Fashion Photography by Max Vadukul

Max Vadukul is a photographer who has worked mostly in America. He is noted for his fashion photography, portraits published in The New Yorker and many covers for Rolling Stone magazine.

Vadukul was born to Indian parents in Nairobi, educated in England and lived for a time in Paris. At age 16 he ran away to escape an arranged marriage. Vadukul’s first success came when David Puttnam asked him to take a photograph of his assistant.

In 1984 Vadukul was employed as a photographer by Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto whose young art director Marc Ascoli was looking for young, beginning photographers. Vadukul asked for a cash advance with which to buy a camera, then took black-and-white images in Manhattan for the project. Vadukul began taking photographs for The Face in the early 1980s and also worked for the French, American and Italian editions of Vogue. Much of his work is not credited aside from by-lines in editorial mastheads. Vadukal’s work has included photographs of Lisa Stansfield, panoramic shots for Veuve Cliquot and manipulated colour images in advertisements for Chloé.

In 1985, Vadukul also branched into video and television commercial directing with an award-winning advertisement for Williwear called The Expedition. He has cited Stanley Kubrick’s evolution from still photography into film directing as a career model.

Vadukul has said he rejects a Pre-Raphaelite image of women in his work, seeing modern women instead as "powerful, aggressive." At times his work has strayed from straightforward documentation of fashion and has not been published. His preference for black-and-white photography has also been a commercial hindrance.

Landscape Photography by James Rotz

In his ongoing project The Region, James Rotz investigates and documents the development of Northwest Indiana. A conglomerate of cities that form part of the Chicago metropolitan area, the Calumet Region, as it is commonly called-or “the Region” for short-is home to around one million people. But more notably it is a place, as Rotz observes, “where nature takes a backseat to what humans have created.”
Photographing at night, Rotz creates images in which the absence of human life allows our attention to rest on the elements of infrastructure that characterize the landscape of the region. Power lines cut through nearly every image, and telephone poles and factory smokestacks outnumber the few scattered trees. The scale has grown beyond that of the domestic as power plants and highway overpasses tower over playgrounds and single-family homes. It is as if the real act of living had become an after-thought to the operations that facilitate our way of life. With factories situated beside marinas and baseball fields the implements of industry seem to be out of place, and in some of the pictures one gets the sense we are seeking to protect ourselves from our own creations: fences and barriers punctuate most of these settings and an eerie, perpetual light bathes everything, leaving no dark corners.