I was recently turned on to the absolutely killer commercial photography of Mitchell Feinberg. An American working in both Paris and New York, he does some of the best product photography around. Check out these examples.

I struggled to find my favourite examples from his site for this article, as there were tons of them. The most striking ones are these recent pieces of work for Muse Magazine, which are technically advertisements or product photography, for products that have been scultuped out of a kind of mold. It’s as though their imprint was left perfectly inside drying cement, only dozens of times more detailed.

The polo shirt is an especially striking example, and each one from this series gives a strangely satisfying emboss to these handbags, watches, and wallets. I love the fact that each product is entirely drained of colour and essential shape, and the photo is as much about the cracked texture and broken surface of the environment around the indent as it is about the prouduct being represented.

Here’s something I never thought I’d be stunned by: makeup and cosmetics photography. Feinberg makes this stuff look luxurious and entirely alien. Flipping through a fashion magazine, stuff like this might get missed, but when seen as part of his impressive portfolio, it’s some beautiful work.

This red/blue combination is especially beautiful–he’s turned lipstick and… that blue thing (what kind of makeup is that, anyway? I’m clueless) into what looks like an unconventional homage to abstract painting.

And then there’s his food photography, which I’m still unsure about. He approaches it with the same eye he lends to the cosmetics, which means much of it looks alien and interesting, and hits you with a fresh burst of the unexpected. That’s good, but does it make me want to eat what he’s shooting? Not exactly, but I don’t think that one set of criteria is all that matters. A lot of this work is for the New York Times Magazine, which publishes some of the best food writers in the country, and they’re not always writing about how delicious and fun it is to eat things.

For some reason the aesthetics of Feinberg’s embossed series made me think of this model by Hans Op De Beeck that I stumbled upon recently, which is just a rapid-prototyped (unless it’s entirely computer-generated–I can’t tell) model of a modernist, Le Corbusier-styled apartment flat, only with additional touches like satellite dishes on every balcony and the first signs of decay. It occupies the space between real life and Corbusier’s blueprints: a pristine white model of what his famous designs eventually became. De Beeck calls it a “silent witness to the crumbling of modern thought.” Sure, why not?

I’m sure most of us have heard of Threadless, but recently their Select Series has been getting a lot of notice. And with good reason. In case you haven’t heard of the line before, it’s this: originally, Threadless would put up certain t-shirts done by well known artists and designers, not using the traditional voting process but instead featuring that shirt as a kind of choice item. Eventually those speically-curated shirts were collected into the “Threadless Select” series, which has now been spun off into its own website, called www.theselectseries.com.

Releasing a new t-shirt each Monday, the series has showcased some fantastic designs over the past couple of years, all curated by Faesthetic publisher UPSO.

The recent news is: the storied Rhode Island School of Design (check out this list of alumni) will be participating in the Select process, with four new t-shirts curated by John Maeda, president of the RISD. Four different faculty members created the shirt designs, and part of the proceeds cover a $15k donation to the school’s scholarship fund.

My favourite of the four designs are Nature vs. Nurture by Nancy Skolos, and Soojng Ham’s The Journey. You might remember that The Gap tried something similar a while back, getting all the recent Whitney Biennial artists to design t-shirts, with varying degrees of success. This project, however, is the first time in which I’ve seen several faculty members from an influential design school get together and do something like a series of t-shirts. Each of these artist/professors is quite established in his/her field, and thus the translation of the design to the t-shirt medium is a big deal for those of us who pay even a casual attention to t-shirt design.

The very usage of the t-shirt as a “medium” is a movement that has finally matured enough to start seeing major artists trying their hand at it. What’s strange–and enjoyable–is that these are all artists, not fashion designers. As such they’re generally treating the shirt as just another canvas, rather than trying to make a t-shirt that will compete with others on a shelf somewhere. I like the idea quite a bit, although it’s not without its risks: it’s like asking established musicians to try and make a record that will appeal to fickle, critical youth, and seeing what happens. Often it’s a disaster, or a general confirmation of the concept that technical proficiency and even mastery in a medium doesn’t translate to youth-culture appeal.

Here though, it’s working, and the old hands are proving more than able to compete with the best of the new in giving us memorable stuff to wear. It’s also providing us with designer-quality t-shirts made outside the major fashion houses that don’t cost over $100, which is a major difference: the big names all have wonderful designers working for them, or know which ones to hire, and can crank out some absolutely killer t-shirts in a moment’s notice, but unfortunately they tend to be outside the normal price range. Here’s to fresh, contemporary design you can wear for less than $30.

I find myself wondering about contemporary art sometimes. Not so often, but every once in a while a little old-fashioned voice pops into my head–especially when I’m looking at a video installation or a conceptual piece–and suggests I could pull off something similar, bury it under enough pseudo-theory about the nature of space/blankness, and call it groundbreaking. It’s a bullshit idea, of course: just the same kind of conservative ‘verification process’ that wanted to be sure Picasso could paint detailed, measured, classical scenes before accepting the artistic merit of his more innovative work.

My silly ideas are sent even further down the river when contemporary artists are given the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities in a different medium, especially a traditional one with well-established boundaries. Ubiquitous American retailer The Gap has gone and done just that, commissioning 13 former winners of the Whitney Biennial to design a range of limited edition t-shirts.

H&M has been doing a similar thing for a while now, pulling in top fashion designers and having them create low-cost/high-fashion lines for the store, but Gap’s project is different–each designer isn’t from the fashion world, but actually a contemporary artist for whom clothes aren’t the norm.

Although most of the shirts seem to be sold out by now, they offer us a great look at the kind of art world genre-hopping we don’t normally see. While some artists seem born for at least some kind of t-shirt design (think the visual blasts and surface-is-everything aesthetic of Jeff Koons), others give me pause, or set me wondering how they can possibly translate any of their major themes to a t-shirt. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exploration of the ’social role of the artist’ works great in a gallery, but splashed across your chest?

Flipping through the New Yorker recently and seeing the individual ads for each shirt, I was really taken aback by how successfully Gap and the artists have pulled this off. Mixing high concept art with a whitebread American clothes shop shouldn’t have worked, but it did. For a few weeks in May, it was possible to hit any big mall in any suburb in America and get a $30 t-shirt that would normally be sold in a select few Paris/NYC/London shops for ten times the price.

Share your thoughts on the shirts–have you seen better stuff on Threadless, or has each artist’s talent been successfully transposed? Leave your comments!