These are questions I feel like these people might ask me, but instead I ask myself, just in their voice, because it’s a good exercise in processing an experience you recently had. Here is my intro for myself: I take pictures of many things. Recently it has been notorious genre-busting musician Hank Williams III aka “Hank 3.”

Pretend I’m comedian Jerry Seinfeld: “What’s the DEAL with your recent photos of Hank Williams III?”

Tara Israel: Hank 3 is a musician I adore, who navigates a number of seemingly unrelated genres of music with great success. I contacted him earlier this year because I wanted to do a photo essay that both looked at the stage clothes of country music legends and also explored at what I feel makes Hank 3 so special. I contacted him with an email only he would be crazy enough to respond to: “I have this great idea. I don’t know exactly what I want to do or even what I’m going to do with it but its going to be great. I’ll show up and you just change your clothes a few times. Easy breezy. Where do you live?” Two weeks later I was in Nashville knocking on the door to the Haunted Ranch (his home.) At the time I had no idea what Hank had access to but he took the time to collect what I styled into nine different looks. He pulled suits that had been made for his grandfather (Hank Williams Sr) and father (Hank Williams Jr), as well as one made for him in his youth, in addition to assorted stage looks he has worn, ranging from heavy metal inspired leather to his everyday look of a workshirt and boots. I admire Hank’s ability to pay homage to his family lineage yet not be limited by it.

Pretend I’m photographer Joel Sternfeld during a crit when you were his photo student: “What is a good photograph? Why are any of these good photographs?”

Tara Israel: What I try to achieve with my photos is to challenge my understanding of intimacy. Its not about hiding behind gimmicks like sexuality or relying on complicated production to create a false connection between the camera and the subject. The pictures are very simple, sometimes awkward or creepy, but always honest. Its about connecting with another person, which is often terrifying, and having fun with someone new. Its basically living in that electric moment before a first kiss or telling someone you love them for the first time, but because there are no words or kisses, it just becomes limitless potential. No fear of unrequited love, or bad kisses or the dreadful “now what?” when it starts to get stale.

Pretend I’m the I CAN HAZ A CHEEZBURGER cat: “Wut lessuns haz you lernd from this prossis? Do you evur feer that what matterz to you 2day will knot bee kulturally relevint toomaro?”

Tara Israel: I reject the need to create a linear path between the past and present, and I feel that Hank does the same. These images illustrate how he is able to simultaneously occupy all of these identities with ease, showing that he does not have to be one or the other, that one should not be restricted to genre titles or convention. Purist fans of country music need to accept that he is honoring the genre and his grandfather the best way he can- he just sometimes does it while wearing crazy costumes on stage and with a lot of headbanging. He is a living library of music references and anecdotes, allowing it to organically manifest throughout his art. I went to Nashville to shoot these portraits in June, on a particularly hot and oppressively humid week. One afternoon we planned on walking the trails behind his house to shoot him wearing his own suit made by Manuel. I suggested we wait until later that afternoon because I felt it was too muggy for him to go outside in a wool suit and hat. He looked at me and said, “My grandfather would tour in the back of a Cadillac wearing wool suits in the summer without air conditioning and perform on stage every night. I can handle standing around for an hour in my backyard.”

Pretend I’m your dentist at the exact moment he starts drilling a cavity: “So what else have you been up to lately?”

Tara Israel: I recently returned from a stint on the road with Hank 3, photographing his shows and behind the scenes. Despite his lineage, Hank is very much a DIY success story- from how he interacts with his fans to the recent release of three albums on his own label. He lives and breathes his music, from loading the gear onto the tour bus to signing autographs for every fan after he performs 3+ hour shows. I had never shot a concert before or even been on a tour bus, so it was learning how to accomplish what I wanted while staying out of the way of the 13 other people on the bus (and how to hold a camera still when you are balancing on a moving bus/ vibrating speaker/ using a taller person as a tripod).

Pretend I’m your mother Bonnie Schnitta: “Why am I so proud of you even though you never remember take out the garbage/ empty the dishwasher when you come to visit?”

Tara Israel: I just don’t know, Mom. I just don’t know. Sometimes you want to know you can count on people… Unfortunately you can only count on me forgetting these things. I’m consistent. You can count on that.

Pretend I’m your high school math teacher: “Please show your work”

Some of Tara Israel’s photos of Hank Williams III will be on view December 8 – January 3 at Keyes Art Projects, 551 W 21st St, 4th Floor, NYC.

Dossier‘s most recent issue features T. Cole Rachel in conversation with the legendary Stevie Nicks. In the interview, among other things, Stevie talks about the long-running NYC event Night of a 1000 Stevies, a costume ball full of ethereal Stevie Nicks gypsies. To accompany the feature, Brooklyn-based illustrator Jess Rotter has collaborated with Dossier through Rotter and Friends to offer 50 limited-edition “Stevie” t-shirts, printed on a super soft, 100% power-washed cotton dyed a lush grey/purple hue. We can’t tell you how much we love these babies right here.

Dossier x Rotter & Friends Limited Edition Stevie Nicks T-shirt: $35 (plus $5 US shipping or $13 International shipping)

US (select size)

X-Small Small Medium

International (select size)

X-Small Small Medium

Photo by David Black

Dossier Issue 8 was released this week. It features contributions from Kiki Smith, Yoko Ono, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Michael Stipe, Stevie Nicks, George Saunders, Robert Longo, Tom Sachs, Cyprien Gallard, Aimee Mullins, Nate Lowman, Devendra Banhart, Sloane Crosley, Olympia Le-Tan, AF Vandevorst and many others. You can order the new issue here, or find it on a newsstand. For a very quick preview, you can also flip through the video below.

Check out all of our Fashion Week coverage here.

Photographs and text by Phillip Kalantzis-Cope

Being in flight is one of the most unnatural, extraordinary, ordinary experiences of modern life. When we climb to 30,000 feet, our perspective looking down at the world becomes that of a deity, and the rules of time and space are altered as we rush over the earth. In flight we are able to view the most remote corners of the natural world and the vast spread of the world we have constructed. It gives us the unique perspective to look at the interaction of the natural and constructed in a truly holistic way. In its totality, the unnatural or extraordinary experience produces great fear and excitement. We confront death a little every time the doors close – and this closeness to death intensifies the extraordinary experience of being in flight. On the other hand, our ‘in flight’ experience is filled with the most unremarkable daily activities: reading a comic book, finishing a crossword puzzle, eating, sleeping. The cabin becomes our shared world, temporally removed from the world that we’ve left back on land. What connects the ordinary and the extraordinary is a powerful trust in the human capacity to take us beyond the mundane. The plane becomes a temple of humanism, where we put faith in all that get us and keeps us up in the air – engineers, pilots, researchers, air traffic controllers – a web of people, underwritten by collective knowledge, keeping us alive, together.

Click “Read More” for additional photographs.

We are psyched to be a part of the massive roster for the pop-up shop Arts & Leisure. Curated by Chrissie Miller (of Sophomore NYC) and Erin Krause, the idea is to bring the best artists and designers from JFK to LAX. One look at the list below and we’d say they’ve succeeded. It opened this weekend but it is up until the 28th which gives plenty of time for New York fashion and culture to completely infect Los Angeles.

Arts & Leisure is at Space 1520 N. Cahuenga Boulevard, Los Angeles, from August 6-28. Opening hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 12-8pm.

Poet and performance artist John Giorno is many things to many people. It depends on who you talk to. To some, he’s simply lost in translation. The author of Suicide Sutra and Thanks for Nothing is fatalistic, shockingly blunt, incendiary, controversial, and pornographic – according to his critics. His defenders claim the iconic figure in Gotham’s counterculture since the 1960’s is woefully misunderstood, instead seeing him as an innovator, a visionary, fierce, passionate, prophetic and teased with erotic charm. Our intrepid photographer, after spending a solid late summer afternoon with Giorno, came away with this impression, “He’s very sweet and kind – John radiates a certain happiness and gratitude towards the world. You can tell he is still thrilled to wake up and produce work all day –  creating art and making this his reality.” Ultimately, all characterizations may be correct, leaving us with an individual possessing a peculiar and electric mix of contradictions.

A native New Yorker, John Giorno was born in 1936. Armed with an Ivy League education (from Columbia), the former stockbroker turned poet gained his street-cred in the 1960’s underground. He began hanging out with those brash young artists who were on the cusp of immense notoriety – characters like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and Roy Lichtenstein. Giorno eventually ended up the protagonist in Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep, which featured him sleeping for five hours. That led to another by Warhol called Handjob - we will spare you the details of this never released film. In his book You Got to Burn to Shine: New and Selected Writings (Serpent’s Tail, 1993), Giorno details his fast and furiously promiscuous youth.

He talks about his relationships with Warhol and artist Keith Haring and goes on to share how he was able to redirect his energies toward acts of humanitarianism through AIDS activism. In an effort to fight, with compassion, the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic, Giorno launched the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984, which provides direct financial support to people with AIDS.

John Giorno has also for more than four decades been innovating through poetry. It was in 1965 that his entrepreneurial spirit collided with his passion and he launched Giorno Poetry Systems. In short a record label, GPS allowed him to experiment with the use of technology in poetry, create new venues for delivery and introduce the art form to a broader audience. GPS has a catalogue of over fifty titles – LPs and CDs of poets working with performance and music, cassettes, poetry videos and film, poem paintings and books. Some of the poets and artists who recorded or collaborated with Giorno Poetry Systems were novelist (and his sometimes spoken word performance partner) William S. Burroughs, John Ashbery, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe. Continuing to look for new opportunities, it’s said that following a phone conversation in 1968 with Burroughs, Giorno initiated the Dial-A-Poem service. It worked like this: several phone lines were connected to individual answering machines, and people could call GPS to listen to a poem offered from fragments of various live recordings by contemporary poets. As far as topics, a wealth of material was available to GPS given the times. Social, political and civil unrest, the sexual revolution and the Vietnam War stirred up at times feverish fits of public interest in the Dial-A-Poem service. And with this project, Giorno claims to have given impetus to the development of dial-for-stock market info and dial and for sports-info services that become so ubiquitous.

Although he’s firmly planted in the modern age, Giorno’s living and workspace recalls a New York of the 60’s and 70’s, when an artist could live in a huge loft on the Bowery and just create all day. He has three generously sized loft units in what was the first YMCA in New York. One is his apartment where he sleeps. Another is more like a studio for his words on canvas projects. The other, known as “the bunker”, is the apartment that he leased to Burroughs for several decades. All three units are a little dank but open and bright, with the exception of the Burroughs apartment: not much light there. Meanwhile, it would be an intriguing exercise to tag John Giorno before releasing him into the wild as his craft keeps him at a curious pace that takes him to multiple destinations. Brussels, Berlin, Paris, London are all recent stops. And there’s no indication that he plans to slow down.

Text by Erickson S. Blakney
Photography by Weston Wells

On Thursday, Dossier played in the COACD soccer tournament at South Street Seaport with a lineup that included teams from Bloomingdales, Oak, Milk Studios, Lil Frankies, ThreeNYC, Red Bucket Films and East Village Radio and a live performance by Jailbait. We lost to East Village Radio who went on to the finals and was beat by good old Bloomies. The whole gig was sponsored by PumaCity which has more fun events going on this month related to soccer, drinking and dancing in the middle of the day. Thanks to our team for coming out. Clockwise from top left- Micah Reed, Rob Schumann, Andrew Blazer, Erin Dixon, Alec Friedman and Tim Yu. (Not shown: Ithai Schori. ) For a video of the days action and additional images of the festivities click “Read More”.

A fashion video directed by Dossier creative director Skye Parrott, styled by Pamela Love, and starring Sarah Staudinger.

Text and images by Seana Cavanagh and Elizabeth Gates

Designers, models and stoners alike found a temporary home beneath the surface of Manhattan’s Hudson Hotel at the Good Units bar, where they fêted Skrapper, a fashion line founded by Soho artist/Warhol exhibition alum William Quigley and designer/photographer Katie Theofilos. The brand’s tees are a refreshing hybrid of art and fashion, featuring snappy sayings and artistic studies of legendary boxers, bulldogs and other icons, and the party was equally eclectic. A mix of uptown girls, downtown boys and flamboyant neon painted “Superheroes” mingled with guests Damon Dash and DJ Deantoni Parks while listening to a live performance from Fire and Reason, and Dog Solider.

Click “Read More” for additional images.