This issue is really dark.
And it’s not a coincidence. All my friends were thinking dark thoughts, making Grim Reaper artworks, shooting fashion stories after sunset, and working the witching hours. These stories chronicle their sentiments, and the obscurity they embraced. We all experience darkness, but no one wants to escape it.
We want the night to go on forever. We revel in the night. Darkness mirrors oneself — in reflections that don’t lie. Darkness is the only reflective space left in a world of distractions, a world where you can’t think clearly, where you don’t have time to talk, or simply be by yourself.
It’s no accident that the vanitas theme in sixteenth century art was given voice in Hamlet’s thoughts on death, while he contemplated Yorick’s skull. A skull isn’t frightening or macabre: it’s a ghost in a shell — a memento mori for the living, a reminder that human life is artifice, a trompe l’œil, and that you have to fight to stay alive.
Of course darkness is also a place for fun, as you can see in the pictures I obsessively take at parties. The night is so sensual, with its uninterrupted beauty, and is the “shot/countershot” of this issue, the hidden side of the magazine that emerges on these page. Don’t fear the darkness — embrace it.
— OLIVIER ZAHM
[Table of contents]
by Bill Powers
by Olivier Zahm
by Olivier Zahm with a text by Philippe Parreno
by Liz Goldwyn
by Bill Powers
by Olivier Zahm
by Juergen Teller
by Stacey Mark
by Alexei Hay
by Katja Rahlwes
by Emma Summerton
by Richard Bush
by Manuela Pavesi
by Jonathan Hallam
by Glenn O'Brien
by Manuela Pavesi
by Maurizio Cattelan
by Noritoshi Hirakawa
by Giasco Bertoli
