In the Shadow of Things with Photographer Leonie Purchas
As one of our favorite and oft-used photographers, Leonie Purchas has graced the FADER with her probing, visceral portraits of Bat For Lashes, Little Boots and Tough Alliance, among others, and we’ve admired her personal work documenting families across the world and the ties that bind them. For her latest gallery show, though, she’s taken on a more intimate subject: her own family. For In the Shadow of Things, she documented her mother’s struggle with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as she unpacked moving boxes that had been shelved and unopened for 12 years. In what must have been a difficult process for Purchas, she ended up truncating the distance between photographer and subject, in the process turning the camera into a sort of magic vessel for coping. It won her the KLM Paul Huf Award out of 81 nominees, and will exhibit through October 25 at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam as a result. After the jump, check out a few more images and read her artist’s statement.
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posted on Sep 14, 2009 in ART+CULTURE NEWS tags Bat for Lashes, Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Leonie Purchas, Little Boots, Tough Alliance
Air France, “Gothenberg Belongs to Me” MP3 + Video
Air France’s synth-pop is breathless and breezy 100% of the time regardless, but apparently when they’re repping for their hometown Gothenberg, Sweden, they step it up about seven notches and practically start levitating. “Gothenberg Belongs to Me” is part of a full DIY tourist-board style Gothenberg outreach program made simply for the love, complete with a video that will actually make you want to move there and partake in its beauty. Of course, we already discovered its appeal in FADER 56, when we visited the city for our Tough Alliance cover story, but Air France puts it best in their “love letter in three parts,” dedicated “to everyone whose heart skips a beat at the sight of an intersection, feeling dizzy at the amount of routes available, and to everyone who believe that a city is not just a home, it’s a lifelong companion.” Sigh! Their romance is contagious, so big up to New York from the FADER and wherever you come from, too. (via RCRD LBL)
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posted on Sep 10, 2009 in MP3 / STREAMS tags Air France, electronic/dance, Gothenberg, Pop, RCRD LBL, Tough Alliance
Freeload: JJ, “From Africa to Malaga” MP3
- story THE FADER
Is everything about this song perfect? The mysterious JJ’s angelic voice. The patter of drums, steel, conga and otherwise. The melancholy lyrics. The most artfully sanguine artwork since Yoko Ono’s Season of Glass. It is on the same label as former FADER cover stars Tough Alliance. Basically the only bummer is that when this song ends in our iTunes, it alphabetically goes into “We Own” by KES, a soca song we love but it is totally jarring, like napping on a goose feather pillow, then getting splashed in the face with iced coffee. We’re awake!
Go to Sincerely Yours to download and offer up some cash if you think it’s worth it, we suggest the $12-73 price range for this one song (we would say a billion but it’s a recession). (Via Acephale Records Twitter [we know.])
Video: Air France, “No Excuses”
- story THE FADER
Don’t let their pillowy songs and wistful videos fool you, the fellows in Air France were key contributors to our zootedness during last summer’s Tough Alliance cover story in Gothenburg, Sweden. That’s what makes them easy to love: They will keep you up until six in the morning and then play you a song that will put you to sleep (not out of boredom).
