Tag Archives: Interviews

New Photography Books: “Ciao” In Italy By Mario Testino (May 2020)

Ciao BookIn Ciao, Testino handpicks his favorite images of Italy, a country that has featured heavily in his life, from his friendships and breathtaking vistas to quintessentially Italian iconic fashion shoots and Italians’ ever-evolving allure to their effervescent lifestyle. Featuring three sections, IN GIRO (out and about), ALLA MODA (in fashion), and AL MARE (at sea), the result is a highly personal journey across the country through Testino’s lens paying homage to Italy, and it’s culture as well as a chronicle of 40 years of genre-defining photography.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential fashion and portrait photographers, Mario Testino is responsible for the creation of emblematic images, transmitting emotion and energy in an open and intimate way. Throughout his four-decade career, Testino has been on a journey beyond the world of fashion capturing Earth’s traditions and cultures with unparalleled access and an extraordinarily unique point of view.

Ciao

 

Peruvian by birth, Testino’s intimate connection to Italy found its roots in his Italian heritage, but blossomed when he experienced the country for himself. Discovering Italy was, for Testino, synonymous with discovering his passion for fashion. “Rome was all about the hottest, latest trends and fresh new styling, and I loved the way Italians could shed the latest look for an even newer thing without ever losing their own identity.”

The photographer and author

With a four decades career as a leader in the fields of fashion, culture and lifestyle, Peruvian-born Mario Testino OBE has many facets that take him beyond the surface of a photographer and artist placing him as a cultural visionary. Testino’s universe is broad, his impact is uniquely powerful and his lifestyle is completely authentic. Testino’s has seen his works published and exhibited in hundreds of cities around the world. Throughout his career he built unprecedent relationships with editorial and commercial partners such as Vogue, Burberry, and Gucci to name a few. His past and present muses include HRH Princess Diana, Madonna, Donatella Versace, Kendall Jenner and Mariacarla Boscono. His solo exhibitions have shown in museums and galleries worldwide, including the National Portrait Gallery, London; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The contributing author

Alain Elkann is a New York–born author and journalist. Since 1989, he has maintained a weekly interview column for the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa. Elkann has lectured on art, Italian literature and Jewish studies at the Universities of Oxford, Columbia, Jerusalem, Pennsylvania and Milan’s IULM. He is President of The Foundation for Italian Art & Culture (FIAC) in New York and in 2009 was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the French Republic.

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Interviews: Author Olivia Laing On Her New Book “Funny Weather – Art In An Emergency” (Podcast)

Monocle on Culture Monocle 24 podcastsNovelist and art writer Olivia Laing tells Robert Bound about ‘Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency’, her new collection of essays, columns and character studies from the past decade.

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic.  She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. She’s the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, which has been translated into 17 languages and sold over 100,000 copies worldwide.

 Her latest book is Crudo, a real-time novel about the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2019 it won the 100th James Tait Black Memorial Prize. 

Laing’s writing about art & culture appears in the Guardian, Financial Times and frieze, among many other publications.  

Her collected essays, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, will be published on 16 April 2020. She’s currently working on Everybody, a book about bodies & freedom.

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Podcast Interviews: “Exercise Is Medicine” Author Judy Foreman

Science Talk logoHealth journalist Judy Foreman talks about her new book Exercise Is Medicine: How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging

downloadThis is Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on April 24th, 2020. I’m Steve Mirsky. And under our current, often locked-down situation, it’s still really important to try to get some exercise. Judy Foreman is the author of the new book Exercise is Medicine: How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging. She’s a former nationally syndicated health columnist for the Boston Globe, LA times, Baltimore Sun and other places, and an author for the Oxford University Press.

Judy Foreman is the author of “A Nation in Pain” (2014), “The Global Pain Crisis” (2017), and “Exercise is Medicine,” (2020), all published by Oxford University Press, and was a staff writer at The Boston Globe for 22 years and the health columnist for many of these years. Her column was syndicated in national and international outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Baltimore Sun and others.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College and has a Master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was a Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She spent six months as a guest reporter for The Times of London. She was also a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She was also host of a live, weekly call-in radio show on Healthtalk.com.

Judy has won more than 50 journalism awards, including a 1998 George Foster Peabody award for co-writing a video documentary about a young woman dying of breast cancer and the 2015 Science in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers.

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Interviews: 83-Year Old Danish Urban Designer Jan Gehl (Monocle 24)

The Urbanist PodcastAndrew Tuck brings you a special interview with Jan Gehl, perhaps the world’s best-known urban designer. Now 83, he’s waiting this pandemic out while isolating at home, enjoying spring from his garden.

Jan Gehl Hon. FAIA is a Danish architect and urban design consultant based in Copenhagen whose career has focused on improving the quality of urban life by re-orienting city design towards the pedestrian and cyclist. He is a founding partner of Gehl

Interviews: 75-Year Old Earth Day Founder Denis Hayes – “How It Began”

From a Rolling Stone Magazine Interview (April 22, 2020):

Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair Denis HayesWell, in 1970, things were vastly more limited. We had three dominant television networks, and also public broadcasting. We had a handful of national newspapers and the wire services. News magazines were much more important than now. That was pretty much it.

Denis Hayes is the Mark Zuckerberg of the environmental movement, if you can imagine Mark Zuckerberg with a conscience and a lot less cash. Like Zuckerberg, Hayes dropped out of Harvard to start an eccentric and unpromising venture. Zuckerberg’s was called Facebook, which he launched in 2004; Hayes’ was called Earth Day, which he founded in 1970.

Hayes is a child of the Sixties. He grew up in a small town on the Columbia River in Washington state, where his father worked in a paper mill and Hayes saw firsthand the toxic consequences of the collision between industry and nature: dirty air, spoiled streams, dead fish. He drifted through college, bummed around in Asia and Africa, and thought deeply about the role of humans in the natural world.

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Reopening The Economy: “What The Year Ahead Might Look Like” (NY Times)

The Daily - New York Times podcastDonald G. McNeil Jr., a science and health reporter for The New York Times, discusses how the Coronavirus lockdown might end what it would look like.

While the economy is likely to reopen slowly, there is hope that society will adapt to manage the uncertainty of our new circumstances. Here’s what experts say the next year (or more) will look like.

Exercise Podcast: Home Rowing Machine Maker “Hydrow” CEO Bruce Smith

The Entrepreneurs Monocle 24 PodcastAs gyms are closed and many of us are stuck at home, it’s an opportune time for home fitness platforms. We speak to Bruce Smith, founder of Hydrow, while Jason de Savary of London’s Core Collective talks about the gym’s new CCTV platform.

Bruce Smith, CEO & Founder

Bruce Smith CEO of HydrowLife-long entrepreneur and rower, Head of the Charles winner, coached the US Lightweight Eight to a Bronze medal at the 2015 World Rowing Championships and former Executive Director of Community Rowing – Boston.

Every aspect of Hydrow is engineered by rowing experts to elevate your experience. From computer-controlled resistance to revolutionary Live Outdoor Reality™ technology, Hydrow delivers an effective and enjoyable workout that brings the river home to you.

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Podcast Interviews: Art Magazine “Ursula” Editor Randy Kennedy – “The Rare Pleasures Of Print Online”

Monocle 24 The StackMonocle 24’s “The Stack” chats with Randy Kennedy, editor of ‘Ursula’, the beautiful print quarterly from Hauser & Wirth.

‘Ursula’ is the quarterly art magazine featuring essays, profiles, interviews, original portfolios, and photography by some of the most thought-provoking writers and artists in the world, as reported by Artnet. ‘Ursula’ takes its name from the internationally admired co-founder of the gallery: patron, collector, mentor, and art world mater familias Ursula Hauser. Reflecting the inclusive values and broad perspective of the gallery she helped to establish in Zurich in 1992, ‘Ursula’ will showcase not only the work of artists and estates represented by Hauser & Wirth, but also a wide, adventurous swath of the international art world of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Art Magazine "Ursula" Covers from Hauser and Wirth

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Podcast Interviews: Craig Brown, Author Of “One Two Three Four – The Beatles In Time” (Monocle)

Monocle on Culture PodcastsRobert Bound speaks to writer Craig Brown about his new biography of the Beatles, called ‘One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time’. How do you say something fresh about one of the most written-about bands in history?

Author/writer Craig Brown
Author Craig Brown

From the award-winning author of Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret comes a fascinating, hilarious, kaleidoscopic biography of the Fab Four.

John Updike compared them to ‘the sun coming out on an Easter morning’. Bob Dylan introduced them to drugs. The Duchess of Windsor adored them. Noel Coward despised them. JRR Tolkien snubbed them. The Rolling Stones copied them. Loenard Bernstein admired them. Muhammad Ali called them ‘little sissies’. Successive Prime Ministers sucked up to them. No one has remained unaffected by the music of The Beatles. As Queen Elizabeth II observed on her golden wedding anniversary, ‘Think what we would have missed if we had never heard The Beatles.’

One Two Three Four traces the chance fusion of the four key elements that made up The Beatles: fire (John), water (Paul), air (George) and earth (Ringo). It also tells the bizarre and often unfortunate tales of the disparate and colourful people within their orbit, among them Fred Lennon, Yoko Ono, the Maharishi, Aunt Mimi, Helen Shapiro, the con artist Magic Alex, Phil Spector, their psychedelic dentist John Riley and their failed nemesis, Det Sgt Norman Pilcher.

From the bestselling author of Ma’am Darling comes a kaleidoscopic mixture of history, etymology, diaries, autobiography, fan letters, essays, parallel lives, party lists, charts, interviews, announcements and stories. One Two Three Four joyfully echoes the frenetic hurly-burly of an era.

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Interviews: “Courtyard Living” Author Charmaine Chan – “Domestic Solitude Solution” (Podcast)

Monocle on Design PodcastCharmaine Chan, design editor for ‘South China Morning Post’ believes that courtyards offer an excellent urban solution to domestic solitude. She explains how they can be hubs of community and calm.

Courtyard Living Charmaine ChanCourtyards have long played an important function in residential design, regulating light, shade, and the use of space. With thousands of years of tradition as inspiration, contemporary architects are now realizing courtyard living afresh. This lavish survey of twenty-five residences across the Asia-Pacific region features homes from Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, India, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka.

Structured by courtyard function, the book’s five chapters—on privacy; multigenerational living; sightlines; light and ventilation; and living with nature—are richly illustrated with photography and architectural illustrations showing courtyard positions within floor plans.

Showcasing the unique lifestyle opportunities afforded by contemporary courtyard design, this is an inspirational resource for anyone interested in indoor-outdoor living.

Charmaine Chan is Design Editor at the South China Morning Post. She began her journalism career in Sydney, pursued it in Tokyo and moved to Hong Kong in 1997 to join the Post. Her writing focuses on design and architecture in Asia.

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