Posts by: Billy Murray

When Vancouver-based photographer Chiara Zonca started her Moon Kingdom series, she already knew how to lose herself in isolated locations. She had been exploring what she calls “the switch”—an emotional process that occurs when she is surrounded by a landscape so surreal that it feels like a dream. In a month’s time, she travelled with her husband to “alien-like” locations in the Altiplano region that separates the border of Chile and Bolivia.

Keith Haring, 1982. Photo © Don Herron, courtesy Estate of Don Herron and Daniel Cooney Fine Art

Phoebe Legere, 1988. Photo © Don Herron, courtesy Estate of Don Herron and Daniel Cooney Fine Art

The East Village, 1988: Phoebe Legere was preparing to pose in her bathtub for photographer Don Herron. The 25-year-old songwriter had signed to Epic Records—one of the most powerful in the world back then—and they poised to make her into some combination of Madonna, Barbra Streisand, and Liberace. At the same time, Legere says, Michael Jackson had reached huge commercial success, Cindy Lauper was past her prime, and few female singers or artists were depicted as strong or powerful figures in stardom. Not to mention there was a booming yet wholly male-dominated art renaissance emerging quite literally around the corner in New York, according to Legere. Even Keith Haring was showing at the now-iconic FUN Gallery just half a block away from Legere’s apartment, where she still resides today. “It was a boys club, no question about it,” Legere tells me. “Girls were not welcome, except as maybe a muse or a drug dealer.”

A few days before her photo shoot with Herron, however, Legere had an idea. The up-and-coming musician could use the session to reveal another one of her talents: painting. Using black bathtub glaze, she adorned her bathtub in paintings of fish—which she calls her “totem animal”—and voluptuous women. She didn’t think her beauty alone was enough to would hold anyone’s attention. By the time Herron arrived, after he climbed 80 stairs to Legere’s fifth floor walk up, the paint on the tub had not yet dried and the water had turned black.

“It was a foggy autumn morning and I was on my way to an appointment,” Switzerland-based photographer Marco Zedler tells me. “From the road I saw the top of a dead birch tree nestled behind trees and bushes. That made me curious, as birches are usually removed from densely populated areas.” He’s recalling the first time he discovered the hidden, mystical landscapes pictured in his ongoing Wetland series.

A few days later, Zedler returned to this location and noticed a small swamp just beyond the brush. He couldn’t see much. Everything was overgrown. But as he crept past the underwood in this area along the Rhine River, it was as if he stepped through what he calls a “magical portal.” In what felt like an instant, Zedler was transported from a noisy, densely populated street into a world of nature and solitude.