Over the last few days, longtime VICE photographer and writer Jamie Lee Taete has been out documenting the fires and their aftermath in the areas near his home in Pasadena. His images capture a familiar neighborhood rendered suddenly alien by the sheer force of the inferno, a landscape of charred remains largely absent of people as just under 180,000 flee under evacuation orders, with another 200,000 on standby. Looting has begun and a 6PM-6AM curfew has been imposed in parts of the city, as experts and local and national government wrestle with the role climate change has played in the disaster, and the question of how to stop this happening again in a place where terrifying towers of flame are evermore common.

VICE called Jamie to ask what it feels like when your home burns down.

VICE: Hey man, how are you?
Jamie Lee Taete: I’m alright. How are you doing?

I’m OK; I’m not on the cusp of a gigantic wildfire like you, so…
I’m driving it back into it now.

That sounds sensible. How close has the fire come to your house?
I think the edge of the fire is about two miles from my house, which is uncomfortably close. You can smell the smoke in our house; it’s like ash-smelling, from the sky. I live in Pasadena, and the fires made it to Altadena, which is the next neighborhood over and has burned down.

How scared are you at the moment, on a scale of 1 to 10?
I don’t know. I’m just feeling kind of numb, more than anything. After spending two days wandering through the ruins of people’s lives, it’s sort of emotionally depleted me. I’m feeling stressed, sure, but I dunno if I can put a number on it. I’ve lost track of time because I haven’t slept very much.

What’s your experience of it been so far?
So the first day, it was in the Pacific Palisades, which is on the beach, kind of in the Canyons. I parked in the next neighborhood over and walked across. It didn’t seem too bad as I was walking in but it just sort of exploded while I was in there. I saw multiple businesses burn down. Roads have been clogged by people fleeing and abandoning their cars, which have then been bulldozed out of the way by local emergency services, so there were wrecked cars everywhere. Both sides of the road were on fire. And then walking back out, I didn’t know that it was physically possible for wind to be this strong, but the wind got so strong that I couldn’t walk any more and I had to hide in a stranger’s car for 90 minutes while a fire burnt around me on all sides, with embers flying horizontally at the car. A full ‘Hell-on-Earth’ kind of vibe. In two minutes it changed from being a little brush fire on a hillside to like, the apocalypse. 

What was it like, staring into your own potential demise?
Not great. I mean, I wasn’t worried about my impending demise, because that’s a beach community, so I was like, ‘Okay, worst-case scenario, I can just jump in the ocean and it’ll be fucking miserable, but I’m not gonna die.’ But yeah, I mean, just terrifying, like heartbreaking, watching house after house burn on the hillside. Car after car, landmarks… I’ve been to the area so many times, but at one point it became hard to tell where I was because everything I knew was not there any more or on fire: the toilets, the little snack kiosk, everything.

In the videos you sent over, one guy was livestreaming someone’s house burning down.
He was a local news blogger. There’s the local news, the national news, but then there’s also a lot of YouTubers who seem to have turned up. Yesterday, I encountered a huge group of YouTube photo bros; the kind of man who is approximately 28 years old and out for adventure… I saw a lot of those. As long as people are being safe and not hurting anyone else, I think it’s really important to cover this shit. Although I did have to tell some people to move because they were standing next to some burning power lines, and didn’t seem to be aware that they might fall on them.

Fire is one of the most ancient, elemental forces there is, and LA is a hypermodern city. Were there any moments when you were walking around in the fire, or in its aftermath, where it felt like those two realities were sort of meeting each other, head on?
I guess hearing everyone’s phones go off with the geolocated evacuation warnings… and yeah, the livestreaming, but that’s not exactly new, you know? 

It’s newer than fire.
Yeah, it’s definitely newer than fire.

LA is the home of cinema, showbiz… What’s it like when that bursts into flames?
The neighborhood I live in, which is one of the ones that’s burning, a lot of stuff gets filmed there because it looks very classically ‘suburban America.’ As stupid as this sounds, yesterday when I was walking around, I kept thinking, like, ‘Oh shit, I think this is where they filmed Scream 2, and now that’s gone—that’s weird.’ And then obviously tons of celebrity homes have burned down.

Which ones?
In my neighborhood, there’s Mandy Moore. I thought she’d lost her home but it turns out she’s OK, as are Meryl Streep and Grimes; I think they’re a little further south. Shia LaBeouf is definitely fine. The Pacific Palisades is a very wealthy neighborhood, though; I saw Billy Crystal, John Goodman, and Leighton Meester all lost houses there.

Is the Oh Happy Day Vegan Cafe somewhere that you used to patronize?
No. That was another one where I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a vegan restaurant here. I should have tried that, it was five minutes from my house.’

What’s going with the huge topiary rabbit?
Oh, that’s the Bunny Museum. That’s been… I mean, it’s obviously all heartbreaking, but I think the Bunny Museum has been kind of the saddest thing I’ve seen. It was the personal collection of this couple who’d been collecting rabbit memorabilia for 40 years, I think. So it was thousands and thousands of rabbit-related things in this one building. And it was just ash, just completely gone, and is obviously completely irreplaceable; their life’s work, I guess.

I kind of love the Bunny Museum; it was a really unique way of looking at cultural history. They had everything: food packaging, toys, ornaments, dating back hundreds of years. I feel like it gave a more complete encapsulation of history than like, the Natural History Museum or something. But yeah, it’s ash now.

And then the Barry Manilow vinyl.
I was just walking in the neighborhood next to where I live, walking through the ashes trying to spot anything recognizable. It is kind of really surprising how few things remain recognizable when a house burns. Many of the houses I looked at, there was just not one single item. I don’t know, it’s just so hard to imagine, like, an entire kitchen full of pots and pans and cutlery just going up in flames.

The children’s slide did quite well to survive, I think.
Yeah.

Were there any live rabbits at the Bunny Museum?
There were, but they got them out.

Okay, that’s good at least. There’s a silver lining.
I saw an interview on the news; I think he said they got the live ones out.

All right, thanks a lot and stay safe.
Bye bye.

Follow Jamie Lee Taete on Instagram @jamieleecurtistaete

The post Wildfire: Surreal Photos of Los Angeles in Ashes appeared first on VICE.

Of all the work in our recent Photography Issue, Adam Rouhana’s is perhaps the most laden with poignancy. He started taking pictures when his parents gave him his first camera at the age of 12, and has spent much of his life flying between his native Boston in the US, and Palestine, where his family hail from and where he now spends about half of the year.

Those visits have often been fraught, but this year’s horrifying escalation in violence has been something else entirely. Adam’s remarkable photos capture a world before all hell broke loose, with an emphasis on showing the other side of Palestine, the one that people don’t hear about on the news—the one not under siege, constantly fighting for survival.

VICE: When I look at your photos, there are visual traces of the relentless hardships faced by the Palestinian people. But mostly, they seem focused on joy and hope.
Adam Rouhana: When I first started this project, I found myself trying to recreate pictures that I had in my head: a boy throwing a rock at a soldier, a masked Palestinian with a gun, and so on. But after a while, I stepped back and reflected, why am I trying to recreate representations of a place that I know so well? And then I thought, what happens if I take the camera and point it away from the machineries of Apartheid, away from the violence, and towards us—the Palestinian people—instead. And that’s how this body of work started.

I often hear photographers talk about the effects of time on their work—there’s a logic that runs something like ‘an ordinary photo today will become extraordinary in the future,’ when the world has changed and life looks different. I feel like the conditions Palestinians have faced for over a year now have had a similar kind of accelerating effect on your work. Looking at the photos yourself, and the joy and hope in them, do you feel as though you are looking at a version of Palestine that has been lost?
No, not yet. After all, these are photos, not paintings. These are images of what I actually experienced. Things are of course changing—Israel’s genocide has transformed Gaza from a concentration camp into a necropolis. But my photos are from the rest of Palestine, and despite Israeli Apartheid, Palestinian livability is still very much an active form of resisting settler-colonialism.

What are the things that outsiders get wrong about Palestine and daily life there?
I think that one thing people get wrong about Palestine is assuming that it is homogenous—that Palestinians are somehow all the same. The reality is that Palestine lies at the crossroads of three continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe. And Palestinian society has been an open, pluricultural place for thousands of years—until 1948. The result is historic diversity of thought, religion, language, and culture, tied together through topography, heritage, and today an, albeit fractured, ongoing anti-colonial struggle.

How, when, and why did you start taking photographs?
When I was about 12 years old or so. My parents had this old Canon Powershot that they didn’t know how to use, so they gave it to me and I became the sort of family photographer. I kept making images for the past 20 years; photography became a sort of default for me.

What’s the story behind the photo of the red patch on the white wall?
Photographers are always asked these days to tell the stories behind their photos. I don’t really share the back stories from my images—I prefer to leave them open-text, to allow the viewer to write their own stories, to make up their own mind.

How has your perspective been influenced by the American part of your identity?
I grew up coming back and forth from Palestine to the US. I think that dissonance created the space for me to observe the types of differences between representations and reality that my work explores.

Going back to the ‘joy and hope’ I spoke about earlier—are those two things that have completely exited the equation in Palestine?
Franz Fanon wrote that, for the colonized, “To live means to keep on existing. Every day is a victory.” I think the same is true during a genocide. Every day you survive is a victory.

Follow Adam Rouhana on Instagram @adam.rouhana

The post Adam Rouhana Photographs the Palestinian People appeared first on VICE.

The images themselves are beautiful. So we thought we’d catch up with Domenico to see what his pretty little horses are really all about.

VICE: Hi Domenico, lovely work. How would you describe yourself as a photographer?
Domenico Matera: I don’t like to put labels on things: I’m a photographer, but I don’t like to define myself as a photographer. Let’s say that I take photos. I’m in love with how our reality can be told through the medium of photography by combining ethic, aesthetics, and the soul.

Okay. So what’s your thesis regarding this project, A New Friend?
Through visual language, I investigate nature and feel a sort of primordial energy that, in my opinion, is present in the guiding principle of every living being. The word “being” carries with it a sense of decadence, forgetfulness, and unawareness. The brilliance of those connotations is that it illuminates our understanding, but it does so by confronting us with our own negativity. What reveals this to us is the word itself—or rather, the misunderstanding of the word, which translates physis (a Greek term taken from Greek philosophy, meaning “nature”) into ideas, and the genetics of being into the realization of the body.

Go on.
Through this project, I aim to highlight that the sensory, visual language formed through an empathetic union with horses does not distort reality through words, but instead enhances the mystery of physis, expressing it through the infinite possibilities of nature’s being.

So this idea of physis seems kind of important to you.
Physis is the essence of being itself, the foundation that allows beings to become observable and to remain so. It dwells in its own appearance and abides there.

I see. Am I right in thinking you’re basically saying words can’t capture our lived experience… that they can’t capture our experience in nature?
OK.

Is that what you’re saying? Because language is limiting?
Yeah. Because I think words misunderstand the revelatory power of nature that man is only given to perceive. I believe the universe lives in us. We can connect with it whenever we want, but we cannot explain it through words. Animals, in this case, horses, teach us to live according to nature, to follow a natural flow of events.

For example, when we were children we had an atmospheric perception of events. So we forgot about the passage of time and we were intimately interconnected with time and space. In my visual expressions, I explore the concept of mystery and the energy related to the universe and nature, and the sphere of nature in general.

Okay. Should we talk about the horses?
I think horses are extremely sweet and sensitive animals. I experienced unprecedented empathy through contact with them––they communicate and transmit so much positive energy. After all, human beings are aggregates of united particles. We spread magnetic fields of energy in space, and it’s up to us to choose whether positive or negative energy is transmitted. I have always thought it was really fascinating to think of ourselves as small, to absorb the infinite beauty of the universe and to start every day from scratch, marveling at everything and always living to spread hope and beauty, wondering where we come from and why we live in this world. Contact with these creatures has helped me to know a new world: sunny and friendly, full of energy.

Did anything happen in your life for you to want to hang out with horses so much?
It all started by chance. My region’s full of woods and green hills. I have come into contact with them very often. They are free in the wild, and I often see them. I was fascinated by how they live in groups, by their way of communicating and moving in packs, as if they were following a great flow of events. Their perceptions of the wind, the sun—their natural search for greenery and trees—has allowed me to investigate them.

What kinds of encounters have you had with these horses?
One afternoon, I went to a reading school half an hour from my city here in southern Italy, and I saw their life in contact with men up close. It was extremely fascinating to see how they were much more comfortable and confident with children than with professionals. I felt also as if they could look inside the soul of human beings. 

What do you think the horses see?
I believe horses can perceive good and evil. I imagine they see inside the human soul that they trust with a boundless prairie in which to gallop freely, a place free from judgment, a home to share with…

I mean what do you think the horses see when they look inside our souls? 
I think that when they look inside the soul of a human being they can perceive who lives according to nature, who loves the world around him because he is uniquely fascinated by it—and in these terms I think they recognize this propensity that children have, to be amazed and enthusiastic about the world, to always think of themselves as small, recognizing in something, absorbing from the world around them, only for self-knowledge.

Alright, that sounds really nice. Thanks, Domenico.

Follow Nick Thompson on X @niche_t_

Find more of Domenico Matera’s work on Instagram @_domenicomatera.395

The post Urgent: Look at These Beautiful Photos of Beautiful Italian Horses appeared first on VICE.

Chivas Clem is a queer artist from Paris, Texas whose new collection, Shirttail Kin, is a study of the masculinity he sees around him. Texas is a state that often makes the news for its Death Row executions, abortion laws, and border control controversies, and last year outlawed drag performances, before the legislation was overturned for being unconstitutional.

Clem found his hometown hostile when he was growing up, moving away to New York where he lived for years making art. Following recovery from addiction and a nervous breakdown, he returned to Paris years later and began to photograph the local men he hired to work in his studio. The men are all transient in some way—drifters, addicts, felons. A subculture living in the shadow of the American Dream.

Today’s discourse on masculinity usually revolves around its perceived toxicity—patriarchy, sexual violence, privilege, and poor mental health. Clem’s delicate photos portray vulnerability, poignancy, and an outsider sense of fraternity as the men wield guns, shoot up, lie naked, piss, hunt, and smoke.

Shirttail Kin is exhibiting at Dallas Contemporary gallery from October 17, and is Clem’s first solo museum show. I caught up with him for a chat.

VICE: Hi Chivas. How did the project begin?
Chivas Clem: I hired them all to help me in the studio. They were terrible workers [laughs]. They’d just take a nap, or take a bath, or sit and eat a banana. I started taking these short videos and photos of them. You know the famous term “deplorables” that Hillary Clinton used [to describe Donald Trump’s voter base]? I think that was terrible and alienated so many people. I was thinking about what it meant. What is a deplorable? What do they look like? 

I was also thinking about this kind of masculinity that seems outdated, but it’s not outdated in Texas, where I grew up. I thought it would be interesting to document this subculture, which is peculiar to America. A huge swath of the American South is like this. 

What can you tell me about the men in the photos? 
A lot of them just come from poor, rural communities in the South. Not just North Texas, but Southeast Oklahoma and Northwest Arkansas. Not all of them, but lots of them have been affected by addiction, by poverty, by systemic generational abuse. Things that reflect the landscape around them. But that’s not to say they’re just ‘That One Thing.’ I think there’s more to them than that. Nobody is just one thing. One guy that has sat for me for many years is a brilliant, brilliant poet, and a country and western singer who plays like, eight instruments. If he’d been born into different circumstances he would have gone to NYU music school and he’d probably have five albums by now.

Did you set out to offer a different perspective of masculinity? 
No, I didn’t. I didn’t have any set criteria. Of course I know about toxic masculinity, and feminism, and the patriarchy, but I had to put all that to the side, really. I just wanted to photograph what was in front of me. I found there was a huge discrepancy between their exterior and interior. They look like these very menacing, dangerous, hyper-masculine men, right? One of them has a swastika tattoo, which of course, people immediately think of white supremacy when they see it. He got this tattoo when he was in prison. Do I think he’s actually committed to white supremacy? No, not really. It’s just a sign of this hard exterior.

Then, inside, all of these men were very vulnerable, tender, fragile. We can talk about mental health and toxic masculinity and all those things, but I think my work isn’t just about that. It’s about the human condition. An exterior and an interior that just don’t match. 

I’m interested in what brings all of these people and yourself together at this point in American history…
Modern America and, even more generally, middle-class America does this. Right now in America there’s a real crisis of masculinity. That’s because of the rise of fascism in America, and the weird backlash against LGBT people—against drag, against anything that breaks down those traditional things. Those have really been under fire the past five or six years. The crisis of masculinity is people coming to terms with that, you know? 

When you live out in the country, you’re not exposed to things. They all went to church—that still has a real stranglehold on young people—and they all watch Fox News too, which is its own kind of hyper-dangerous propaganda. That’s all about nostalgia for an old America. Where Black people knew their place, where white men controlled things, women didn’t have control of their bodies […] There’s this incredible wave of nostalgia for a time that never really was.

There’s a lot of repression, too. I had this model who was very, very, very transphobic. I mean, it really upset him; the idea of trans people. And then it turned out he was really trans amorous—so he’s actually attracted to trans people. He just didn’t know how to have a voice for that. It’s the return of the repressed. I think the crisis of masculinity fits into that, too. America is definitely at a crossroads and at a dangerous point.

Drug addiction can be disempowering and humiliating for anyone who’s in the throes of it. Are drugs something you consciously wanted to tackle in this project? 
It’s just part of how they live. I didn’t want to edit the work to overly romanticize drugs, but I also wanted to cover their entire journey. I photographed them doing everything: shooting up, smoking crystal meth. I didn’t want to sanitize it at all. 

Tell me about the process of taking the photos.
I feel like a lot of my models are like actors without movies. There’s no script, there’s no screenplay, there’s no movie, but a lot of them really took to being on camera. They rose to the occasion. They liked being looked at. There’s also something about being seen like no one had seen them before. There’s something very poignant about having somebody see you. 

I chose them because they’re wildly charismatic or wildly magnetic. Not just beautiful, but there’s something inside of them. I think there’s something about an imaginary narrative or an imaginary cinema that they can see. That’s part of the work as well.

So in the US you’ve got an election in a few weeks. When it comes to the exhibition, is that on your mind?
The curator really liked the idea of the show being up during the election cycle. Someone asked me if these guys are all Trump supporters. I said they probably would be, because they might want a pathological daddy figure. But almost all of the men in my pictures either cannot vote or wouldn’t vote. They cannot vote because they’re felons, or they would not vote just because they don’t participate in the world like that. They don’t pay taxes. They don’t participate in the political system.

People often get reduced to their political beliefs, but I feel your work offers something different. It shows humanity in three-dimensions. Do you feel there’s joy in this work? 
One of the reasons I liked all of these guys is because they’re free. They don’t follow the rules of society. They don’t feel like they have to go to college. They don’t feel like they have to get married. They don’t feel like they have to have children, although some of them do have children. They’re thrill seekers. Whether that ultimately ends tragically is another issue. There is a certain freedom in their criminality, and a romance in that. They get high and fuck all the time. There’s a beauty, romance, and joy in that. Their lives are just different to mine. I feel that their individual spirits come through in the photos, and it’s not all coded at tragedy.

‘Shirttail Kin’ is exhibiting at Dallas Contemporary gallery from October 17

Follow Jak on X @Jak_TH

The post The Drifters, Addicts, and Felons of America Derobe for Chivas Clem appeared first on VICE.

This annual ‘Pardon of the Camper Vans’ is part of the wider Pardons Bretons, an ancestral celebration involving over 2,000 processional pilgrimages in Brittany. Romain Ruiz, a photographer who has documented the phenomenon and whose work adorns this page, says this is just an inventive modern way for the Catholic Church to lure people into its flock.

“This benediction is only seven years old, which is very important to me because I’m really interested in how ancient rituals can adapt themselves to reach new people here in our time,” says Romain. “This was the perfect example of how the pardon could take new forms to attract new people into the Church.

“It’s a new leverage of evangelism; it’s a new way to attract people to Catholicism.”

The pardon starts with Mass before the local bishop, Father Yves Carteau, spends five to ten minutes with each camper van-owning person or family. They might talk about tedious things—like where they’ve driven from—or more serious matters, like previous road collisions, or lost loved ones. The priest will then dish out a load of blessings: to the owners, their vehicles, sometimes even their dogs, to help ensure safe travels for all in the year ahead.

“In one of the pictures, which is very powerful to me, the mother is crying, and you can see she’s carrying a portrait of her son. It’s a way for them to share the sorrow,” Ruiz says.

Saint Giles—who, depending on what you believe, was either a hermit or a monk active in the Rhône region of France in the 7th century—has been the saint of Malestroit since the 1400s. And he’s been the patron saint of motorhomes ever since Father Yves Carteau decided he was in 2017, when he sought to revitalize the local Saint-Gilles festival. (France is increasingly secular, with 29 percent of the population identifying as Catholic, according to Insee.)

Small statues of Saint Giles abound, while the camper-van owners take great pride in their mobile homes. “You can see eagles, you can see the on-style design with painting. Every van has its own little story. And they [the camper-van owners] are very, very proud of it. It’s like their house. So it’s their life,” Ruiz says.

The crowd was somewhat mixed, Ruiz says. “There were not too many young people there; they were all retired. Some people are new in town, so it’s a way for them to get into the community and to be connected with other people,” Ruiz says.

Ruiz’ photo-story is part of a wider series on French culture and society, France Parallax, highlighting the country’s regional quirks, which Ruiz jokingly calls the “French Metaverse.”

Check out more images of the benediction below.

Follow Nick Thompson on X.

Follow Romain Ruiz on Instagram.

The post French Priests Are Blessing Camper Vans and Dogs in Brittany appeared first on VICE.

This year, we scoured the globe for 20 rising stars who are revolutionizing photography. Ada Zielińska shoots flaming cars in Warsaw and wildfires around the world. Adam Rouhana documents the joys and burdens of life in Palestine. Carlos Idun-Tawiah finds cinematic beauty in his Ghanaian family’s photo albums. Kristina Rozhkova takes super-raw, sensual portraits in Russia. Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart makes fun fine art on a Canadian farm. Sara Benabdallah showcases the women who make Marrakech tick.

And that’s not even half of it. Literally, physically, it’s a big issue.

Free copies of will be available at some of our favorite photography labs, bars, and local businesses in New York City and London over the next couple of weeks. Pick up an issue at Bushwick Community Darkroom and photodom in NYC or magCulture and Photobook Cafe in London. And if you miss out on one of those limited-supply freebies, don’t worry, because there’s more good news.

The whole VICE Magazine is coming back, in all its sprawling and salacious glory. We’re launching a brand new subscription to deliver four magazines a year, anywhere in the world. The subscription will also give you access to a bunch of online exclusives—like extended films that are too risque for social media. The first issue you get will be The Photo Issue 2024.

Sign up below to get a heads up on when it launches before anyone else. Then, without further ado, meet the 20 stars of The Photo Issue 2024.

Ada Zielińska

Read more: Ada Zielińska on watching the world burn.

ADAM ROUHANA

ANDRÉ RAMOS-WOODARD

Read more: André Ramos-Woodard remixes Black cartoon history.

AVA CAMPANA

Read more: Ava Campana’s absurd, All-American self-portraits.

AVION PEARCE

Read more: Avion Pearce embraces darkness in their queer Black photography.

CARLOS IDUN-TAWIAH

Read more: Carlos Idun-Rawiah turns family photo albums into Ghanaian epics.

HENRY CRAWLEY

KAROLINA WOJTAS

KRAIWITCH TUNGSOMBOON

KRISTINA ROZHKOVA

LAUREN DACCACHE

LISS FENWICK

Read more: Liss Fenwick turns termite mounds into supermodels of the Outback.

LUIS MANUEL DIAZ

MINH NGOC NGUYEN

ROBERT HICKERSON

SAGE SZKABARNICKI-STUART

SARA BENABDALLAH

Read more: Sara Benabdallah captures the soul of Morocco with help from her grandma.

SHAHRAM SAADAT

Read more: Shahram Saadat turns carwashes into surreal time capsules.

TÔN TÔN BO

TUMI ADELEYE

Plus: 15 Years of Jake Burghart

Read more: Jake Burghart on sneaking cameras into the world’s danger zones.

The post Introducing VICE’s Photo Issue 2024 appeared first on VICE.

Combining original portraits with cartoons from American history, photographer André Ramos-Woodard is redrawing the future to tell a black and queer story that’s distinctly his own.nh

ANDRÉ RAMOS-WOODARD: I’m a trained photographer, but I’ve always liked drawing. When I was a kid, I would watch anime with my cousin and redraw all the characters from Dragon Ball Z as Black people.

Years later, I looked into the history of illustration, and that’s when I found all these minstrel caricatures that I used in Black Snafu. It was 2020, after the death of George Floyd and many other Black people, and it felt really important for me to dig into that.

I was making photographs that I considered celebratory, highlighting Black experiences, then drawing on top of the images to juxtapose the truth of Black people versus the way Black people have been portrayed throughout American cartooning. It’s a little bit of an act of reclamation, using these characters to teach about American history.

But honestly, it got kind of tiring. Stealing these characters, which I would consider detrimental to Black identity, was exhausting. So, I started to incorporate characters from my childhood, like Spawn or Sticky and Fifteen Cent from The Proud Family, that are pro-Black and just powerful, fun, courageous, and celebratory.

Even though I’m using references in my work, I try to fight against the idea that you have to have a historical background to really dig into art. My homies, my friends, my family, I want them to see themselves in these characters. I want them to find something that they relate to.

Follow André Ramos-Woodard on Instagram.

Learn more about the magazine, subscription, and how we’re building a new era for VICE by joining the waitlist below.

The post André Ramos-Woodard Remixes Black Cartoon History in Bold Portraits appeared first on VICE.

Flaming cars and wildfires reveal the sorts of catastrophes that can feel distant but are obviously already here. The daughter of a firefighter, photographer Ada Zielińska explains how she got into watching the world burn.

ADA ZIELIŃSKA: When I got into photography, my first big idea was to stage car crashes. I choreographed scenes depicting the aftermath of accidents and the people around them, which I thought were very cinematic. Eventually, I thought about setting a car on fire. I had no idea how to do it, but I remembered my dad was a firefighter when he was very young. He used to tell me stories about putting out fires in Warsaw. I explained my idea and asked him to help me, and he said, “Let’s do it.”

Dad had a friend who owned a junkyard, so we went there. My dad knew exactly what to do, replacing the gasoline in the tank with water. I, on the other hand, was so afraid of the fire that I didn’t take any good pictures. I remember running around in a panic with my camera in my hand. Still, I wanted to go back to it. So I started calling my meeting up with my dad every few weekends, and we would set things on fire. Mostly cars. 

After about five years of doing this, I turned it into the book Pyromaniac Manual. By then, I was scheduling fires with a team of firefighters and directing them. They used my work for training exercises.

There’s one photo of a steering wheel on fire that I took from inside the car. The firefighters put a belt on me so that if something happened, they could pull me out. But when it got to that point, it wasn’t exciting anymore. It wasn’t dangerous. I knew what was going to happen: the tires and airbags were going to explode, the windows were going to crack. 

So I looked further afield. I began traveling to the sites of wildfires, mostly after they had been extinguished. 

In one sense, I’m trying to find beauty in these catastrophes, however crude that sounds. And, later, to think about what they mean. 

In the modern world, we have control over everything. But when a natural disaster comes, even in the most developed countries, there is nothing we can do. Right now, there’s flooding in Dubai. I wish I was there. People have cars that cost $2 million, and they can’t do anything about it. Their cars are just floating away.

I have this memory from a burnt forest I photographed in Australia. It was all black and still. It wasn’t burning, but it was still super hot in there. And what struck me the most was that the birds weren’t singing. It was complete silence. It was so overwhelming. On the one hand, it was, I don’t know, the worst thing in the world. But on the other hand, it was so beautiful and scary.

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These intricately staged photographs offer glimpses of queer Black lives, both real and imagined. Here, Avion Pearce talks about the power of representation—and the responsibilities that places on them.

AVION PEARCE: In middle school, I found my dad’s little 35mm camera. I started taking it to school, taking photos of my friends and figuring out how to make an image. It was this thing I was doing for the joy of it. I felt like this was a way of creating a world without using language, and that was appealing to me.

It wasn’t until I left school in 2011 that I decided to take it seriously. I started thinking about history. One of the first projects was a fake archive. I created these two Black women in a relationship who were alive in the 1930s and 40s and created a whole world around them. I made stills from what might be a period film of these two women alongside an archive of their belongings: letters, objects, clothing, etc.

I was thinking: I might not have access to a history like this, but I can imagine it, and I think that’s really powerful. It was a way to create something I desperately wanted to see.

Then I turned to photographing people in my community in Brooklyn. I was thinking about survival as the city is rapidly changing, as gentrification and the housing crisis are issues, and a lot of people are being displaced. I’m exploring my responsibility in photographing a community that is trying to survive in this place—which I feel very protective of.

I think of photography as a really powerful tool for documenting and recording a time, place, and people, informing our ideas about these things, and confronting the issues of visibility and invisibility at the same time. I can use this tool to make commentary about the world around me. Maybe it can’t change laws, but it can impact the people who see the work.

I’ve gotten comments like: “The colors are so dark, this doesn’t feel very joyous to me.” My response is that I don’t owe anyone joy. Just because I’m photographing a marginalized community doesn’t mean I have to photograph them a certain way. I think that the images should be as complicated as the things that I’m speaking about. And I think that darkness is so beautiful and rich, and there’s so much there, and so much is revealed with the light.

People feel excited to be photographed in a way that’s more nuanced, poetic, and sentimental, even. That’s all that I want: to create a world and invite people in.

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VICE’s longtime creative partner, Jake Burghart has helped to craft over 100 documentaries in more than 70 countries. Over 15 years, he worked on many of the films that came to define the sort of hard-hitting, courageous, and mind-boggling stories that VICE traded in, including “The VICE Guide to Iran,” Dennis Rodman’s visit to North Korea, and on-the-ground coverage of the 2011 Arab Spring.

On these expeditions, he always shot photos for keepsakes, using whatever camera he had with him at the time: a 35mm, medium format, DSLR, or a cheap point-and-shoot. We asked Burghart to sift through his hard drives and share the stories behind some of these monumental moments.

CONGO

This photo was taken deep in the jungle on the border of Congo and Rwanda. I was with Suroosh, and we were going to interview the Mai Mai, a militia group. On the way there, we came to the last U.N. outpost. We had tea with these guys there, and they strongly advised us not to go any further into the jungle-which we did anyway.

We were quickly captured by a group of teenage rebels with machine guns who took us back to their camp. It wasn’t until months later, when we were home and got all the translations, that we realized they’d said something along the lines of: “Hey, boss, we found these white guys in the jungle. Should we just kill them?” But we had no idea that line had been spoken while we were there.

Our fixer explained to them that we were going to see the Mai-Mai, and these guys were like, “If they’re guests of the Mai-Mai, we can’t touch them. We actually have to make sure they’re safe.” So they escorted us to the Mai-Mai camp. It was an overnight walk through the jungle.
There was a funeral going on when we arrived; fires, drumming, and chanting. They put us in a grass hut with a mud floor and said they’d see us in the morning. This photo was taken the next morning: These are the main guys of the Mai-Mai village and their guards. And this is us setting up for the interview.

EGYPT

This is in Egypt during the revolution. We sort of snuck in—we were there as tourists, but we were filming in Tahrir Square, Cairo, during the day when demonstrations were happening. This photo was taken at night, near the presidential palace—there were all these kids in black masks throwing Molotov cocktails and firing slingshots and everything else at the palace. They had lasers they were shooting into the cameras, and they were getting tear-gassed. This guy is running away from the palace, across the no-man’s land, and the tear gas is shooting over his head. We spent a bunch of nights filming these guys and all of this until we were eventually arrested.

It was scary because we were held in custody in a country that had no government at the time. They had ousted the president, and there was no new president—the country was under martial law. They just sort of put us in a room and began questioning us as though we were spies. Luckily, the producer got out a tweet about us being captured, which became news in itself. The U.S. State Department found out we were there and sent someone to get us. It was the ultimate version of your mom picking you up from jail when you were a kid: To have this black SUV from the U.S. State Department pick us up from Egyptian prison and take us back. They were very cool about it.

IRAN

I’ve been to Iran several times. This was taken on the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. I’ve always liked this photo because you see these guys on stage with the yellow flags they’re passing out, and everyone’s got these sort of “Death to America” signs, and it’s all very serious. But there’s also this guy here selling colorful balloons. I like that juxtaposition of the sort of carnival air these balloons give and this very serious Iranian monument on this very serious day.

JAPAN

We were doing a story on hostess bars, weird cuddle clubs, and the different things on offer in Japan. And, you know, the Yakuza runs most of that, if not all of it. So we were kind of trying to get in tight with these guys so that we could film in those places. These guys are all tattooed up, and one night, they started just showing off their tattoos. This guy was showing the full scope of what he had going on, and he just took off his clothes in the back of a tattoo parlor where we were. One guy is smoking and holding a baby, and another guy in a leather jacket is looking on; there are Pringles and weird DVDs in the background. I don’t know—it’s just one of those absurd photos.

CHINA

This was during the Creators Project days. We were doing this big event in Beijing, and afterward, we decided to see the Great Wall before going home. It was a little road trip we did just for fun. This is a random place on the side of the road. We stopped to get snacks,
and this place was there, and Shane ended up playing pool with this dude. I don’t know exactly what it is, just a giant place with a pool table. But I feel like it was classic Shane of that time: Texas shirt, army jacket, earring. He was down to hang with anyone. He loved going to places, and on our way, he’d be like: “Oh, here’s this random guy who has a crazy style and seems cool. I’m going to have a beer and play pool with him.”

RUSSIA

This is a photo of Edward Snowden at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. It’s this famous hotel where, supposedly, every room is wired. This is where they put the Americans so they can spy on them, at least that’s what people say. I don’t know, I looked around and I couldn’t find any wires. But all the rooms have this really cool old-school Russian vibe.

We met Snowden in secret in this room, and Shane did this really long interview with him. In this photo, they’re just kind of having a moment. Snowden’s laughing at whatever Shane had said, and I just like that it’s a pulled-back look at these two guys talking. Snowden was lovely and cool and had so many amazing things to say. I feel like everything that he said about surveillance is true and continues to come true.

NORTH KOREA

This was another anniversary- forget what for, but there was a major show of force on display. We were in Pyongyang on a media junket. I was with Shane, and we were alongside people from CNN, BBC, and Fox News. The North Koreans were parading their ICBMs and other big missiles, and it was just a really insane thing to witness. Their precision, their marching, how in time they were, and how aggressively they marched. You can see that haze in the background, all from these thousands of guys just marching and kicking dust into the air. There were guys with bazookas marching, women marching, and then guys on horseback, and then a crazy stretch Mercedes with GoPros on it. Absurd things, scary things, so much shit going on.

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