Alex Zafiris // stories

Gaspard Ulliel, photographed by Miguel Villalobos, styling by Hedi Slimane 

Danny Lyon. Shakedown, Ramsey, Texas Prison, 1968, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist, the Menil Collection, Houston, and Edwynn Houk Gallery.

My contribution to the best shows of 2016, for Bomb: 

“The red hot center of Danny Lyon’s work is freedom. His contrarian instinct and unapologetically engaged eye leaves no room for denial of the other, in both personhood and politics. This year’s Whitney retrospective, Message To The Future, celebrated this drive by giving space to his most captured subjects––civil rights, incarceration, outlaws, love––and showed how his images hold the past and present together: accountable, with no escape route.”

Monica Belluci in Mixte Magazine, 2017. 

From my interview: “Richard Burton used to say—of course, he was married to one of the most incredible actresses in the world—but, he used to say: ‘An actress is a little bit more than a woman, an actor is a little bit less than a man.’ Being an actress is an extension of femininity.”

Chelsea Hodson in Mixte Magazine, 2016, photographed by Nicolas Wagner. 

Alejandro Jodorowsky in New York City, March 13, 2014. Copyright Balarama Heller, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

From my interview with Jodorowsky in 2013, for Bomb Magazine: 

"In Mexico they really wanted to kill me, they thought I was so weird. I changed the culture. Now all their museums want to do a retrospective of the work I did there. I became a legend."

Iconic work by Milton Glaser. From my interview with him in Guernica, 2014: 

Cover art by William Powhida for Ben Davis’ book of essays, “9.5 Theses on Art and Class”.

From my interview with Davis in Guernica, 2014: 

"If you try and argue with people on the street about labor exploitation as a central driver of the economy, eventually they will bring up art, how labor exploitation doesn’t explain the sale price of a Picasso."

Eyes of Time (detail), 2014. Mixed-media wall mural. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. © Chitra Ganesh. Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum

From my interview with Ganesh in Guernica, 2015: 

Chitra Ganesh, an Indian, Brooklyn-born artist, is not religious, but her work brims with visual and narrative references to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Greek mythology, the literary and art historical canons, folk tales, and pop culture. She recognizes both the emotional clout and cultural heritage of these symbols, and her paintings, murals, photography, and drawings offer a space in which to find the untold or forgotten story, guided by familiar clues. Her most recognizable works are her digital collages, comic strips directly inspired by the children’s books of Amar Chitra Katha, an imprint founded in the 1960s to teach Indian history and lore. Her focus on female power is erotic, dramatic, and primal—characteristics often attributed to the ancient narratives from which she draws and that are so often sanitized for modern life—and her attention to marginal figures, unresolved endings, and mass imagery reveals a reverence for the individual and subjective experience.

Lady (Assa Sylla) and Marieme/Vic (Karidja Touré) dancing in Céline Sciamma's film, 'Girlhood’. 

From my 2015 interview with Sciamma in Guernica, 2015: 

“When you get the power, you have the responsibility of the power.” 

Hayv Kahraman, Broken Teeth, 2014. Oil on linen, 96 x 73 x 2 in. ©Hayv Kahraman. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman gallery.

From my interview with her in Guernica, 2015: 

"The commonality in these histories—contemporary Baghdad and thirteenth-century Baghdad—seems to be this overwhelming loss or trauma, and then the rebuilding of something new. For me, and many others in the diaspora at this point in time, it’s a rebuilding that stems from the margins, from a migrant consciousness of sorts."