Marsha P. Johnson was the boundary pushing gay and transgender activist who sadly past away in 1992. This documentary tells the story of her truly inspiring and sadly lesser known life which throughly deserves more attention for the incredible work that she achieved. Johnson was a veteran of the Stonewall Riots and co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with Sylvia Rivera in the 1970s, providing shelter and support to young trans women in New York.

Besides from her humanitarian work she was immortalised into a portrait by Warhol as one of New York’s greatest personalities and Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons supposedly named his band after her. She also had an exceptionally eccentric style but most sadly the biggest question is over her mysterious death which was pronounced by the police as suicide after being found in the Hudson River. Her friends have vehemently questioned this and in 2002 the inquest was reopened as there have been suspicions that she was assaulted in that area. Once when Johnson was asked by a judge what the ‘P’ in her name stood for, she famously remarked what later became her trademark – “’PAY IT NO MIND’

 

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I was initially attracted to the work of Amanda Ross-Ho because I liked her slashed black tee shirts and wanted to wear them; little did I know that all of Ross-Ho’s shirts were part of a wall sculpture series entitled BLACK RAGS, and that they are actually quite large and impossible to wear. Her exhibition GONE TOMORROW, of which BLACK RAGS was a part, also included a significantly enlarged wall sculpture cast of a gold-plated earring and a few collages including prints and photographs of human-sized shirts that seemingly served as inspiration for the sculptures. Personally, I enjoy how her work takes on tropes and visual signs of street (sub)cultures, fashion, and found objects, and mashes them together in complex and unexpected ways, how DIY culture and made-ness collide with mechanical production in her larger-than-life objects.

(Images via Mitchell-Innes & Nash)

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The St. Michel Flea Market in Montreal is always filled with an eclectic mix of objects and individuals. Located in close proximity to Saint Michel station, the last stop on the Metro’s Blue Line, the flea market attracts visitors from all areas of the city. It is here that I have been fortunate enough to meet a number of older gentlemen who have allowed me to take pictures of their tattoos.

The ship, cross, and flower/dagger are all from one man and were done in Hong Kong. On another man is the “I LOVE… FOR EVER,” anchor, and LOVE/HATE knuckles – homemade jobs done in various locations on Canada’s East Coast. The man with the dancing woman could not remember when and where he acquired the tattoo, but was quick to demonstrate how he could make her “dance” by moving his fingers.

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Photographer and Sang bleu contributor Sven Marquardt is the face of Europe’s most infamous club, Berghain, the notoriety of which lies partly in its tattooed and pierced, gruelling façade, and control of perhaps the strictest, and probably least predictable, door policy across the world.

Banned from showing his face throughout the Mitte district during communist East Berlin, Marquardt risked incarceration and brutality for the publication of his photographic work. Having spent over a decade away from the practice, instead turning his keen eye to screening the clientele of the city’s club nights, recent years have seen a resurgence, photographing the provocative characters of Berlin subculture met in the between.

The not entirely unexpected, but all the same differing pursuits spark the query as to the quality that unites them – an inquisitive nature so widely misinterpreted as a quick google search will tell.

In an interview last year, in giving some small hint at the nature of his cut-throat selection, the gap between these somewhat antithetic vocations became that bit smaller “[it's] so much and actually nothing. I find faces in which I see life.”

 
Photographs Sven Marquardt, Portrait Kate Bellm for Wonderland Magazine
 

 

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Pamela Anderson aged 45 by Mario Testino for Vogue Brasil June 2013

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I saw this guy on the overground yesterday, he had got Les Skuse to do all of his tattoos in Bristol in the 60′s. This eagle on the back was my favourite one.

 

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