21st Century alternative fashion

 

January, 2012 marked my ninth anniversary with Suicide Girls, the popular website for tattooed & pierced (“alternative”) models.  Interestingly, I find more artistic inspiration as a member of their Photographer’s Group than I do at PPA (Professional Photographer’s of America) or the DWF (the Digital Wedding Forum, where all of the world’s top wedding photographers hang out.)

Drawing the idea for the name from a Chuck Pahluniak novel, SG was launched in Portland, Oregon by Selena Mooney, (aka “Missy Suicide”, then a bored recent art school grad), and web designer Sean Suhl.  SG photographers shoot photo sets, usually between 40 and 60 photos of an individual model.  To protect the girls, each takes a single stage name followed by “Suicide.” As you might expect, some of the women have become very popular, with upwards of 10 or 15 photosets posted over the last few years.  Models post to their blogs regularly and hundreds of thousands of members are active in the online community.  For some of the girls, their fame has spread to magazines, music videos, and movies.

What follows immediately below at the top of this blog post are individual shots from some of my favorite photosets from SG in recent years, with credit to the amazing photographers.  All images are copyrighted by Suicide Girls.com, Inc.  Farther down the page are some of my own personal photos of a few of the girls taken while they were in town during their nationwide “burlesque tour" recently.

 
Pick your crush de la semaine:

Fractal, Nixon, Reagan, et. al. visited Minneapolis recently during their national traveling Burlesque Tour.  Here were a few impressions from my anthropology field trip notebook:

Overall, you'd find the girls to be lovely & mysterious & other-worldly, like UFO's made out of white chocolate.  But the three shown here were my own personal favorites...

Fractal radiated sweetness. Samantha was so charmingly normal that she was almost out of place, like a bank branch manager from a parallel universe.

Nixon: By gawd, this woman had the most amazing PRESENCE about her! You’d swear she was generating her own weather system, small patches of etherea coalescing in her wake, clouds and  sparkles of dew forming halos in the atmosphere about her... what a knockout impression she made. The last time I saw a face like that, I was 12 inches from the solid gold mask of Tutankhamun at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in 1974.  She is that regal.

Reagan: There were moments around Chloe when I thought some Japanese anime cartoon character had come to life - what a charming and unaffected little bird she is. No wonder everyone on Suicide Girls claims to have a crush on her. I haven't seen her live on stage, but in person and in the tour-DVD interview, she really seems like the girl you want baby-sitting your kids.  As a photographer, I could spend hours just working headshots with those mystical timeless eyes and that wonderfully quirky smile. I'm sure if angels rode buses, they'd get up to give her their seat.