Arthur, 25. Arthur is wearing a patchwork suede suit by Chrome-Cuir for Rafael Fashions (about $200). Top is patchwork-trimmed at pockets, cuffs and waist. Pants have trim at waist, back pockets and leg panels. Skinny ribbed top by Robert Bruce.

Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Boxer and their son, Michael, 25. Michael is wearing a clay-colored knitted shirt-suit (by Tiger of Sweden, about $120), with diagonal twill-patterned panels. The top is belted, with snap-closure flapped pockets. The pants have an extension waistband and slightly flared leg.

Mr. and Mrs. Duke Marks and their son, Peter, 36. Peter is wearing a belted beige suede safari-style shirt-suit by Bidermann of Paris (about $200). The top features an all-around, stitched-on belt and has cream-colored stitching on its four flapped patch pockets. Wooden neckband by Valerie.

Mr. and Mrs. John H. Jacoby and their son, Eric, 24. Eric is wearing a polyester knit shirt-suit in a gold, mustard, black and beige geometric pattern. The top has a stitched-down chest yoke, two inverted-pleat flapped button-through pockets, and a half-belt in back (Hardy Amies U.S.A., about $80).

Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Shanman and their son, Mack Schlefer. Mack, 25, is wearing a wool knicker-suit in an all-over pattern of gold, beige and black (B. Teller of Vienna, about $95). Jacket has buttoned flap patch pockets and extension-tab waistband. Shirt by Unk Knits. Diamond-pattern socks by Esquire.

Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Henry and their son, Richard, 28. Richard is wearing a black double-knit safari-style suit with an all-around belt and pleated flapped pockets. The pants have an extension-tab waistband and flared leg (Tiger of Sweden, about $120). Skinny ribbed speckled plum turtleneck by Giovannelli.

Mr. and Mrs. John Interlandi and their son, John, 22. John is wearing a denim-look polyester and cotton shirt-suit by Harry Lans for Rafael Fashions (about $90). The safari-style top has metal buttons, stitched-down all-around belt and four scalloped flap pockets. Metal belt by Vacher for Rafael Fashions.

Of the five hundred lots, 102 are clothing items and 25 accessories, ranging in date from the late 1960s to the ensemble she wore for the 2020 Grammy Awards, when she received the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award. I’m going to focus here on the 1970s, as it is both my main era of fashion interest and also the period where her fame and unique clothing were at their height. The auction featured many lots of stage clothes—totally over-the-top, sparkling, fur-trimmed, bedazzled gowns—as well as many less ostentatious, though no less interesting, garments that appear to have played dual roles, working both on stage and in real life. Though less “stage-worthy” (i.e., fewer sparkles), there are often photos of Roberta wearing these other garments to perform or for press images. What connects this group of garments is the softness of the silhouettes, the ease and comfort of wear, and their generally simple-to-care-for fabrics—all of which would make them much easier to travel with and handle than the often-imposing stage clothes.

Another thing that connects them, and which I find most fascinating, is their origin. Unlike the stage clothes—most of which are unlabeled and likely made for Roberta by costume designers, dressmakers, and custom salons at department stores—the rest of her wardrobe is heavily weighted toward what was called “boutique fashion” at the time. This broad term covered smaller designers who sold their goods in their own boutiques or in boutique sections of high-end specialty shops. Before purchasing her apartment in The Dakota in 1975, Flack was living in a fantastic mid-century modern, Charles Goodman-designed home in the Hollin Hills neighbourhood of Alexandria, Virginia (it’s currently for sale for $1,890,000). While she appears to have done much of her recording at home, Flack was likely spending quite a bit of time in Manhattan, recording TV appearances and doing press. As many of her items can be dated through photographs, we know that she likely picked them up while on trips to NYC; she also appears to have shopped in Washington, D.C., and on the road during this period. Two D.C. store labels that pop up on her garments are “Pasternak,” a women’s specialty store on Connecticut Avenue that was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue in 1963 and closed in 1970 (it’s now a nightclub), and “Perelucci of Capitol Hill,” which was a high-end fashion store that operated from 1968 to 1981.

The stores with the highest number of appearances in her auction wardrobe are “Henri Bendel” and “Bonwit Teller,” both luxury stores then at the peak of their sartorial influence under the aegis of power retailers Geraldine Stutz and Mildred Custin, respectively (Custin retired in 1970, but the designers she launched and the fashion focus she created were still very much ongoing into the decade). I love to think of Roberta Flack strolling down Fifth Avenue and hitting up Bergdorf Goodman (58^th Street), Henri Bendel (57^th Street), and Bonwit Teller (56^th Street), picking up a dress here, a caftan there.

Roberta Flock’s closet just feels very representative of what a cool woman with cash might be shopping for in the Seventies, if she wasn’t interested in the more staid WASPy or European styles out there. There is some vintage, some high-end American designers (Oscar de la Renta), a little European ready-to-wear (Thea Porter, Chloe, Pablo & Delia), and lots of young, interesting, NYC-based designers.

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Roberta Flack’s “boutique” fashions:

While I couldn’t find anything about “The Flirt” (was it a boutique somewhere?), I was able to find Flo Garafola’s obituary and she seems like quite an amazing woman. A resident of Hollin Hills, the same neighbourhood Flack lived in pre-NYC, Garafola had quite the side business:

The vintage:

I did some research on Lune en Papier inc. and it was a vintage store opened up on Madison Avenue by former model Tya Scott, who was described as “the first Black woman to own an antique shop on Madison Avenue.” When the New York Times wrote about the store in 1974, the prices were definitely in keeping with its UES location: “A beaded black twenties chemise is $300 here and a group of never-worn Schiaparelli suits from the forties in wool gabardine with padded shoulders are $200 each, but some crépe de chine and cotton dresses cost as little as $15.”

An interesting side note that came up during my research:

In 1973, designer Jonathan Hitchcock was designing a line for the Kreisler Group. When Kreisler closed it down because “it was too hard to get hold of the fabrics Jonathan likes to work with,” Jonathan launched his own line—Hitch, Ltd.—with backing from Roberta Flack. It’s unclear how long she was involved with the business, but the business appears to have changed its name to “Jonathan Hitchcock” at the beginning of 1975, at the same time it became a Henri Bendel exclusive.

And some more great stage pieces:

While I have included many pieces here, it is worth noting that this isn’t anywhere near all of even the 1970s garments, let alone the 1980s and beyond. All of the auction lots can be seen on Julien’s Auctions.

If you listen to our conversation on the podcast, you’ll hear Erika (now 95) sharing many of the same opinions on designing and manufacturing fashion as she did back in 1970. Taken together, the podcast and the Rags interview provide an intriguing glimpse of the juniors/teen mass-market in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

To learn more about the fashion column that inspired the creation of Rags, read this newsletter, and to read Rags’ manifesto (of sorts) from its first issue, read here.

ERIKA ELIAS HAS MORE FASHION INFLUENCE THAN ANYONE YOU'VE EVER HEARD OF

Interview by Daphne Davis

Of the almost fifty Seventh Avenue junior sportswear houses, one of the best to emerge in the last five years is Charlie's Girls/ Hang Ten, a division of the mammoth Monsanto Chemical Company. Known in the trade for selling "roast beef in volume" (manufacturese for millions of dollars worth of two or three styles), the line is designed by Erika Elias, a soft spoken, modest woman in her early 30's. Erika's approach, unlike that of most of her competitors, is to design functional clothing compatible with the wearer's lifestyle, and to use the best possible fabrics within the production budget.

Her popularly priced clothes ($8 to $30) are worn by millions of girls (and sometimes boys) from 13 to 25. Though unhyped outside the rag trade, she has more impact on fashion than any of the designers featured in Vogue or Bazaar. And instead of dictating a length, look or color, she prefers to design the kind of sportswear most girls want.

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My latest interview for the Sighs and Whispers Podcast is one I’ve long dreamed of. I’ve been interested in the fashion designer Erika Elias for many years, first coming across her designs for the mass-market teen fashion brand, Charlie’s Girls, in vintage stores over twenty years ago. Erika’s designs for Charlie’s Girls were basically the coolest juniors’ fashions to be sold on a truly mass scale in the late ‘60s and early 1970s. Unlike most mass-fashion brands, Erika’s name is on the label, yet when I tried to research her, I could find very little.

When I interviewed Anna Sui for this podcast eight years ago, she spoke of leaving Parsons after two years to work for Erika Elias at Charlie’s Girls, telling me how that job and working and learning from Erika really shaped her career. Additionally, a few years ago, when I was writing the history of the counterculture fashion magazine Rags for its 50th anniversary box set, I came across an interview with her in the third issue, which provided a clear overview of her incredible success and influence (I will share that interview with you this weekend). Every time I would shrug on one of her brightly colored intarsia sweaters, I would find myself wondering about her, wanting to learn more. Eventually, by reviewing every mention of her in the media from the 1950s on, looking for any hints that might help me trace her whereabouts, I finally found a clue that led me to a possible address. I mailed her a letter, and a few weeks later, she called me back.

Earlier this year, I went up to Vermont to meet with her. She’s 95 years old and has this amazingly sharp memory for what it was like to work in the New York fashion industry from the 1950s through the 1980s. Born in Vienna in 1930 and raised in Czechoslovakia, Erika escaped to America with her family in 1940. Once in New York City, she studied at the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design) and Parsons before starting a career in fashion in the 1950s. In our conversation, she details the many jobs she passed through before first making her mark at Juniorite, Inc., a junior sportswear brand. By early 1960, she was head designer with her name featured on advertisements in Seventeen.

From the start, Erika was in tune with youth culture—she was able to take what was going on in the street, first with the burgeoning youth movement and then with the nascent counterculture, and translate it for the mass market with clothes that were affordable, easy to produce, yet still fashionable and cool. She moved around a bit in the mid-60s, working for juniors’ labels like Weeds and Petti—even designing a children’s line—before she was brought in by Monsanto to start Charlie’s Girls, named after the musical, Charlie Girl. The purpose of Charlie’s Girls was always fun clothes at a good price point. “Charlie’s Girls Inc. Designed by Erika Elias” soon became the coolest label in town, reinforced through an evocative ad campaign illustrated by Joann Landis with a groovy cartoon man, the inimitable “Charlie,” out and about with three very stylish girls in the latest Elias looks (“Charlie is a mythical character who represents the groovy guy this type of chick wants to be associated with. He changes from season to season in our ads. He’s been a rock star, guru, movie star, cowboy, astrology freak, writer, and race car driver.”) One of the first items they launched, in the fall of 1966—a dress with an attached coin purse on a chain, priced at $15—sold over 100,000 pieces, proving that Elias had a keen understanding of what was going to be the “it look” of the season.

As we discuss in this conversation, she was constantly traveling, constantly looking at the street—always curious, always paying attention. When she saw that young surfer girls were wearing their boyfriend’s Hang Ten surfer gear, she met with the founder of the company and licensed the name, producing the first line of surf-inspired clothes for women. Other licenses, including for Dr. Seuss, followed as well as a rainwear line and a secondary line called Charlie’s Moustache—all for girls who were looking for “lighthearted, bright-spirit clothes in cute, funny shapes that make them laugh.” Charlie’s Girls closed in 1974, after six years, when the owners attempted to secretly go to non-union factories and were caught by the union, resulting in massive fines. After that, Erika jumped around—designing for a number of different companies in different segments of the industry, including petites and plus-size, before retiring from design in 1988.

Unlike other designers of her era, she wasn’t out on the town—Erika was a true career woman. Her total focus was on designing and advancing her career at a time when that was unusual for a woman. It led to the dissolution of her first marriage, and likely a bit of disconnection in her second—she even told me, “I never should have gotten married.” You can hear the joy in her voice as she recalls her work; even now, Erika has a very good memory for the jobs, the slimy bosses, the ups and downs of the rag trade. It makes for a very fascinating conversation. If you really care about fashion, it’s so much more than Chanel and Dior... It’s about what people are wearing on the street, and many of Erika’s designs sold hundreds of thousands of units per garment. That’s a lot of people out on the streets of America wearing her clothes. As that 1970 Rags article was titled, “Erika Elias has more fashion influence than anyone you’ve ever heard of.” Now, you can hear her story for the first time.

Some of Erika Elias’ designs for Charlie’s Girls and Hang Ten:

To see many more photos from Erika’s career—at Juniorite, Charlie’s Girls, and later—visit the Sighs and Whispers Podcast website.

Each of the five, very different artists provided two works for the folio: one in their “established style” and one in their “personal style.” These were then printed on the duplex combination paper (basically a thicker stock with a subtle linen-like ground, with different colours on each side), to illustrate how these papers “give you more ways than ever to express your most imaginative ideas.” The artist’s papers are graduated in size, so that they nestle beautifully within the folder.

The artists include a computer artist/illustrator, a photographer, a typographer, a satirical illustrator, and an illustrator/graphic designer. It’s a rather motley group. I came across this folio as I have interviewed two of the artists for my podcast previously, and love their work. Curtis Papers closed in 2003, so I haven’t been able to discover much more about this project, but as corporate projects go, I always welcome ones that highlight artists.

The top image for each artist is their “established style” with the bottom, their “personal style.”

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Barbara Nessim

Listen to my interview with Barbara on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Soundcloud

Jack Ward

I couldn’t find anything online about Jack Ward, except a single remembrance of him teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tom Carnase

John Robinette

Barry Zaid

Listen to my interview with Barry on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Soundcloud

Production notes:

Because a magic trick is so ephemeral, it is the wands, the posters, and the magic catalogues that have survived. Through the ephemera and memorabilia, a story emerges: of magic as a locus of creativity, technological innovation, occult knowledge, mystery, and performance. This isn’t a subject I had much knowledge of previously, but I found myself captivated by the stories and lives of these intrepid magicians, magic shopkeepers, and collectors. Harry Houdini is the most remembered of the magicians highlighted, but many of the others were just as famous in their day; among them, Harry Kellar, Alexander and Adelaide Herrmann, Howard Thurston, and Dell O’Dell.

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This is a very image-heavy newsletter, so you will likely need to view it in your browser or the Substack app. While what I’m sharing may seem like a lot, it is just a tiny portion of what is on view in the exhibition—if you are anywhere nearby before it closes on July 11th, I recommend stopping by. There are so many details—the typography, the graphics, the language, the sumptuous print quality of the posters—that it is a total delight to take them all in, in person. If you can’t make it there, I suggest opening these photos and zooming in to see as much detail as possible. I mean, just look at all the magic paraphernalia covering the walls in the photo below!

The wall of posters is the most sensational and dramatic section of the show. It is hard to see here, but the colours are so luminous, the posters so large and imposing, and the content so fantastical, it’s not hard to imagine them melting the minds of anyone who happened upon them on the street in the 1890s. By illustrating the key moments of a magician’s act—“transformations, levitations, decapitations”—and aligning them with the supernatural and deviant—through the inclusion of demons, imps, and sprites—these posters helped create “a new visual language of magic.”

From the exhibition didactic:

These posters playfully suggest the wonder and fantasy of what will be, leaving much to the imagination of audience members. Magicians and their promoters displayed posters at theaters and performance venues, as well as on walls, fences, and other highly visible surfaces. Thin pieces of paper, they were never meant to last. Indeed, some of these posters are among the only examples known to exist today.

The rise of Golden Age magicians aligned perfectly with the zenith of multicolor stone lithography, which was used to mass-produce masterpieces of poster advertising art across genres. In this print-making technique an artist draws with an oil-based medium onto a limestone block, creating one block for each primary color used in the final image. The stone is chemically treated and ink is applied to the block, adhering only to the oiled areas. Stones are then placed in a printing press, allowing the poster paper to be perfectly aligned as it is pressed onto each subsequent color block. This process produced artwork with delicate detail and subtle overlappings of colors that could be printed in very large quantities. Many examples in the Library’s poster collection are the creations of Strobridge Lithographing Co. of Cincinnati, Ohio, considered the greatest American poster company of that era, particularly for magic. Although the individual artists are rarely known, the compelling imagery, vibrant colors, substantial sizes, and crisp printing make their posters exceptionally beautiful.

On the above gown:

“A magician’s costume is an integral part of the performance, emphasizing an aesthetic, establishing a character, and serving practical uses during tricks. This costume is an homage to the elegantly shaped and adorned dress that Adelaide wore as the “Queen of Magic” onstage at the turn of the 20th century (and depicted in a photograph nearby). For a woman, the elbow-length sleeves and fitted bodice make it clear that there is nothing “up her sleeves” or concealed under a suit jacket, as a man could do. Yet there are other secrets. An expert on the Herrmanns, the magician and author Margaret Steele (b. 1953) commissioned this dress to wear in performances when she recreated many of Adelaide’s signature solo illusions.”

About the above and below images:

Audiences thrilled to see Thurston’s “Mystery of the Water Fountains” illusion, which often closed his shows. This elaborate adaptation of a simple trick by the Japanese magician Ten Ichi was beautifully costumed, with elegant Asian-inspired sets, music, and colored lights. The effect was complicated and messy. It involved the transformation of bowls of rice to endlessly multiplying sources of water emanating from bowls, coconut shells, pans, fans, bamboo poles, and even the bodies of Thurston’s many assistants. The scene culminated in a rainbow of water jets arcing across the stage.

Mystery and Wonder: A Legacy of Golden Age Magicians in New York City.

Through July 11, 2026

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Shelby Cullom Davis Museum, Vincent Astor Gallery

40 Lincoln Center Plaza (entrance at 111 Amsterdam between 64th and 65th)

New York, NY 10023

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I have a short piece in the Spring 2026 issue of recently relaunched Playboy about photographer Bunny Yeager and her role in defining the early Playboy look. It looks like the issue is sold out online, but you might be able to find one at newsstands. It’s always fun to revisit Bunny and her world!

Below are some of the things that fascinated and intrigued me this month:

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Following the trail of Mary Colter’s legacy across the Southwest

As an architect and the head decorator for the Fred Harvey Company from 1902 to 1948, Mary Colter was integral to the creation of what we consider the Southwest aesthetic—a blend of “Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission Revival architecture with Native American motifs and Rustic elements. At the Grand Canyon and along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, she fashioned hotels, lodges, restaurants, shops, and lookouts that appeared hundreds, thousands, of years old, so historically accurate did they appear—her research process even included developing fictional narratives for the supposed previous inhabitants, whether Hopi or Spanish, allowing her to access a level of intimate understanding that translated into an intense attention to detail.

For AAA Magazine, the design writer Trisha Cole went on a train and car odyssey across the southwest, visiting most of Colter’s buildings—and now all I want to do is copy this trip exactly (I wonder if a toddler would be into it?)

My ’90s Art World: “I saw 25, 30 shows a week, made hundreds of studio visits, and everywhere I went I brought my camera.”

All of New York Magazine’s “The Art Issue” is good, but this slideshow of art critic Jerry Saltz’s slides of the 1990s NYC art scene is particularly fascinating.

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Produced as a way to advertise the company’s La Mode brand (they also had a subsidiary brand called Le Chic), the idea was to use buttons to “change a dress from old to new, excite a costume with color, emphasize the lines of a fashion”—finding within this brand’s wide offerings (“from tiny pearly buttons to big, breathtaking buttons of gleaming gilt, from starkly simple buttons to amusing novelties”) something that would jazz up one’s look. Whether it’s a sprinkling of star-shaped buttons around a neckline or stripes of buttons circling a circle skirt, the emphasis is on zhuzhing up simple styles or outmoded garments—finding ways to make them look novel or new.

But before getting to the ideas, there is a short history of buttons, a breakdown of what they are conventionally made from, and instructions on how to properly sew a button and buttonhole (essential for everyone to learn!)

Of course, within fashion history, the use of buttons as embellishment instantly recalls Patrick Kelly’s work in the 1980s. In taking inspiration from the mismatched buttons his grandmother mended his childhood shirts with, he catalyzed a new vision for the humble fastener. Whether densely layered in a collage of different-sized and colored buttons, used to spell out letters or symbols, or elegantly arranged like polka dots, Kelly saw buttons as something more—as something easy-to-find that could be arranged and rearranged for endless possibilities. At one point, Kelly even offered a DIY option; selling his signature skintight dresses untrimmed with separately packaged buttons, bows, and brooches, leaving the creativity up to the wearer (much like the woman appealed to by B. Blumenthal’s team).

If you are looking at your spring and summer clothes with a little less than enthusiasm, then maybe these pages offer some novel ways to reinvigorate them. While NYC’s legendary Tender Buttons sadly closed in 2019 (The New Yorker’s elegy for the shop is worth a read), there are still quite a few button and trim stores around the Garment District—Lou Lou Buttons has over 10 million in stock (they sell online as well). For vintage buttons (the best, of course), if you are in London, go to Taylor’s Buttons and Bells. Otherwise, online or at antiques malls appears to be the way to go. I am always on the lookout for interesting Bakelite buttons when searching through antique shops. But then, what’s so fun about so many of these ideas is that you don’t need to hunt down the most intricate, rare vintage buttons; for many of these projects, brightly coloured plastic buttons or little pearl ones would be the most sensational. If you know of any other specialist button shops, please let me know in the comments!

Sadly, the illustrations aren’t credited anywhere in the booklet, so I do not know who they’re by. Benjamin Blumenthal founded B. Blumenthal & Co. in 1877. In 1986, B. Blumenthal acquired an Iowa-based button company, Lansing Button Works, becoming Blumenthal Lansing Company. In 2016, Blumenthal Lansing was acquired by CSS Industries Inc.; four years later, CSS Industries Inc. was acquired by Atlanta-based paper gift packaging company, IG Design Group.1 Suffice it to say, there is unlikely to be any B. Blumenthal archive still kicking around, so any information about the illusive illustrator is likely lost.

And now, the thirty-eight pages of button ideas, so “take a button, make a fashion”:

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It was an intense week of research (if I owe you an email, sorry!), and while I think my original book idea is going to need a whole new approach, I came across so many things that I plan to write about, whether here, in academic articles, or in other publications. I shared some photos from my week on Instagram.

Sifting through the papers of five very different women, I was continually compelled to photograph the letterheads they received. Whether from businesses they were doing work with or from friends catching up, the letterheads are striking. Below I’ve pulled together a small group of these letterheads, from the 1930s through 1960s, featuring a range of different graphic design styles and a cornucopia of fonts. There’s the very traditional (the Calico Printers Association likely had not changed it’s in over a century), the Art Deco, the Psychedelic, and just about everything in between. Looking at all of these has me dreaming of getting my own letterhead designed—but which direction to go???

That something interesting is a cookbook of recipes starring coffee (according to MacMillan, often using the coffee experimentally in place of bouillon or wine) that also delves into the history of coffee, its botanical background, and how to properly brew coffee at home. Among the recipes are “Kenya Pot Roast,” “Chicken Columbia” [sic], “Veal Venezuela” with “Spicy Prune Conserve,” and “Polynesian Spareribs,” as well as many delicious-looking desserts. Each chapter opens with a full-page illustration, with additional illustrations used alongside coffee poems and as punctuation throughout.

Of course, the illustrator Dennis Redmond was also an intriguing character…

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Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the covers of Scope, a monthly magazine published by Upjohn Pharmaceuticals between 1941 and 1957. For health professionals, its “mission was to explain the latest medical research, to report on advances in diagnoses and treatment, and to advertise Upjohn’s prescription drugs,” but it did so with the help of two pioneering American graphic designers: Will Burtin and Lester Beall. These men really created a new visual language for illustrating scientific and medical ideas. Drawing on European modernist graphic design advances, and using a mix of typography, diagrams, symbols, color, and photography, Burtin and Beall “set the highest standard for the effective and beautiful blending of form and content.”

On sale through the Easter weekend is Bomber Boys, a book I worked on WWII flight jacket art. Put together by photographer John Slemp, I contributed a chapter on the influence of bomber jackets on popular culture (movies, music, comics and TV) and on fashion. John’s photos lushly capture every single nook and cranny of the jackets and their artwork—making them an incredible resource for those interested in the war, for graphic designers, for fashion designers, and for collectors. It’s an exquisitely printed book and would make a great gift for anyone interested in World War II history.

Below are some of the things that fascinated and intrigued me this month:

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The Texan Ideology

From Fred Turner, author of the seminal From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, a piece on Silicon Valley’s shift to Texas and the ideological changes that both support and result from it. To supplement, I recommend this podcast interview with Fred about this subject and his career.

In the 1990s of the Californian Ideology, a loose hippie spiritualism prevailed, but going to church was for the hopelessly square. Today, as Silicon Valley leaders turn to the right, and particularly when they migrate to Texas, many are embracing the simultaneous celebration of entrepreneurship and Christian discipleship at the heart of the Texan Ideology… For Lonsdale, as for Dunn and, increasingly, Musk, the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.

That fusion is the essence of the Texan Ideology. The millenarian impulse that animates it could be felt in 1990s California too, but the Californian Ideology grew from the counterculture, a movement driven by the search for a new consciousness, for new ways to understand our collective interconnection and so leave earthly politics behind. Its spiritual tendencies proved ideal for motivating and legitimating the construction of a global digital network. The Texan Ideology grows out of two centuries of resource extraction in the heart of the Bible Belt. Its Christianity emphasizes the idea that saints walk among us and should be venerated over the notion that we should tend to the least among us first and foremost. The Christian elements of the Texan Ideology lead to the building of private compounds, not soup kitchens.

From Yves Saint Laurent to Thierry Mugler: Annie, model and jewelry designer

And for something very different, an interview with former model Annie Ferrari. Her first show was YSL’s famed spring 1971 “Libération” collection, before becoming a favourite of Thierry Mugler. Alongside her husband, Annie set up the premier jewellery atelier for special fashion show pieces.

I posted this clip a few months ago of Annie modeling Mugler:

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The first designer I became truly obsessed with was Ossie Clark. I voraciously read everything I could find about him, following every rabbit hole that led to any friend or associate mentioned in any book or article about him. One of the names often mentioned alongside him in early articles was Hylan Booker, an African American fashion designer who studied at the Royal College of Art in London alongside Ossie in the early to mid-1960s. I was always intrigued by his story—how did a Black Detroiter end up in London, studying fashion in the 1960s?—so I set out to speak to him.

Now living in Los Angeles, Booker has had a long and very varied career, working in many sectors of the fashion industry before starting anew in art. Born and raised in Detroit, Hylan Booker studied art in high school, briefly working in window displays at the department store Franklin Simon, before joining the US Air Force and getting stationed in the UK in 1958. In his downtime, he studied at the Swindon School of Art before enrolling at the Royal College of Art in London, where he studied alongside Ossie Clark. Booker launched his own line after graduation in 1966; working out of his small garret atelier, he did everything himself: design, cut, sew, sell, and deliver. It quickly became one of the most talked-about collections in Swinging London. Favoring elegant, sculptured wool dresses and coats, Booker was trying to move fashion forward from the hip Carnaby Street look. As he explained to a journalist, “The kooky had a job to do. It started a whole new feeling… Now people want more quality. Me? I’m a realist. I like to see people in what they can live in.”

In 1967, he was awarded Yardley’s London Look Award; a surprise, as Janey Ironside, the legendary professor of fashion at the RCA, wrote in her memoir, while describing her most famous students: “There was Hylan Booker, an attractive young American Negro ex-G.I. intelligent and talkative, who ironically enough won the Yardley Award IN America for the best ‘young British designer.’” I’ve written a bit about this award before, as Vanessa Clarke was also up for it along with Bill Gibb, Janice Wainwright, and Alun Hughes. Though his own line was selling to Harrods, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Henri Bendel, he closed it in early 1968 due to financial issues. A few months later, Booker became the first Black designer to helm a European couture house when he was tapped to design the couture collection for the newly revived House of Worth (other designers were hired to design hats, furs, menswear, and jewelry). His designs brought a new, fresh energy to the London couture scene.

Booker left the House of Worth in autumn 1970, after the owner stymied his efforts to push the company to expand into ready-to-wear. Throughout the next decade, he freelanced for many British fashion companies, taught at Nottingham College of Art, and established a cosmetics line for women of color, called Mia, before returning to the United States in 1980. In New York, Booker began designing for men, spending much of the decade working for D.S.I. along with moonlighting for other contemporary men’s brands. He moved to Miami in the 1990s, where—with his wife, Charlotte Schiff-Jones, acting as muse and providing assistance and support—he established a couture line of exquisite evening gowns, Hylan Booker, which proved to be the ultimate wardrobe for Palm Beach society balls. As an ad for a trunk show at venerable Palm Beach retailer Martha stated, a “connoisseur collection of romantic, opulent and distinctive evening wear, glorious ball gowns and bridal.” After closing his line in the wake of 9/11, Hylan switched his focus to art—primarily painting, as well as soaking up the beauty of art while working as a guard for LACMA, which also provided him the opportunity to start writing about art and fashion history for LACMA’s blog, Unframed.

Here is Booker revisiting his time with Worth, in a LACMA blog post from 2011, at the time of the museum’s “Fashioning Fashion” exhibition:

Reflecting on my time with the House of Worth, the most striking thing was the time itself. The 1960s were hot and sexy, and Swinging London was the coolest place in the universe—vivacious, vivid, and vital. It feels like everything that we experience now was being born at that very moment. The spirit of women really defined this sense of liberation with a freedom not seen since the 1920s, although far more complex and assured. Here the short skirt, the tights, bobbed hair, and the pill would cut them off from the past as never before. Unknowingly, we were the future. With our own intoxicating background music of the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Kinks, Jimmy Hendrix, and so many more, a self-reflecting universe seen through Pop art was complete. It was a glorious, uniquely transient moment! And we were the agents, the vanguard, possessing a standard we were somehow expected to maintain. I was the product of the Royal College of Art, as were many of the designers and artists at the time such as David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, and the Kings Road style maker, Ossie Clark. England was bursting with artistic energy.

Hylan has always been at the center of everything—continually creating and always evolving. Still painting daily, Hylan is a highly erudite, philosophical man. We spoke for several hours, with our conversation touching on all aspects of his life and career, following the ups and downs, the inspirations, and the passions—discussing all of the career moments covered above in much greater detail, and situating them within a life of great friendship and family.

Some looks from Hylan Booker’s late 1990s-early 2000s demi-couture eveningwear line:

Some of Hylan Booker’s artwork:

Lots more photos and press clippings from Hylan Booker’s career can be seen on the Sighs and Whispers Podcast website.

The first and second homes featured below are the same physical space, just completely redecorated; her interior creations are so complete that none of the architecture (or likely, the lack of architectural detail) of the flats is shown, nor any sense of the floor plan. What we do see are totally novel spaces.

Featured in the October 19, 1968, issue of Petticoat, a British youth fashion magazine, the first flat is a key example of a pop art home. Zandra and her then-boyfriend, television/production designer Alex MacIntyre, built the furniture themselves from unusual materials and recast garish objects as pop art sculptures. The look was so novel—the white walls, floor, and ceiling; the sunken bed with plastic cover; the brightly colored plastic—that the studio apartment became a favourite of British newspaper and magazine style pages, “constantly pictured in spreads on individualistic young London homes.” Women’s Wear Daily described it as a “shiny plastic palace.”

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I often feel that Grace Mirabella is unfairly maligned or forgotten in the history of Vogue editors; not given to the kind of style pronouncements that made her predecessor, Diana Vreeland, legendary, and without the steely self-resolve that has made Wintour into a cultural icon (look at her Oscars appearance the other night for an example), Mirabella fades into the background. Where Vreeland’s Vogue was all about fantasy, Mirabella’s sought realism. I wouldn’t say the magazine was “realistic,” but more an aspirational realism. You might not look like Kelly Emberg or Beverly Johnson under the gaze of Denis Piel, but with the right haircut, diet, and clothes, some affinity might be possible, versus the pure fantasia of Vreeland’s editorials—Veruschka nude except for body paint or wrapped head-to-toe in a fur-lined body bag might be a dream, but not a realistic one. Mirabella described her Vogue woman as a “little bit more easy-going, healthier, approachable look. It’s a certain kind of good looks, it’s not over-polished.”

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If you’ve ever browsed through a 1980s issue of Vogue, you’ve likely seen Denis Piel’s work—combining storytelling and photography, his editorials have a cinematic, narrative quality that unfolds across the pages (scroll below to see a few full stories). Contracted with Condé Nast from 1979 to 1990, he shot more than 1000 editorial spreads and celebrity portraits for the American, German, Italian, French, and British editions of Vogue, along with Vanity Fair, Self, and GQ.

His story began in France, where he was born to members of the French resistance in 1944. After the war, his family moved to Australia to start over. As he spoke about in our interview, Piel began a photographic career while still a teen. He opened his own studio in Brisbane in 1966, mostly shooting advertising work. A small job for Vogue Australia led him to move to Melbourne, where he began to focus on fashion photography. After moving to Europe in the early 1970s, he shot for many of the hippest young fashion magazines, like French Elle and Honey. After a brief time focusing on art photography, technology, and holograms, in 1979, Piel moved to New York, where his work for the New York Times Magazine brought him to the attention of Alexander Liberman, the legendary art director of American Vogue. Liberman became a mentor to Piel, bringing him into the Condé Nast fold and giving him the kind of contract that every photographer dreams of and few achieve (Avedon and Penn are some of the only others).

Sensual and cinematic, his fashion and beauty photos always seemed to be telling a story, hinting at a mysterious narrative. For Piel, he found inspiration in the work of directors like François Truffaut and Stanley Kubrick, rather than other photographers. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the world of cinema came to him; in 1983, Denis Piel was asked to be technical advisor on the James Toback film Exposed, which starred Ian McShane as a fashion photographer modeled on Piel. Inspired by his experience on set, he decided to start directing; in 1985, Piel established a film production company, Jupiter Films, and began shooting commercials, most famously with Rosemary McGrotha for Donna Karan. He was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence for Commercial Photography in 1987. After he left Condé Nast to concentrate on directing in 1990, Denis continued to shoot commercials while also making a feature-length documentary, Love is Blind. Following blind couples as they fell in love and married, it premiered in 1995. In the early 2000s, Denis and his family left New York and moved permanently to a Renaissance chateau in South-West France, Château de Padiès. There, he became deeply interested in sustainable agriculture.

Since then, he has focused on art photography, much of it inspired by the Chateau’s gardens and local environment. Many of his photographic series have been exhibited and published as books. Moments, the first monograph of Piel’s work, was published by Rizzoli in September 2012. In 2020, Piel published three books: EXPOSED, FILMSCAPES, and PLATESCAPES. He continues to photograph, primarily focusing on his Padièscapes series; described by his NYC gallery, Staley-Wise, as “colorful and abstracted,” the Padièscapes are “work which celebrates nature in flowers and gardens. These images are a departure from the fashion pictures of Piel’s early career, but reflect his continued interest in the environment and humanity.”

I’ve long loved the narrative power of his fashion stories and have always wanted to know more about his personal history in photography. I first reached out to Denis in 2018 to interview him for this podcast. There were many emails back and forth over the years, trying to set something up, but we finally met and recorded this conversation in March 2025 when he was in New York for an exhibition of his photographs at the Staley-Wise Gallery. In our podcast conversation, we spoke about growing up in Australia in the 1950s, his introduction to photography, setting up his own studio, and how fashion photography brought him from Australia to Europe, and eventually, to New York City and Conde Nast. Denis told me all about life in 1980s New York, the appeal of making movies, and the various photo series and books he’s made over the last 20 years, many inspired by and celebrating the nature of his home.

Denis Piel’s famous Donna Karan New York ad (1985), starring Rosemary McGrotha:

“The Perfect Escape,” an editorial photographed by Denis Piel at the Institute of Thalassotherapy in Biarritz, for Vogue, December 1981. Piel traveled there with fashion editor Polly Mellon, models Rosemary McGrotha and Kevin McLaughlin, and hair and makeup artist Rick Gilette, a previous guest on the podcast.

Kelly LeBrock in Japan, photographed by Denis Piel for Vogue, December 1985:

If you read my article last year on Santos Santiago, a clothing line that in its brief year of existence had a definite influence on fashion, and appreciated their colourful “cartoon clothes,” I finally had the opportunity to wear out one of their dresses (after searching for over a decade) to an opening in February. It was a delight to wear—the curved expanses of bright colorblocking seemed to bring an instant smile to all who saw me.

If you are in Chicago before June 21st, visit the DePaul Art Museum to see a new exhibition of the art of former podcast guest Barbara Nessim, which includes paintings, drawings, computer art prints, a site specific installation, with “special emphasis on the artist’s sketchbooks or her ‘forever books,’ as she calls them, which have been instrumental to her creative process.” Pick me up a copy of the catalogue, if you make it there!

Below are some of the things that fascinated and intrigued me this month:

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Frederick Wiseman, The Art of Documentary No. 1

I’ve written about my love for Frederick Wiseman’s documentary The Store before, but all of his work has had a huge influence on me since I first saw Welfare while in college. His death on February 16th pierced my heart—yes, he was 96, but it was obvious from his last film, the four-hour Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023), that his observational eye was still so sharp. This 2018 Paris Review interview with him is a delight.

The theory shifts as I discover the structure. I try to avoid imposing a preconceived view on the material. Editing is a process that combines the rational and the nonrational. I have learned to pay as much attention to peripheral thoughts at the edge of my mind as to any formally logical approaches to the material. My associations are often as valuable as my attempts at deductive logic. It’s the old cliché—you find a solution to a problem because you dream it, or you’re walking down the street and it occurs to you, or you think of it in the shower. I’ve resolved editing problems many times that way, by trying to be alert to the way my mind—or what’s left of it—thinks about the material, even when I’m not formally editing. That’s why for me, total absorption is absolutely crucial. I can’t edit in a half-assed way. Editing almost kills every other aspect of my life.

Suburban Sublime: On the paranormal archive of SORRAT

Photographer Shannon Taggart's study of the archive of the Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis (SORRAT).

A look at the group’s archive reveals SORRAT—long dismissed as an embarrassing footnote to Neihardt’s career—as a mythopoetic extension of his literary cosmos. Collapsing art, science, paranormal phenomena, and ritual, SORRAT expands Neihardt’s search for visionary truth via poetry and experimentation. As an inadvertent art collective, the group both mirrors and anticipates many vanguard, cross-disciplinary approaches throughout the twentieth century: Consider Marcel Duchamp’s recontextualizations of common objects and experiences, John Cage’s aleatoric methodologies, and various forms of radical play (à la Cage, neo-Dada, and Fluxus) embraced by artists such as Alison Knowles and Yoko Ono. SORRAT’s central preoccupations with invisible transmission and amalgamated authorship connect to fundamental questions regarding distributed agency and who—or what—it is that creates.

…

Working through the archive over the past five years felt less like piecing together a narrative about the group than entering a world that had already scripted itself. What begins as paranormal record-keeping gradually reveals a mythic tale centered on people who, fittingly, were mostly writers. Taken as a whole, the archive reads like a multi-act tragedy in which humans confront the forces of nature. It is thick with symbolic devices, recurring motifs, and unforgettable characters.

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