Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - As a young man, living in Manhattan in the 1970s and '80s, Frank Rispoli was drawn to the New Wave and Punk club scenes. Recognising the inherent performance of sexuality and desire in both fashion and club culture, he documented the intertwining of the two. Always with a camera strapped around his neck, he frequented Danceteria, Tier 3, Max's Kansas City, Studio 54 and many other clubs in Soho, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and Midtown. Rispoli asked female clubgoers, bar patrons, singers, and band members if he could photograph their shoes, utilising the staged sets, props, and bathrooms of the clubs, and the taxis, sidewalks, and rooftops of the city, as his backdrops. A selection of these photographs forms the basis of his first book - High Heels.0Rispoli attributes his interest in women's shoes to his inability, as a teenager, to look women in the eye and, due to his shyness, focusing on their feet instead. He drew further inspiration from the work of Guy Bourdin, and his advertising photography of the period. Rispoli continues, in his photographs, to capture the fun, freedom, and performance found in other outsider communities and events, such as Wigstock, and the burgeoning art scene in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Ifa Brand never felt satisfied as a model. The dissatisfaction stemmed from not being able to represent her true identity: 'I fell "between styles": alternative but not alternative enough; fetish but not in a typical sense. I also disliked photographers telling me how I should look, pose, behave; telling me no to red lips, no to precious lingerie and all the things I loved.' In 2017, she decided to go her own way. She saw photography as an opportunity to be her own creative director, to follow her own storylines, and to explore her own vision of sensuality, eroticism and fetish. Hers is a quest for personal empowerment through the art of self-portraiture: 'I find it very important to present a strong, independent woman. There needs to be an element of being untouchable. The message to the viewer is: yes you can look but solely on my terms.'.