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.

There are a dozen good reasons to see Matteo Garrone’s new film Gomorra, currently in competition at the Cannes film festival and just-released to Italian theatres last week. Bursting with the energy of City of God and aiming for the scope of 2002’s Traffic but within an Italian context, the film (based on Roberto Saviano’s best-selling book) is at turns frightening, thrilling, and depressing–a serious look at what appears a hopeless situation in the southern port city of Naples.

The sparkling energy on display is never too flashy or stylized–at times its documentary feel really does trick you into the feeling you’re watching something real, and with good reason–the book’s author, Roberto Saviano, had to seek police protection after the release of his book, in which he chronicled Naples’ Comorra (the Neapolitan version of the Cosa Nostra) as an insider. Filming in the authentic housing projects of Naples’ depressed periphery didn’t hurt, either.

Telling 5 interlocking stories in a Neapolitan dialect that can be difficult even for Italians (the version I saw was subtitled in ’standard’ Italian), Gomorra does a wonderful job of showing the messy situation at the bottom end of several Italian ‘industries’–fashion, garbage disposal, and drug-dealing, to name a few. Telling a series of interlocked stories is the only way to really explain anything about the Comorra, as the globalized, back-slapping nature of all the business dealings, above-ground and otherwise, is the film’s biggest point.

The fashion angle alone makes the film relevant: arguing that we are all somehow affected by the counterfeit fashion industry, no matter where or who we are, Gomorra reveals a whole host of ills. In the world of Italian fashion, as in Italian politics, finance, and to a large degree, Italian ’society’ itself, the line between what’s authentic and what’s not is often blurred beyond recognition. As Alexander Stille, one of the best English-language journalists writing on Italy, pointed out recently:

Despite the violation of their trademarks, the big fashion houses have been surprisingly slow to protest. Saviano suggests shrewdly that copying the brand may have actually served the interests of the big-name clothing makers. Saviano writes: “The garments they turned out were not inferior and didn’t disgrace the brands’ quality or design image. Not only did the clans not create any symbolic competition with the designer labels, they actually helped promote products whose market price made them prohibitive to the general public. In short, the clans were promoting the brand.” [...] to many, the indignities and corruption imposed by the illegal system are so widely accepted as to seem “natural.”

The film captures this divide (or lack of it) with pinpoint accuracy; although an English-subtitled version is likely some months away, Saviano’s book is widely available in translation. Anyone interested in understanding a little about the chaotic, perilous manufacturing that backs up some of the world’s top design would do well to pick it up, and to eagerly watch for the release of Garrone’s film.