bbnnt:

True Norwegian Black Metal

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Photographing the Sweet Crazies (Read: Mentally Ill) of Ethiopia

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Fuck Winter

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Army Girls Can Be Girly Girls in Afghanistan

I don’t know about you ladies, but to me the army has never seemed like the ideal place to spend your early twenties. In my mind, there would be no shopping, Gossip Girl or spending hours in one position under the sun trying to achieve the perfect tan. Or basically anything else that’s silly and unimportant, but is an important part of me feeling unashamedly like a girl.

Turns out I was wrong. Lalage Snow is a photographer who has spent a good part of the last five years in Iraq and Afghanistan photographing female soldiers. According to her work, girls in the army remain very intent on “being girls.”

Not that this makes the army any more appealing to me personally, but I think it’s cute to know that, while you’re sweeping the roadsides for Taliban IEDs, you can also sorta smile to yourself whilst imagining Spencer from Made In Chelsea getting blown up by one. So I called up Lalage for a chat.

VICE: Hey Lalage. What’s up?
Lalage Snow: Hey! Just got back from holiday with some friends. We stayed in a house in Assenois, which is in the south of Belgium. We ate lots of paté and drunk biére blonde.

And how did that differ from your time in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Haha! It was different, but you know, it was much girlier than you’d think. The British girls in Iraq, for example, would sunbathe any chance they got, while when it came to the way they decorated their bunks everything was over-the-top girly. Pink washbags and sponges, pink iPod cases. The American girls would have a slumber party almost every night. They’d watch scary films and eat popcorn in their little bunker on a computer. When you are in such a masculine environment you sort of need to cling on to your femininity really tightly.

How old were most of the girls?
Young. The American female engagement team were like, 19 to 22 years old.

You know how they say women are more tolerant to pain, because of our periods and baby birthing and all that? Did you find that to be the case with the female soldiers?
Well, for the time I hung out with the girls they never came under fire. Their main job is to go out and find Afghan women on the streets and search them. Because men are not allowed to speak or touch Afghan women, they were finding that often they were hiding rifles or thousands of dollars under their burqas, and so the female team was brought in.

Right. Were they being treated differently by the male soldiers?
Yes and no. They would get some hassle and some slack at the same time from the other guy soldiers, but I think at the end of the day, they look at it and say we are just soldiers together—a job is a job. They have the confidence to do so.


But the funniest thing was the Afghan response to these girls. They can see that it is a soldier in uniform, but they also see the blonde hair underneath the cap in a ponytail and they are like, “Oh my God, it’s a girl looking like a man!” They all think that Western girls are really weird.

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RON GALELLA HATES GANG BANGS - THE ORIGINAL PAPARAZZO TALKS ABOUT HIS LIFETIME OF PARTY CRASHING

Before the concept of paparazzi became what it is today—swarms of faceless, Hollywood-hungry fools with digital cameras, no clout, and even less class—Ron Galella was sneaking into parties via dumbwaiters, snapping shots of Madonna, Bowie, and Liza dancing post-rails at Studio 54, and relentlessly stalking Jackie O. outside her Upper East Side apartment.  

An opportunist and workaholic, Galella scrabbled his way up the twisted ladder, eventually becoming thephotographer of celebrities—a distinction that may not have been sanctioned but was definitely recognized. He’s been beaten to a pulp by Marlon Brando (after which he wore a football helmet when Brando was around), sued by Jackie O., and barred from dozens of exclusive clubs while at the same time being incredibly valuable to the industry because, from the 60s through the 80s, literally no one was doing what he did. During this period, his work appeared regularly in Time (which deemed him the “godfather of US paparazzi culture”),Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and People. He captured intimate moments no one else had the balls to even attempt to photograph. 

Today, at 81, Galella has seen everything the glamorous world of movie stars has to offer, and he’s got it all documented and catalogued. The basement of his New Jersey mansion is overstuffed with meticulously categorized shots of everyone from Andy Warhol to Elizabeth Taylor to Goldie Hawn to Elvis Presley. He’s currently working on a book about Jackie O., his greatest obsession, but he took a break to talk to us about his long years of shoving cameras in famous faces and graciously offer a selection of unpublished photos from his archives. 

A candid shot of Ron surrounded by his decades of candid shots. Portrait By Benjamin Wlody.

VICE: Do you consider your work invasive?
Ron Galella: Well…

I have to ask, considering you’ve been punched and sued more than a couple times.
[laughs] I’m controversial, you see. Some celebrities think they are private, like Jackie Onassis. She thought she was private. But in public areas you are fair game. She was a hypocrite in a way, because she liked it, too. My greatest picture of her is “Windblown Jackie.” She had no makeup, no hairdo, natural pose, natural person. I was photographing this model Joyce Smith in Central Park near Jackie’s house. When we were leaving the park, I spotted Jackie. She didn’t see me, but I followed her to the corner of 85th and Madison and hopped in a cab. If I had followed her on foot, she would have spotted me and put on her sunglasses, and I don’t like that kind of shot. My taxi driver blew his horn; I think he was interested in looking at Jackie. When the horn sounded, Jackie turned and looked right at the cab. I got the shot. Then I got out of the cab and gave Joyce Smith another camera so she could get some shots of me going after Jackie. 

Why were you so obsessed with Jackie O.? 
There were a lot of reasons: Physically she was beautiful, with big, wide eyes. She had a whispering, soft, little-girl voice like Marilyn. The biggest factor, which creates glamour in any woman, was that she had mystique. She was mysterious. She was quiet. She only gave three interviews her entire life. Mystique is what is lacking in most celebrities today. Everyone is so quick to expose themselves; it’s vulgar. When there is mystery we want to know more. It leaves something to be desired. 

When did you start working as a paparazzo? 
I had no money for a studio coming out of art school, so I just shot on location. The world was my studio. It was necessity. I would shoot celebrities in their environment: at events, the airport… Of course, with Jackie, I would just wait outside her doorstep and she could take me anywhere. When I shot, my style was very candid, spontaneous, and unrehearsed. My letterhead even says, Photography with the Paparazzi Approach. I wanted real emotions. Whereas today, it’s all posed. At a premiere, the paparazzi just yell the celebrities’ names; they want the celebrity looking into their camera. I never wanted that. I wanted people doing real things. That’s what makes great pictures: genuine emotions. We want to see celebrities in human situations, so we can say, “Look, they are just like us!” It tells a story when they’re doing things. A posed picture says nothing. 

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disturber-magazine:

Best Shots published in 2011.

Ayman Oghanna

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New Laws Would Make Environmental Protest “Terrorism”

Most people have heard of tree-sitting—a tactic environmentalists use to prevent old-growth trees from being cut down and whole forests decimated. In its heyday, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, members of groups like Earth First! climbed 100-foot-tall Redwoods and stayed there to save them. Beginning in 1997, one woman in Humboldt, California, named her tree Luna and stayed in it for two years, until enough money could be raised to prevent it from being axed. In 1998, in a Northern California old-growth forest, another treesitter named David Gypsy Chain was “accidentally” killed when loggers felled a tree that came crashing into the protester. He died instantly of massive head trauma.

This style of protest was also hugely successful—that is, until a series of arrests in 2005 against radical environmentalists who were labeled “terrorists.” It scared the shit out of the environmental-activist community, and folks started drifting away.

Now, there’s a vibrant national protest movement reviving those “direct action” tactics of civil disobedience again, and adding a new political savvy to the mix. They, too, have been incredibly effective. In Oregon, in the summer of 2011, one blockade took 50 cops, a backhoe, and a 125-foot-crane to remove treesitters. A few days later, activists locked themselves together in an Oregon Department of Forestry office. The group responsible, the Cascadia Forest Defenders, say they won’t stop until the Elliott State Forest is protected from clearcutting.

As a result—surprise, surprise—politicians are trying to create new laws that make tree-sits and other direct-action techniques illegal. The bills even single out the Elliott State Forest campaign by name and allow corporations to sue protesters for costing them money.

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