Japanese Legend

Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto tancends time with his photographs. Each image capturing a sense of longevity and a glimpse into an unseen time and place. Obsessed with time travel, Sugimoto's subjects include wax figure dioramas where something lifeless can become full of life in a still image, seascapes that cannot be affected by time or humans and theatres lit by the light of an entire lenght of a film. Worth a look.

NEONSLEEP

A wee interview with the brains behind NEONSLEEP! Welfe Bowyer has in many ways been responsible for creating a new kind culture. It's one that dares to stay up all night, isn't scared to let loose, lives for adventure and is increasingly global in scope! As Welfe explains NS is much more than a home for 'party photo', it's an original and innovative NEW kind of space. A hub for high fashion, street culture, jewellery and much much more...

You've changed the format of NeonSleep drastically, what's the concept behind the new site?
The new site is designed to act like a cultural hub, allowing fans to easily navigate all the aspects of NS. All sections are equal, whether your into the photos or street fashion or art.

How do you see the site evolving?
Treating each section as equal, allows each to also grow and shrink as needed. The new fashion sections, Sidewalk and Look are starting to gain momentum, with various NZ labels seeing the potential and getting on board. It would be great to have Auckland street fashion on there too. So any budding fashion photographers out there!?

What is about NZ culture that inspires you? What would you like to see more of?
NZ'ers are so do 'DIY'. Its an old cliche, but the reality of it is that NZ gives you a very good chance to do what you want. And you might just find your one of the only people doing it! There's less competition, which gives you more attention. This is good and bad, as designers are often pushed further amongst competition. So I would like to see more competition for sure.

Less?
Less P would be nice. People should just chill out with a nice cup of Peppermint tea.
And where would you like to see NeonSleep five years on from now?
In 5 years, I would like to expand the brand to include photographers from other cities around the globe. That's been the idea from the start. We've been mixing in photos from Berlin for 2 years now, and would be great to see some other cities (on one site) too! But yeah, just generally focus more globally, which hopefully just strengthens NZs position next to work from around the world.

You can check out NEONSLEEP HERE ( and don't forget to navigate all the features!)
Cheers Welfe! x

Still Life

ahhhh.... so I can't always think what to blog next.
What if I just take the last topic and ask myself if I could create a blog post that would fit under the same title. Unoriginal?

Vincent Bousserez isn't.

You can check out the french artist's take on still life here

The Flaneur

Auckland photgrapher Lydia Cowpertwait has just begun a cute new fashion blog....

Oh how great it is to find another interesting place to trawl on the wonderful world that is the web.

FROM THE STREETS OF PARIS

Heidi Neubauer-Winterburn has been documenting the recession by photographing sale signs in Parisian store windows. It's not much of an 'upper', but her pics are insightful and she has a good sense of humour too...

"Everything is on sale but love!"
'........to which I say: surely you are joking! I have absolutely seen women walking these streets on the arms of men who speak to the contrary'
View more HERE

WHOLLY SHIZZ

If you party/ go to gigs/ or are just generally out and about.... then chances are at some point over the last few years you may have come across a wellington guy named Welfe.

Neonsleep ( the cultural hub of NZ's night life) is moving....No longer will Welfe deal solely with pics of YOU, rumour has it- he's going to document all aspects of cultural life. Fashion, events, gigs, etc..

It's really nice to see party photo progress into something else.... I think he's right on to monopolise on the hype the neonsleep site has created, and to build on that to create something else...

Hell New Zea lands a small place- there's every reason why ONE cultural centre ( even if it's on the web) could exist.

The launch party is tonight so for those of you, like me, who can't go- check his site tomo...

www.neonsleep.com

I can't wait to see!

FLURO hearts RUBY PARTY!

We had a party to celebrate our first birthday and our sixth issue: Fluro in [Space] and Ruby's new store launch at Old Bank Arcade in Wellington last Thursday, 21st August.

Thank you to everyone who came, it was an amazing turnout and super fun times.
Thanks for reading the mag over the last year - we wouldn't be able to do it without you!

Check out www.neonsleep.com for the full nights action!

Temporary Sculptures

Check out the photography of Martin Klimas. Its beauty will undoubtedly melt your face off.

"Martin Klimas may carefully control his studio environment, but his pictures are greatly left to chance. With a strobe light and one sheet of film, Klimas captures each individual experience of a porcelain figurine being dropped and obliterated. As the statuettes in his pictures fall to their fragile demise, Klimas is able to capture a new structure that only exists for an instant.

His photographs explore time and material objects—an object that can be intact and so serene one minute can easily be destabilized the next. These figurines display a perpetual sense of motion. The intention of this process is that the process of an action creates a new object. Every picture becomes a sculpture on its own by showing the transformation of an object that no longer exists."

- www.coolhunting.com

Rad.

Rad photos of rad bands doing rad things.

Rad.

www.benrayner.com