Nick Turner: Who takes photos of himself running naked with Horses!

Through his personal and professional life, one thing has remained constant for artist Nick Turner—his connection with horses. The American artist has led an eclectic life, which brought him to pass his adolescence in France before returning Stateside to study art.

As an artist who cuts across mediums—his work includes photography, drawing, and painting—a through line is his incorporation of nature and fascination with the equestrian world. Recently, he traveled to Iceland—a country that has long fascinated him—with the arts organization Twyla, in order to work on a powerful new set of self-portraits incorporating horses.

The final works are a study in energy and return to man's animalistic instincts. Turner's nude body, entwined with the wild horses, speaks on multiple levels.

Recalling Classical sculpture, his muscles stretch and bow as they strain to meld with the horses. We recently had a chance to speak to Turner about his work, his fascination with horses, and the different levels of meaning within the series.

Nick Turner is an American artist and photographer born in Boston in 1983. He was raised in the countryside of Maine where he was home-schooled until the age of fifteen, when he moved to the South of France. There, he attended a French high school before moving to Toulouse, where he passed his international baccalaureate. Immediately after receiving his diploma, Turner moved to Paris. He relocated to New York City to attend the Parsons School of Design, where he received a bachelor’s degree in Illustration.

Back in 2011, artist Nick Turner’s began a love affair with Iceland. He started travelling there regularly as a source of inspiration for his creative pursuits (which include drawing and painting and photography) and immediately fell in love with the country’s rugged landscape and sparse scenery. But it wasn’t only the bare country that continued to draw him there, it was the wildlife that populated it – in particular, the horses.

      

 Is this the dream life? Meet the man who takes photos of himself running naked with horses in Iceland, Nick Turner.

For Turner, the Icelandic countryside is his studio, and horses are his muse. The form of the horse features strongly in Nick’s paintings, drawings and photography.
Speaking with Twyla about the animal, he said: “From a young age I have felt an understanding and calmness around them. They seem to carry some of the most pure and sensitive emotions of any animal.”

Twlya recently travelled with Tuner to the Icelandic countryside to document his interaction with these horses and their role in his creative process. In the series, it emerged that Turner himself plays a key role as he literally runs wild with the animals, completely naked, exuding something both primate and delicate. “I do a lot of self portraiture and self examination with horses or in nature,” he said.

Explaining further about the project, Turner speaks candidly about how it may easily be misconstrued. “This is not to be confused with a project about vanity, but more about trying to understand my own personal insecurities and where I am most comfortable.”
“I always related more to horses,” he continues. “I’m much more comfortable around them than with people.”
The series is quite shocking at first glance – it’s beastly and completely stripped of any self-consciousness – but is also raw and starkly beautiful.

Why and When Did Americans Begin To Dress So Casually?

by Aly Jensen (Intern for Uvenio Collezioni)


I study one of the most profound cultural changes of the 20th century: the rise of casual dress. I study casual dress as it evolved on the beaches of Miami. I study casual dress as worn by the Black Panthers and by Princeton undergraduates. As a professor, I teach seminars on material culture and direct graduate students as they research and curate costume exhibitions, but my bread-and-butter as a scholar is the “why” and “when” our sartorial standards went from collared to comfortable.

I happen to own 17 pairs of sweatpants, but I am a convert to casual. As a teen, I scoffed at the wrinkled khakis of my high-school colleagues and scoured the thrift stores of central Pennsylvania in search of the most non-casual clothes I could find—wasp-waist wool dresses, opera gloves, and evening bags. By my mid-20s, I realized I no longer wanted to pry my 6-foot-tall body into uncomfortable clothes and stay in them for hours. While my Clergerie-clad best friend chased down taxis and potential husbands in 3-inch heels, I chose cowboy boots and a pair of overalls that same friend said made me look like an oversized baby. For me, casual is not the opposite of formal. It is the opposite of confined.

As Americans, our casual style uniformly stresses comfort and practicality—two words that have gotten little attention in the history of fashion but have transformed how we live. A hundred years ago, the closest thing to casual was sportswear—knitted golf dresses, tweed blazers, and oxford shoes. But as the century progressed, casual came to encompass everything from worker’s garb (jeans and lumberman jackets) to army uniforms (again with the khakis). Americans’ quest for a low-key style has stomped on entire industries: millinery, hosiery, eveningwear, fur, and the list goes on. It has infiltrated every hour of the day and every space from the boardroom to the classroom to the courtroom.
Americans dress casual. Why? Because clothes are freedom—freedom to choose how we present ourselves to the world; freedom to blur the lines between man and woman, old and young, rich and poor. The rise of casual style directly undermined millennia-old rules that dictated noticeable luxury for the rich and functioning work clothes for the poor. Until a little more than a century ago, there were very few ways to disguise your social class. You wore it—literally—on your sleeve. Today, CEOs wear sandals to work and white suburban kids tweak their L.A. Raiders hat a little too far to the side. Compliments of global capitalism, the clothing market is flooded with options to mix-and-match to create a personal style.

Despite the diversity of choice, so many of us tend towards the middle—that vast, beige zone between Jamie Foxx and the girl who wears pajama bottoms on the plane. Casual clothes are the uniform of the American middle class. Just go to Old Navy. There—and at The Gap, Eddie Bauer, Lands’ End, T.J. Maxx, and countless others—t-shirts, sweaters, jeans, sports shoes, and wrinkle-free shirts make “middle classness” available to anyone who choses to put it on. And in America, nearly everyone wants to put it on because nearly everyone considers himself or herself to be middle class.
The “why” behind casual dress is a hand-clappingly perfect demonstration of fashion theorist, Malcolm Barnard’s idea that clothing does not reflect personal identity but actually constitutes it. As one of my students put it, “So, it’s not like ‘Hey, I’m a hipster and then I buy skinny jeans and get a haphazard haircut,’ but more like in becoming a hipster, I get the jeans and the haircut.” Yes.In wearing cargo shorts, polo shirts, New Balance sneakers, and baseball hats, we are “living out” our personal identifications as a middle-class Americans. Our country’s casual style is America’s calling card around the world—where people then make it their own. It is witnessed by the young boy on the Ivory Coast wearing a Steelers jersey and in the price of Levi’s on the black market in Russia. Street styles in Tokyo harken the campuses of Harvard and Yale in the 1950s—tweed sports coats paired with t-shirts and saddle shoes. Casual is diverse and casual is ever- changing, but casual was made in America.

As far as the “when” of our turn to casual, three major milestones mark the path. First, the introduction of sportswear into the American wardrobe in the late 1910s and early 1920s redefined when and where certain clothes could be worn. The tweed, belted Norfolk suits (complete with knickers and two-tone brogues) of the Jazz Age seem so formal by our “flip-flops-can-be-worn-everyday” mentality, but these garments were truly revolutionary in their time. As were the sweater sets and gored skirts worn by women. The trend towards casual flowed in one direction, as one period observer noted in a 1922 article in the San Francisco Call and Post: “Once a woman has known the joys and comfort of unrestricted movement, she will be very loath to go back to trailing cumbersome skirts.” The mass acceptance of sportswear coincided with the consolidation of the American fashion industry, which had previously been disjunctive and highly inefficient. By the end of the 1920s, centralized firms produced designs, worked with manufacturers across the country, and marketed specific kinds of garments to specific demographics.

A second milestone towards casual was the introduction of shorts into the American wardrobe. A flare-up in the popularity of bicycling in the late 1920s brought about a need for culottes (looks like a skirt but is actually shorts) and actual shorts—usually to the top of the knee and made of cotton or rayon. Shorts remained time-and-place specific for women (gardening, exercising, and hiking), until the Bermuda shorts craze of the late 1940s, when women turned plaid wool shorts into legit fashion and began experimenting with length.
At all-male Dartmouth College in May 1930, the editors of the student paper challenged their readers to “bring forth your treasured possession—be it tailored to fit or old flannels delegged” so that the men could “lounge forth to the supreme pleasure of complete leg freedom.” The students listened. The Shorts Protest of 1930 brought out more than 600 students in old basketball uniforms, tweed walking shorts, and newly minted cutoffs, and introduced shorts into the American man’s wardrobe.

With a higher tolerance for different genres of dress and a newfound appreciation for non-constraining garments, Americans moved into the 1950s with more options to self-create than ever before. Fundamental to this freedom—apart from the suburban department store boom and the onslaught of media (magazines, television, film)—is a “unisexing” of our wardrobe, a third milestone on our quest to go casual. While bohemian types wore pants in the 1910s and 1920s, women really didn’t wear them until the 1930s, and it was not until the early 1950s that pants made it mainstream. There were still discussions and regulations about women in pants well into the 1960s.
That decade saw seismic shifts in “unisexing.” Women adopted t-shirts, jeans, cardigans, button-down collared shirts, and for the first time in nearly 200 years, it was fashionable for men to have long hair. James Laver, a renowned historian of dress, told a group of fashion industry executives in 1966, “Clothes of the sexes are beginning to overlap and coincide.” He recounted a recent experience walking through his town “behind a young couple” who “were the same height, both with long hair, both with jeans, both with pull overs, and I couldn’t tell them apart, until I looked at them from the side.”

To dress casual is quintessentially to dress as an American and to live, or to dream of living, fast and loose and carefree. I’ve devoted the past decade of my life trying to understand “why” and “when” we started dressing this way—and I’ve come to many conclusions. But for all the hours and articles, I’ve long known why I dress casual. It feels good.



Whos Is Bruce Weber?!

BACKGROUND BRUCE WEBER

Bruce Weber was born March 29, 1946 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in the United States. After studying photography at Princeton University in New Jersey, Bruce Weber moved to New York City in 1966 where he continued his studies at the New School For Social Research, then at New York University. His first exhibition in 1974, at the New York Razor Gallery, marked the beginning of his professional photography career.

Capturing Ralph Lauren's 'chic WASP', Abercrombie & Fitch's relaxed style or Calvin Klein's more formal beauty; over the past 30 years, Bruce Weber's photographs have presented a certain 'made in USA' innocence in his advertising campaigns, and GQ and Vogue fashion spreads. In 1980, Bruce became the photographer for Abercrombie & Fitch's notoriously scandalous catalogue full of revealing images of models, and began directing Ralph Lauren's advertising campaigns.

Discovering another passion, Weber has turned out to be a talented filmmaker as well, making music videos like Being Boring, for the band Pet Shop Boys in 1990. Though without any real sexually explicit content in the video, a man's naked derrière appeared at the beginning which was enough at the time to be considered too controversial. He also filmed Chris Isaak's Blue Spanish Sky music video. Fascinated by documentaries and charismatic personalities, Bruce Weber filmed Chop Suey in 2001, a film about wrestler Peter Johnson who he had photographed for four years, and in 2008, filmed Nice Girls Don't Stay For Breakfast with the actor, Robert Mitchum.

Several of Bruce Weber's Work:

Male Model Jason Boyce Accuses Bruce Weber ......!

Male Model Jason Boyce Accuses Bruce Weber of Sexual Harassment and Discrimination

The complaint claims Boyce suffered "mental anguish and humiliation, as well as adverse employment consequences, including loss future wages, professional opportunities, and other valuable benefits and emoluments of employment."

After weeks of rumblings that high-profile fashion photographers were about to be admonished for sexual harassment, a complaint has been filed against Bruce Weber by model Jason Boyce, who says the photog forced him to rub his own genitals.

In the filing, Boyce alleged to have suffered from being sexually harassed and discriminated against on the basis of his gender. “Boyce was the victim of ‘casting couch’ practices by the defendants, upon information and belief, are prevalent in the modeling industry, and suffered humiliation, emotional anguish and lost economic opportunities, including the end of his modeling career in New York,” the complaint stated.
First reported by The New York Post Friday afternoon, the complaint was filed in the New York State Supreme Court. In addition to Weber, the 19-page document names Jason Kanner, Soul Artist Management and Little Bear Inc. Kanner is the founder and head of Soul Artist Management, which represented Boyce at the time of the incident in December 2014. Little Bear Inc. is the production company run by Weber’s wife, Nan Bush.

While Weber’s office did not respond immediately to a request for comment Friday afternoon, the photographer had addressed the problem of sexual harassment in more general terms a few weeks ago. Asked by WWD about what was believed to be a New York Times story in development about sexual harassment in the fashion industry, Eva Lindemann-Sánchez, producer of Little Bear Inc., said, “Bruce believes everyone should, at all times, be treated fairly, correctly and with respect.”

Boyce’s attorney, Mark Risk of The Bloom Firm, did not respond immediately to a request for comment Friday afternoon.
A receptionist at Soul Artist Management said that Kanner was not in the office Friday. Another employee declined comment, saying, “No one can help you,” before hanging up the phone.
In the suit, Risk claimed that as a result “of the discriminatory, harassing and abusive conduct of defendants and each of them, Mr. Boyce suffered.”

The complaint alleges that Weber grabbed Boyce and kissed him on the lips. It also states, “Weber put his fingers in Mr. Boyce’s mouth. Shocked, Mr. Boyce opened his eyes. Mr. Weber told him to keep his eyes closed, and kept his fingers in Mr. Boyce’s mouth. ‘If you just had confidence, you’d go really far,’ Mr. Weber whispered. ‘How far do you want to make it? How ambitious are you?’ Mr. Boyce did not respond.”

Kanner first signed Boyce in 2013. Kanner was said to have arranged a meeting between Boyce and Weber at a Midtown Manhattan jewelry store in December 2014. The 10-minute meeting resulted in Weber wanting to schedule a photoshoot with Kanner three days later. At that time, according to the suit, Kanner allegedly told Boyce, “This is big for you,” Mr. Kanner said. “You have to nail this.”

Born in Oklahoma, Boyce grew up in Northern California and started modeling in 2008. David Todd Management was the first to sign the athletic blonde, before he joined Soul Artist Management. He has appeared in commercials for Target, Amazon and Lexus. He has since switched over to MVA Management, which did not respond immediately Friday to a request for comment. In recent years, Boyce delved into acting, having appeared in the independent film “Unbelievers.”

Having photographed Versace’s spring campaign, Weber has also shot for a number of Condé Nast publications over the years. A Condé Nast spokeswoman declined comment Friday.
Weber is the second high-profile photographer to be called out for reports of sexual misconduct in recent months. In late October, Condé Nast International announced that it would no longer be working with the controversial lensman Terry Richardson. Hearst and The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ quickly followed suit, severing ties with Richardson.

The news of Weber’s alleged sexual harassment and sexual discrimination broke just a day after Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons permanently stepped down from his businesses. His entrepreneurism included starting Def Comedy Jams, Phat Farm, Tantris, Global Grind and other companies. In light of the allegations against Simmons, J.C. Penney has stopped selling Russell Simmons’ Argyleculture brand.

Bruce Weber Sue for Sexual Harrassment!

In the latest edition of when-will-this-end-I-thought-you-were-cool, Bruce Weber is the newest high profile man to be accused of sexual harassment.
The Post reports male model Jason Boyce is suing the famous fashion photographer for inappropriate touching during a December 2014 "casting" at Weber's apartment. Boyce alleges Weber claimed Boyce looked "tense," eventually pressuring him to both remove his clothes and rub his own genitals — Weber was 68 and Boyce 28 at the time.

The complaint details that Weber allegedly told Boyce he'd "go far" if he had the confidence, whispering, "How far do you want to make it? How ambitious are you?" Boyce also claims Weber put his fingers in the model's mouth and kissed him as he was leaving the apartment.
"Upon information and belief, Mr. Weber has engaged in similar conduct with other male models referred to him by Mr. Kanner and Soul Artist, and Mr. Kanner and Soul Artist are aware of such conduct," the court papers read.
Boyce claims that he experienced significant anxiety and became depressed after the experience, ultimately resulting in him leaving New York for California. Bruce Weber has not yet responded to the allegations.