The Plant Journal / Winter 2012

Thursday night Artwords Bookshop on east London’s Broadway Market played host to the launch of the second issue of The Plant Journal. The cozy little hotspot was packed with fine faces from the London creative scene, including 2DM’s Ricardo Fumanal (who has a lovely illustration entitled “Monstera Deliciosa” in the issue), and photographers Paul Barbera and Roberta Ridolfi. The cause for the occasion, of course, was the sophomore issue of a lovely little journal that we had yet to get our hands on. Last night was the first time we’d seen one in person, and it is a welcome and down-to-earth entry into the rarified niche of very fashionable un-fashion magazines that includes the likes of Apartamento and other instant classics.

The magazine drips heavy with film photography, and is entirely about plants. Yes, just plants. But not in the Better Homes and Gardens vain. Lovely plants in cozy settings that make us wish for an urban terrace that’s just an itty bit bigger. Contributors to this most recent issue include 2DM’s Nacho Alegre, Ángeles Peña, Ari and Patricia Feld, Elein Fleiss, Misaki Kawai, Xabier Mendiola and several others. Inside, read about orchards in northern Minnesota, learn to make macramé plant hangers, cook along with delicious still-lives and peruse interviews with the likes of Simon Petrovich and Piet Oudolf.

The art direction is straightforward, with jumbo serifs and a rather adventurous use of rainbow script fonts and well selected art. It’s nice work from Cristina and Isabel Merino – who are also lovely hosts – and their crew that makes us yearn for springtime… We look forward to the next issue and will be warming up our green thumbs in the meantime.

Novembre Issue 4

If you ask the founders of the fabulous Swiss-based magazine dedicated to fashion and contemporary art: ‘Why Novembre?’, they will probably answer you that it is a non-title: “a title that looks like it means something, but does not”. Actually, as readers, we would say that for us it means a lot. It is synonymous of creativity, forward-looking and quality of contents – texts, which worth to be read and eclectic images that strike, together with a fresh and contemporary lay out.

The fourth issue of Novembre is out and now officially distributed worldwide. Written by polyglot, bi-national editors in trilingual version (French, German, English) for globalized people, the magazine, published twice a year, proving itself as an international source of inspiration. The list of contributors is excellent as in the previous issues and doesn’t let the readers down. Special guests, such as Fabrice Stroun, the recently made director of the Kunsthalle Bern board and Haider Ackermann, one of the greatest demanded designers of the fashion system, along with the conceptual artist Hans Peter Feldman and the Swiss performance artist, painter, sculptor, critic, and curator John Armleder, enrich the pages of the magazine with their visions. Last but not least, the versatile contemporary artist Peter Sutherland’s cover, featuring work from his show “Secrets of the Valley”.

Once more 2DM’s talents have the pleasure to collaborate with this unique publication. The photo sections of the last issue this time hosts the shoots by Tung Walsh, accompanied by the stylist Tamara Cincik, and the ones by Bruna Kazinoti. Don’t miss it!

Monica Lombardi – with special thanks to Maxime Beuchi – images courtesy of 2DM / Management

The Editorial: Kodak Filmflam

I can almost hear Paul Simon’s 1973 hit “Kodachrome” blaring away on AM radio like an eerie death knell. Eastman Kodak is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. While the iconic Kodachrome has been dead for a while now, it seems surreal that Kodak itself could soon be extinct – until at least the late 90’s, it was right up there with Coke as one of the world’s prime, ubiquitous, everyday brands. But in the throes of the nasty, nasty recession (depression?) we’ve found ourselves in for the past few years, anything has been possible. There have been many falls from grace, but this one is too massive and sad to believe. Since the early 2000s in photography, we’ve seen titans like Polaroid reduced to sad shells of past glories, while legends like Minolta, Contax, Konica, and Yashica have stopped making cameras altogether. Even scrappy survivors like tough-kid Pentax and serial-innovator Olympus are looking forward to depressingly dim futures…

It’s just business, right? Well, sorta. This grim scenario is clearly a function of a drastically altered social and economic landscape, in which many once-great players in an overcrowded industry were simply beat out by others (Apple, for instance) who were better at anticipating the times. As the paradigm has shifted fully to digital over the past decade, the industry has become a ruthless game of innovate or die. The silver lining is that consumers today have tons of choice of among more stylish, well-made, and inexpensive cameras than ever before. Hell, even the iPhone can be a pretty killer little snapshot machine (and just look at the fantastic work 2DM’s Skye Parrott has done on her BlackBerry).

This isn’t just a tirade against digital: in fact, digital has been a brilliant boon to photography and has expanded not only its definition and applications, but it has opened up the medium to millions of amateur shutterbugs and certainly accelerated our visual culture (see last month’s editorial Instagram Is A Murderer). And at the professional level, high-end digital sensors offer unforetold possibilities in dynamic range, scientific applications and experimental photography. Tons of professional digital work is fantastic, and fine artists, commercial photographers and shutterbugs alike have made tons of excellent of digital work. Cindy Sherman, for instance, went from film activist to digital acolyte.

Film, though, makes emotional, poignant, visceral and sometimes imperfect images. They feel like real life. Film snapshots are always better. Those sleek, functional digital toys pretty much all make pretty junky images by comparison. They’re okay for Facebook, but will never match magic recollective of the works Jakob Holdt or Dennis Hopper made on cheap, basic film cameras. Just like insanely high-fidelity digital audio recordings whose sound simply cannot match the gorgeous, visceral experience of low-tech vinyl, digital simply cannot replicate film. Pixels are not grain. But unlike vinyl’s very apparent technical limitations, large-format film is capable of producing images of superior fidelity. Film’s endangered species status boils down to considerations of cost and convenience conspiring to rob us of choice…

British photographer Richard Nicholson’s haunting series of images of the last surviving professional darkrooms in London is a sobering, almost tragic look at just how much the world of analogue photography has dwindled over the past decade. Many of these labs remain endangered and all need our continued support and patronage.

In any case, what’s most tragic about Kodak’s very possible bankruptcy (just like the “real” Polaroid’s death a few years ago), is that there still exists a very clear demand for analog products! The people want film! The connoisseurs want film! The professionals really, really want film! 2DM wants film! Lomography continues to build its savvy and youthful all analogue empire, and the Impossible Project has set about the noble task of making classic Polaroids possible once again. Ilford does well by offering only monochrome products of the highest quality, and Fujifilm has gone from a classic set of analog products to also making fantastic digital cameras without abandoning its excellent analog products. Go Fujifilm! Kodak on the other hand killed Kodachrome to cut costs, consolidated several of its other lines of film, and concentrated too many resources on unremarkable digital point-and-shoots and cheap-o printing equipment that professionals wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole. As a result, its brand has become an anachronism despite the fact that it still makes some of the best contemporary color film, and has been on the vanguard of some of the most advanced digital sensor technology in existence.

The best outcome we can hope for now is that Kodak can up its innovation game, accept a major downsizing and recognize that its greatest assets are the legions of photographers who love its film (and still spend tons of money on it). Kodak, please ditch the cheap-o, indiscriminating consumers who just want simple, no-fuss devices to take drunken party pictures and crooked tourist snapshots for their social networks: Apple and several others have already blown you way out of the water.

In the spirit of film’s epic struggle, Wonder-Room’s next project is to be a celebration of the fine art of analogue photography. It is a look at process, the art of printing and the magic of long-perfected chemical, mechanical processes. Stay tuned.

Hold on to your Contax G’s and T’s, your Yashicas and Olympus X-A’s, your Minolta CLE’s and Kodak Instamatics and keep making magic with them. And while you’re at it, show your support for camera makers like Voigtländer, Alpa, Carl Zeiss, Fuji, Hasselblad, Leica, Mamiya, and others who still produce lines of excellent film cameras. Dust off that old Polaroid and stuff it with some Impossible or Fuji FP, because the day market pressures finally make film disappear you’ll be left with nothing more than chintzy Instagram filters and some pretty crappy photos. You poseur.

So, sing it with us loudly kids: Oh, mama don’t take my Portra rolls away…

Merry Christmas from 2DM!

Babbo Natale is just about ready to start dishing out those gifts, so let the festivities commence! Hot wine and holly await (see this week’s editorial to get an idea of just how much we love this holiday). And this cheerful little paper cut from the talented Yvette van Boven is packed with the happiest, warmest holiday wishes from all of us at 2DM.

So eat to your heart’s content, make some beautiful memories, run barefoot in the snow, and we’ll see you right back here just as soon as the ball drops on 2012.

The Editorial: Yes, The Holidays Are Happy


This week is the zenith, the summit, the pinnacle of the oh-so-garish and ever more commercial holiday season. Kids (and begrudging parents) are queuing by the thousands to sit on a creepy old man’s lap. Suburban homes are festooned with fake reindeer and snowmen and tinsel that are equally insulting to the eye and local fire authorities. Panhandlers and representatives of dodgy charities are out in full force. But for all that, isn’t it just bloody fantastic?

Those warm spices like nutmeg and cinnamon you haven’t smelled in all year waft seductively through the crisp city air. You have a perfect excuse to load up on sugary treats and skip the gym once or twice. There’s mulled wine, hot cocoa and eggnog everywhere. Parties. Great excuses to dress up. And then there’s that awful singalong music that, no matter how tired and overplayed, is still pretty good at lifting the spirit.

Fa la la la la la la la la!

And so for all the marketing hyperbole, the screaming kids, and the perhaps less-than-ideal family impositions, the holidays are a much needed break from seriousness to do absurd and/or gratifying things. To give and receive thoughtful tokens of your appreciation for your friends and family. And for all our harping on about the ills of our society (this can sometimes be quite a pessimistic editorial space!), the capitalist machine that forces Christmas down our throats at the very least provides lots of jobs that help feed hungry families at this time of the year. In our comatose economy, there’s sometime (however small) to be said for that. And something tells me that if we all consumed in the vain of Selfridges beautifully self-aware 2007 Barbara Kruger-tinged campaign (google it!), we’d make capitalism a much nicer environment to live within.

So as our friends in Australia stock up on prawns for their summer Christmas barbecues, the Germans prepare their knödel, the Scandinavians drop almonds in their rice pudding (and buy marzipan pigs), the Latin Americans wrap tamales, and Canadians deck out their houses, we’re preparing handmade pasta and big, big pannetone. Whether you celebrate Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Christmas or nothing, bask in the beautiful absurdity! Those kitschy songs and the peppermint schnapps only come once a year. And even you Debbie Downers out there know you love them.

Pull out that sledge! Do lots of kissing under the mistletoe! Get your shopping done (or better yet, pull some serious Etsy and make your friends some one-of-a-kind gifts) and have a wrapping party. Pop in She & Him’s delightfully low-key Christmas album. Enjoy the fatty good food and take a deep breath. 2011 has been a crazy, topsy-turvy year. Kim Jong Il and Qaddafi are dead. Berlusconi’s out. Japan was shaken to the ground. The Euro is on the verge of collapse. Another, bigger recession looms. And the apocryphal 2012 apocalypse is just on the horizon. Imagine what 2012 might bring!

Kumbh Mela

For the latest installment of Vittore Buzzi travel journals, we go to an enormouse festival held every twelve in India, where time seems to stand still.

I do not like tourists who masquerade as photographers. Fake photojournalists with telephoto lenses… From far away, they try to photograph people as if they were on safari. India will never be an easy place: I’ve been there dozens of times, but every trip makes me feel like a newcomer to the subcontinent. And she always makes sure that my meticulously planned voyages never go quite as planned.

The Kumbh Mela (the pitcher festival) is the perfect time to find all of India gathered in one place: entire villages of Rajasthan, the Naga Sadhu come down from the mountains and come, every dozen years, to Haridwar on the river Ganges to celebrate and to purify themselves by the drops of Amrit that fell from his pitcher in flight from Garuda.

During the festival, the city bursts at the seams. For days trains unload hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at the station, and around the city myriad tents welcome ordinary people, who walk about with difficulty among the masses. The streets, closed to all but pedestrian traffic, become one-way routes that transport the faithful into a huge serpent that squeezes its attacks on the bridges of the Ganges. It is a colorful and varied humanity which advances in tandem to reach the main ghat “Har Ki Pauri.”

The most vulgar of the tourists rush to see the Naga Baba plunge into the waters of Mother Ganges, sprinkled with ashes and covered by only a hair from the field while spreading the smell of hashish that accompanies the asceticism and ecstasy. They look to capture a trace of Baba Amar Bharti, who in 1970 raised his hands to heaven never to lower them again, and they photograph them like trophies.

The Kumbh Mela is a special moment, however, where the rural India sets itself in motion. In nearly three months of celebrations, pilgrims pour in, leaving their lives to come be purified in the waters of the Ganges. They detach their lives from the everyday to devote themselves to something else. It is this which has always fascinated me, this ability to drop everything.

In a world like ours, marked by deadlines, deliveries, departures and arrivals, this ability to take back one’s own time and to resize it to fit the dimensions of one’s own life has been lost. Time, for us occidentals, is far outside our reaches and it devours us. Machines count time while we have allowed ourselves to dominated, regulated, our lives constricted by it.

So without even a vague care for time, I lose myself among the people. I linger in little groups, joke with the women. I immerse myself in the Ganges, sit down with an old man sipping tea. Around me Western cameras are busy snapping away, their operators dazed by the heat and taxed by the lack of meat (meat and alcohol are banned during Kumbh Mela). Once, I ask for directions, overwhelmed by the maze of alleys. I explain, smiling, to a slender, curious man that I am Italian. He takes my hand and leads me to his tent. “My wife, my two sons,” he indicates by a warm gesture of is hands, and then turns to me smiling and says, “our esteemed guest from Italy.” And in a flash I’m surrounded by women, children and adolescents, many of whom want to know if I know Sonia Gandhi… but that’s a story for another day!

Where They Create by Paul Barbera – Book Launch

Does space influence the way people work? This is the issue behind Paul Barbera’s project that documented, through images and interviews, creative working spaces all around the world. With Where They Create, the Australian photographer – who started taking pictures of interiors almost by accident: “it’s the thing I do without thinking” – changed his voyeurism into a sort of anthropological research. Looking for absurd and hidden things, Barbera entered 32 studios of international creative people – artists, AD, architects, designers, stylists, editorials – and captured all the details of their personal stories and artistic processes.

From Wallpaperand Fantastic Man studios to Matali Crasset design space, Olaf Breuning’s atelier or fashion house Acne (and many more), the Australian photographer peeked into different places with their peculiarities: organised, chaotic or dominated by a chaotic order, empty or with people working, sober or recalling a teenage bedroom.

Barbera’s curiosity, naturalness and good eye for interiors, together with his ability to transmit emotions and warmth make this project unique. Creatives need to transform their offices into intimate spaces (like a home), and to keep his/her own things close to be able to create. Other could work anywhere, travelling with the bare essentials as does Paul. But everybody, even if for a while, leaves personal traces, aspects that don’t pass unnoticed… if you are able to catch them.

Initially thought only as a blog, Where They Create turned into a book thanks to the interest of Frame Publishers.

Presented in NY on September 2011, this sort of diary will be presented in Italy, for the first time, at DesignLibrary (via Savona, 11 Milano) on December 14, from 6 to 10pm.

The Editorial: Instagram Is a Murderer

Susan Sontag’s 1977 collection of essays, On Photography is probably the most important and widely-read treatise on the function of photography in modern society. And until very recently, the major ideas of the work seemed entirely contemporary: photography is an aggressive (even violent) appropriation, a means of ownership by phallic camera, a means by which to demarcate the importance of an occasion, and a record of an event. But it was the deliberateness by which an image was made that signified its importance: “good” images were made by trained eyes looking through good equipment. “Important” images were important based on their specific, significant content: crime scene photos, reportage photos, wedding photos.

Photography was both universal (tourists with Kodak Instamatics) and rarified (Avedon’s elaborately staged fashion work). There were amateurs (your dad) and pros (people who are paid to take photos), shutterbugs (the guy with the fancy SLR who doesn’t really know how to use it) and artists (people who not only make a statement with their images, but are given a platform from which to say it). And that was the world of photography in a nutshell.

Since the 1970s heyday of postmodernism in which Sontag wrote, equipment has changed form and format drastically. Art has loosened up and has evolved to become much, much more inclusive. Think of Nikki S. Lee’s groundbreaking disposable camera work, in which the image and process are less important than the relationships they pretend to capture. There have been major aberrations in the strict amateur-artist relationships. The internet has enabled an unprecedented level of sharing, and given us ready access to an infinite number of other people’s images. But for all of this, our new archetypes are generally just warmed over, digitized, globalized version of the old ones.

Our grandparents dusty boxes of photos in their attic are our forgotten hard drives. Their boring family vacation slideshows and frilly, artificially arranged albums are our Facebook albums. In other words, we’ve been recently able to share our images with a larger audience (Facebook), but the audience has mostly remained the same. Flickr, which enables its users to forge relationships primarily through images, is a more revolutionary step forward within the same frameworks, but it’s mostly just a global version of old amateur photo clubs.

But Instagram destroys Sontag’s framework. Beyond its kitsch retro effects (just bloody buy a Holga), the tool fundamentally changes entirely how photographs are made, viewed, considered and consumed. It changes what photographs are.

Everyone is using it. All the time. Horizontally sharing snippets of their days snapped mostly carelessly with the little lens of their trusty all-in-one smart gadgets. And when everyone uses something, its product gets lost in the shuffle. Quality means nothing. Photography in the age of Instagram is no longer both universal and rarified: it’s only universal and transient. Your photos are destined inevitably to be completely forgotten by the time they’re out of your friends’ feeds. So Sontag’s rape/appropriation/ownership scenario becomes a difficult case to make when 1) everyone is appropriating everything and 2) your appropriation is so temporary it’s inconsequential.

Brands are using Instagram to charge their image with street-level connections to would-be customers, dispatching interns to take blurry photos of things they want you to associate with them. We all use Instagram to charge our personal brands with images of things we want everyone else to associate with us. Through wearing down of the conditions that surrounded Sontag’s theory, that’s mostly what photos have become: badges of things we want to be associated with. The gulf between pro and amateur and artist and shutterbug no longer exists. And photographs have value for their novelty and content. Not their quality or composition or technique. Shame.

So, imagine the epic works of Andreas Gursky. Their glorious highlighting of the most inhuman masses of humanity. Or are they the most human? Now imagine his factory line workers’ Instagram feeds. All appropriating. All forgetting. So despite our desire to view ourselves as individualists, his works demonstrate that our tendencies more often make us more like worker ants. Mold on old bread. Our actions temporarily enriching the whole, but destined to be forgotten in short order. And Instagram does a pretty good job of proving just that.

Long live photography as we once knew it.

Signs (Metamorphosis) / Bouke de Vries

Bouke de Vries had an extended stay in Milan recently while he exhibited in a solo show, Signs (Metamorphsis) at the always on the vanguard Maria Gloria Gallery. De Vries is an artist polymath, his career shifting across mediums and his work always remaining devoid of compromise. His trajectory has taken him from restoration of art to the spotlight of the pop culture art scene, commercial art, jewelry (he released a line in collaboration with Anoushka earlier this year) and on to political activism. His most memorable works are perhaps those which openly criticize chairman Mao Zedong, and . His pieces look like otherworldly pastiches of a hedonistic, ethereal dreamscape, and they showcase flaw to great effect.

“In this flawed world, perfection seems to be an attainable goal… But not-quite-perfection is often easily dismissed and discarded…”

Bouke De Vires Filmed by Matteo Cherubino

For the occasion of his stay, 2DM’s Matteo Cherubino filmed and interviewed the artist among the eerie, surreal backdrop of his recent sculptural work: surreal cross sections and self-contained worlds of a parallel universe. Or a Cherubs. Butteflies. Cigarettes. Dramatically combined with porcelain. In conversation, the artist reveals inner working of the artist’s mind, his depth of perception, and his extraordinary and unbound working process.

De Vries also presented together with Gloria Maria Gallery at this year’s MiArt, showed at Artissima this year, and often exhibits at his home gallery, London’s Vegas Gallery.

Tag Christof – special thanks to Bouke de Vires & Gloria Maria Gallery

The Editorial: My Own Private Mississippi / Place

The two cities we work most heavily in, Milan and London, are both in the midst of being ripped up and partially rebuilt in wait of two massive events, the 2012 Olympics in London and Expo 2015 in Milan. The cities’ drastically different approaches to cleaning up for their guests are reflective of the larger cultures that surround them, as well as their respective visions of their role in the work: London fancies itself the cultured world city, while Milan sees itself as the world’s epicenter of design and fashion. But those imagined roles are both at risk, and while they spruce up their major squares, make token improvements to their infrastructures and add some very expensive new baubles their larger backdrops are being largely ignored.

Milan is unconventionally beautiful and holds tons of hidden gems, but is mostly dark, heavy and alienating brutalist architecture with a subpar transportation infrastructure. Outside Piazza Duomo, it is certainly a city that has a hard time impressing tourists. London, on the other hand, is modern, sparkling and gentrified (read: generic) in many of its more central districts, but is still mostly spaces of shabby, low-slung buildings studded every so often with hideous, dehumanizing estate blocks and slums. Beyond its world-class venues, cafes and green spaces, London mostly oscillates between generic and ghetto. Not surprising, then, that the UK boasts the lowest quality of life in western Europe, according to the Guardian.

So, while you won’t hear any complaints about the benefits the two major events will have on their cities (new tube lines! new green spaces!), we can’t help but think that Milan’s alienation and London’s shabbiness will be addressed in the least. In both cases, a real sense of place and community seems to be that which is missing in both cases. Brooklyn in New York ban be both uglier and shabbier than the worst of London and Milan, but goodness! What a sense of place! And, to be fair, there are certainly spaces with a real sense of place in both of our cities (Brera and the Navigli in Milan, and Portobello Road, Brixton, Broadway Market and many other isolated spaces in London), but they are rare bright spots in a a tapestry of raggedy fabric.

The balance, then, that must be struck to make any space both livable and satisfying is incredibly delicate. Just how to go about creating that sense of place begs a series of complex questions. Milan’s Zona Tortona, which hosts countless fashion shows and is ground zero for the world’s biggest annual design fair, is downright repellent during the 300+ days a year when there are no festivities going on. It plays host to the world’s premiere designers, brands and tastemakers, yet manages to be anonymous, ugly and might as well be a warehouse district in the Ukraine. Shouldn’t you feel like you’re somewhere when you’re in a space so ostensibly special?

It comes down to community and emotion. It is much, much more than being pretty. (Oxford Street is beautiful. We don’t want to be seen there.) Think about it next time you’re in a tawdry themed restaurant. Or when you feel really good in an objectively ugly place. Dive bars. The streets of Lisbon or Buenos Aires. Those all feel just about right. Space means nothing without a sense of place. And place is the sex. So, should’t the visionary developers amping up Milan and London look towards creating a real sense of space – parsing out that which is the essence of the city – instead of spending mountains of money on one-trick monuments?

2DM’s Lorenzo Nencioni, who knows “place” better than most, has taken photographs in lands as far off as Iceland and Japan. The photos in this article, from his new series My Own Private Mississippi showcase just how tangible a sense of place can be: in lieu of a vacation to the United States over the summer, Lorenzo stayed in Italy but went on a search for the feel of Mississippi in his home country. Besides a few pieces of the built environment (spot the tricolore!), these photos very well could have been taken in Dixie, a testament to his eye as well as to that place is much more than what a space seems on the surface.