There are themes that I explore again and again.  In my photography, my journal, my conversations, the books I read. For a long time it was stone angels, I must have read Look Homeward Angel 4 times.  So what is it now, my obsession? ObsessionS, plural?  iPhoneography, for sure.  Themes in my pictures: fashion images set against some improbable and challenging background.  This particular model is currently the face of Marc Jacobs.  Every month there is a Marc Jacobs ad in all the fashion rags that has always set a model in some setting, and styled her, to be deliberately ugly.  Counterintuitive, but it makes you look twice, stare even, trying to read the secret meaning in the image.

The model he uses now is this Chinese model, who is being photographed in settings such as urban jungles (as opposed to flower meadows), grungy graffitied walls and such.  Still not pretty, which is exactly why I like them.  So I have become obsessed with this model, who becomes more beautiful the more you grunge it up.  She apears again and again in the images I’m doing.  Since I don’t like pixel-perfect images, I like to take her face and apply it to my own imagined settings, such as the swirling-galaxy background above, which is actually a picture of a store window in Chapel Hill, NC.

Thanks to Marc Jacobs for an innovative approach to their advertising, and how we are forced to see fashion in a different way.