Kiera Knighley: Distinctly English

Discreetly, quietly, and with the sort of delicate earnestness that she does most things, Keira Knightley has emerged as one of her generation's preeminent period actresses. 

This, however, is less a comment on Knightley's predilection for peddling in corsets in films such as Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007), for which she has earned both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, and more one on her faithful, almost throwback, workaday sense of what her job is and how to go about it. 

Knightley's film career nominally began a very long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—her first role in a major movie was a part as a handmaiden drafted into serving as an expendable double for Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999). 

But in the intervening years, careening between smaller projects like John Maybury's The Edge of Love (2008) and Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go (2010), and big-budget extravaganzas like the Pirates of the Caribbean films, she has managed to knit together a string of performances that are both emotionally complex and powerfully economical. 

"I first met Keira when she was 17," says Wright. "She was a goofy kid then. But she's always had a fiercely inquisitive nature. It's been a privilege to bear witness to her development."

Indeed, there is something distinctly "English" about Knightley's restraint as an actress that allows her to move naturally between characters and eras and genres—and not just because she's a born-and-bred Londoner who grew up steeped in the world of British drama folk. Her mother, Sharman Macdonald, is a playwright and wrote the script for The Edge of Love; her father, Will Knightley, is a veteran stage actor. 

If there is a thread that runs through her work, it's that her characters are frequently tangles of raw nerves: romantics hitched to impossible love; damaged souls searching for liberation; ethereal maidens who don't want to be saved; psychologically self-plumbing swirls of emotion masked by a kind of hesitant beauty. 

But Knightley has an ability to construct something solid and substantial out of those vulnerable fragments, whether she's playing a stylish socialite struggling to come to grips with her own imperfections and her husband's infidelities as she did in 2008's The Duchess or a young Russian woman drawn into a quasi-sadomasochistic relationship with her psychoanalyst as she did in last year's A Dangerous Method. 

"Keira is a perfect paradox," says Jude Law, who stars with Knightley in Wright's new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, due out this fall "On the one hand, she is a youthful, energized beauty, and on the other, an incredibly experienced, controlled professional." 

Adds Steve Carell, who appears opposite Knightley in Lorene Scafaria's Seeking a Friend for the End of the World: "I think what sets Keira apart is her ability to convey great strength and great vulnerability at the same time."

 



Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, which hits theaters in June, is about two neighbors (Carell and Knightley) who are drawn together as an asteroid hurtles toward the Earth. The film is a bit of a departure for Knightley—if only because it takes place in a contemporary setting and, as one can imagine, has some comic elements. 

"Keira has played some incredibly strong women over the years," says Scafaria. "They've been very brave roles, particularly in dramatic pieces. But it was so exciting to see her show this other side of herself, the wild child. She's fun—and funny." [Interview Magazine]

Graphic Romance of Old School Tattoos

Angelique Houtkamp is a Dutch tattoo artist and painter who brings to galleries her own take on the graphic romance of old school tattoos, the heyday of the Wild West and the mystery of Spain.

Alabama Shakes: Road Tested Rythm and Blues

Alabama Shakes' music is drenched in gospel and Southern rock influences, but their real calling card is Brittnay Howard, a wildly soulful vocalist who has already earned comparisons to Janis Joplin. 

 

Her bandmates – bassist Zac Cockrell, guitarist Heath Fogg,  drummer Steve Johnson and keyboardist Ben Tanner – know better than to distract from a good thing. They took a backseat and let Howard's charisma bleed through songs like "I Ain't The Same" and "Always Alright," a pass-the-alcohol adrenaline-starter with genuine swagger. [Rolling Stone]

The band's debut, "Boys & Girls," isn't out until April 10, and the Alabama Shakes don't adorn their music with any trendy flares or hip accents. Their sound is one born in small-town bars, where covers of ol' rhythm & blues tunes become road-tested tough and soulful originals emerge sounding timelessly familiar.

Madonna: MDNA

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Rise and Shine

In honor of the Chinese New Year i-D Magazine collaborated with  Chen Man and MAC’s UK director of make-up, Terry Barber, to create these 12 covers for the Spring issue. These portraits are works of art that celebrate the diversity of Chinese beauty in a very avant-garde fashion.

Les Femmes Heretiques

Les Femmes Hérétiques / AWARD: IPA Los Angeles, LICC London Intl. Creative Competition

Recently, a group of archeologists in Israel found a mural representing Jesus as a woman, with a crown of flowers, pearls around her neck and red painted lips. It could be the not only symbolical confirmation, of God feminine nature, as in the past many heretics declared among them Wilhelmina the Bohemian. 

The hypothesis is fascinating and, if true, would change immediately the bone structure of the contemporary society, frozen in a hard to kill paternalism. Our "femmes", not at all aiming to be divine, represent all sacrifices and suffering that women had to bear along history, and that allowed them to evolve into the so called “women century” - the nineteen hundreds -, and which we should never forget and always keep mind as far as conquests and emancipation. [Winkler + Noah]

Exhibited in Milan (2010).

For Winkler+Noah, photography was the most fitting point of arrival for an artistic itinerary that they began instinctively from childhood, exploring all the forms of expression that they encountered — painting, drawing and sculpture — amalgamating them and trying out blends between different media.

 

This creative need for self-expression matured over the years, first becoming curiosity and then a strong will to create and to photograph. After a professional detour as an illustrator and graphic designer, Noah met Winkler and this acted as a detonator, producing a mixture fusing traditional photography with experimentation.

What their pictures reveal is a sensation of hyper-reality: the protagonists of their portraits appear in a real context, but they stand out from it as if highlighted by reality itself. They are stark, intense photos because each single picture encloses an idea and conveys powerful emotions to the observer. The artists deal personally with post-production so that the creative process joins up with itself like a circle.[The Magenta Links]

Winkler + Noah, the brand name of Milan photographers Romina Raffaelli and Stefano Marini,

NOH8

NOH8 is a photo campaign that was started in response to the passage of Proposition 8 in California back in 2008.

Kaki West

Prop 8 is a ban on same-sex marriages, and it pissed off a lot of same-sex couples and famous people who know same-sex couples and just people in general who think you shouldn’t be denied rights just for being yourself.

Photographer Adam Bouska and his partner Jeff Parshley started taking pictures of people, famous and not, who don’t like Prop 8 — and they’re still doing it today.

Ida Ljungquist

Tila Tequila

NOH8 Campaign