A voyeuristic lens toward the conjectures of forming an adolescent identity
This is Glamcult’s inner Zine, AT LARGE. A voyage deep into the intimate workings of an artist. Inspired by the words of Susan Sontag, “to collect photographs is to collect the world”, we have introduced this new segment of our magazine. Here we curate and “collect”, presenting to you a photographer’s work which exemplifies both our theme and the surrounding global landscape. Enter into these pages as you would an exhibition, taking in each image – face – feeling, observing curiously and considerately. AT LARGE is a place for our audience to go beyond the fundamental, viewing an artist’s body of work with the greater context it requires.
Paris-based, Dutch photographer, Winter Vandenbrink is inspired by the street. Taking a voyeuristic lens toward the conjectures of forming an adolescent identity, he finds the power of his medium through the “manipulated expression”. Showing his subjects within an elevated framework, he aims to draw the audience into the corners of a world they would otherwise miss: “that which you normally would not see, or pay attention to”. Having recently exhibited his Coming of Age series at the Foundation Louis Vuitton, and making waves in this ongoing Vandals series, Vandenbrink’s vision is that of a DAWN we wish to capture. His art is instinctual, his signature is image-making, and by taking on the intention to please others “less and less”, his horizon is ever-broadening. This Vandals series is a continuation of his 2021 book with Études and explores through a docu-lens, youth and pack dynamics within the urban landscape
Franny is listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, Would you like to be a wolf? She answers haughtily, How stupid, you can’t be one wolf, you’re always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all at once, but one wolf among others, with five or six others. In becoming-wolf, the important thing is the position of the mass, and above all the position of the subject itself in relation to the pack or wolf—multiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join the pack, how far away it stays, how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity.
To soften the harshness of her response, Franny recounts a dream: “There is a desert. Again, it wouldn’t make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It’s a panoramic vision of the desert, and it’s not a tragic or uninhabited desert. It’s only a desert because of its ocher color and its blazing, shadowless sun. There is a teeming crowd in it, a swarm of bees, a rumble of soccer players, or a group of Tuareg.
I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm.
They swirl, go north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness.” A very good schizo dream. To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed from it: to be on the edge, to take a walk like Virginia Woolf (never again will I say, “I am this, I am that”).
Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
By Eugene W. Holland
