Karl Simone teams up with Romulo Pires and Cobber Magazine to deliver a pensive study in “Strength in Calmness” for the June 2026 issue.
Luigi & Iango team up with Liu Wen and V Magazine to deliver dynamic beauty in “Style Perfection” for the July 2026 issue.
B. Akerlund is responsible as fashion editor and stylist while hair styling by Lauren Berrones and makeup by Georgi Sandev. Casting direction is led by Maxime Valentini, with manicure by Leanne Woodley.
Lefties teams up with model Sacha Bilal for the perfect dip in the sea in their Summer 2026 campaign.
Elliott Morgan teams up with actor Joe Locke and Glass Man Magazine to deliver a pensive and stylish spread in “Breaking Free” for the July 2026 issue.
Nathan Henry is responsible as fashion editor and stylist while grooming by Petra Nina Sellge.
Styling assistance is led by Johnny Angel McCaragher, with interview and words by Chido Obasi, and special thanks and bookings by Imogen Clark. PR support comes through Prosper PR.
“When you don’t have a script, all of a sudden your speech patterns become natural. You’re going forward without a flashlight”
TRQ: Gus Van Sant, Born July 24, 1952
Filmmaker, screenwriter, editor, photographer, painter, and musician, Gus Van Sant is known as one of the founding figures of New Queer Cinema. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Sean Penn, and Dustin Lance Black each created award-winning work under his direction.
Gus Green Van Sant Jr. was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 24, 1952. His father, Gus Green Van Sant Sr., sold menswear and became president of White Stag’s apparel operation, the company behind the classic Mac raincoat. His mother, Betty Seay Van Sant, took care of the household that moved with his father’s work: Denver, Illinois, California, Connecticut, and Oregon.
He found no peer group at Darien High School, then Catlin Gabel School in Portland. A Super-8 camera gave him a way of building a place instead of passing through one. At the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, he set out to paint and discovered Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and William S. Burroughs. He graduated in 1975 and returned to Portland, recording sound for director Penny Allen’s Property in 1979 and playing in a band called Destroy All Blondes.
In 1981, he made his own first film, Alice in Hollywood, a forty-five-minute critique of the industry that was never released. New York advertising work helped him save twenty thousand dollars before he moved into Portland television commercials. One of them was a shower-scene parody of Psycho, which taught him the industry’s visual grammar from the inside. In 1985, he spent the savings on Mala Noche, a four-person crew shooting Walt Curtis’s novella on Portland’s skid row in sixteen-millimetre black and white. In 1986, the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama programme gave it a first international audience; the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named it the year’s best independent film the following year. Short films followed: Five Ways to Kill Yourself (1987), Ken Death Gets Out of Jail (1987), My New Friend (1988).
Universal Pictures invited him to Hollywood on the strength of Mala Noche’s reception. He pitched Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, but Universal turned both down as too risky to fund.
In Portland, in the autumn of 1988, he shot Drugstore Cowboy from James Fogle’s then-unpublished novel. Avenue Pictures, headed by producer Cary Brokaw, financed the production once Matt Dillon signed on to star, casting Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros, and, in a supporting role, William S. Burroughs alongside him. In January 1990, the National Society of Film Critics named it the year’s best film and named Van Sant best director, ahead of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, Lies, and Videotape.
In My Own Private Idaho (1991), an original screenplay reworking the Falstaff and Prince Hal storyline from Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix played two Portland hustlers, even though Phoenix’s own agent withheld the script from him. Reeves drove a copy to the Phoenix family home in Florida himself, by motorcycle, over the Christmas holidays.
Van Sant directed Idaho with no fixed script for its most private scenes, trusting his actors to find the words themselves. The campfire confession between Mike and Scott, the film’s most quoted scene, came from Phoenix’s own improvisation. A studio-backed young star pairing with a street-cast, openly gay narrative of this kind was almost unprecedented in American film. The method it established, actor-authored scenes inside a director’s frame, became a reference point for independent filmmakers who followed.
Critics in 1991 called the film’s gay sex scenes scandalous. In early 1992, gay-male protesters picketed that year’s Academy Awards over My Own Private Idaho’s total absence from the nominations, carrying placards calling the film a masterpiece and the shutout proof of the industry’s own prejudice. That same year, critic B. Ruby Rich named Idaho, alongside Poison, Paris Is Burning, and Young Soul Rebels, as founding work of what she called New Queer Cinema. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, his following picture for Fine Line in 1993, returned poor box office on a much larger budget.
To Die For, in 1995, put him inside Columbia Pictures for the first time as director only, working from Buck Henry’s script rather than his own. Nicole Kidman starred as an ambitious local weathergirl. Joaquin Phoenix took his first adult role as one of the teenagers she recruits.
Miramax bought Good Will Hunting from Castle Rock in 1995, a script by then-unknown actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and considered Mel Gibson to direct it before the two writers held out to play the leads themselves. Miramax set Van Sant aside during the deal, then brought him back once the two unproven actors could still be cast in the lead roles at that budget. The film earned nine Academy Award nominations, including Van Sant’s first nomination for Best Director. Robin Williams won Best Supporting Actor. Affleck and Damon won Best Original Screenplay.
Between 2002 and 2007, Van Sant built a second, parallel body of work: Gerry, co-written with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck; Elephant, set in a Portland high school; Last Days, built around Kurt Cobain’s final days; Paranoid Park, following Portland skate culture. Harris Savides shot all four. In May 2003, the Cannes jury awarded Elephant the Palme d’Or. Good Will Hunting brought Van Sant enough credit for five years of self-directed work to travel through film festivals without studio marketing.
Red Hot Chili Peppers and Hanson both hired him to direct music videos. He shot the cover and booklet photography for the Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik. He published a novel, Pink, in 1997, and photography books, 108 Portraits in 1993 and One Step Big Shot in 2010. Two albums followed, Gus Van Sant in 1997 and 18 Songs About Golf in 1998.
In 1998, Universal Pictures greenlit the shot-for-shot Psycho remake Van Sant had proposed for years, an idea one of its own executives, Casey Silver, had called a very stupid idea before Good Will Hunting’s release. Vince Vaughn played Norman Bates, and Anne Heche played Marion Crane. The film returned a small profit. Critics called it an unnecessary experiment. Van Sant called it, twenty-five years later, part of the same experiment he had started as a film student with a parody Psycho advertisement. In 2000, he cast Sean Connery as a mentor to a teenage writer in Finding Forrester, and folded in “Deep Night,” the same Rudy Vallee recording he had used in Idaho nine years earlier.
Milk, in 2008, brought Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay of Harvey Milk’s life to Focus Features, with Sean Penn in the title role. The film opened nationwide on 26 November 2008, three weeks after California voters passed Proposition 8. The film put forward the contested suggestion that Dan White, Milk’s assassin, may have been a deeply closeted man himself. Milk earned eight Academy Award nominations, Van Sant’s second for Best Director. Penn won Best Actor, and Black won Best Original Screenplay. GLAAD named it Outstanding Film of the year.
Restless (2011), Promised Land (2012), and The Sea of Trees (2015), which was booed at Cannes, kept him working through mixed reception, alongside a run of films he executive produced rather than directed, including Howl, Speedway Junky, Revolution, and Age Out. He sold his Sauvie Island compound outside Portland (2015), and Los Feliz, in Los Angeles, had become his settled address (2016). Asked once whether coming out had affected his career, he answered plainly: “I’m sure it has affected some things, but none that I can see.” Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) reunited him with Joaquin Phoenix. Andy, a stage musical about Andy Warhol, with book and score by Van Sant, premiered in Lisbon (2021). He directed six episodes of FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans (2024), one titled Hats, Gloves, and Effete Homosexuals. Dead Man’s Wire (2025) premiered out of competition at Venice, with Kelly Lynch and John Robinson back in his cast alongside Bill Skarsgård and Al Pacino.
Today, streaming platforms and awards bodies may still pay a director for the actors and franchises his name can draw, rather than the scripts he writes on his own. Van Sant built a second, parallel body of work, in Portland and beyond, funding his work on credit the studio system had earned him. A student’s discovery of Warhol at Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, and a Portland television parody of Psycho’s shower scene shot a decade on, converge now in the Academy Film Archive, which began receiving deposited prints in 2013. That archive holds Milk too. The Academy holds his negatives now, permanently. It has yet to give him the one prize that would have credited the director, not just the film. Delivering the names and faces the powers that be expect, we make the work they routinely sideline.
About the Authors
Dr. Troy Wise earned his PhD at UAL Central Saint Martins and works across fashion, communication and cultural systems. As a narrative architect, he focuses on how stories, images and design decisions shape what brands and institutions do, then builds strategies that redirect those choices. Through teaching and workshops with universities in the UK and internationally, he extends this systems work into studio, classroom and industry settings. He is founder and co editor of Image Amplified and co leads IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock, using Aesthetic Narrative Imagination (ANI) to analyse and redesign the systems behind luxury, queer fashion and media, including The Relevant Queer.
Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central Saint Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries, a programme that uses design thinking to address complex social and cultural problems. He also holds two MAs and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co editor at Image Amplified since its start, he works with IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock and The Relevant Queer to bring a systems focused, historically informed perspective to fashion and culture analysis.
They are based in London.
Sources:
]]>
“Sometimes getting upset with yourself is necessary when you face the truth.”
TRQ: Gus Van Sant, Born July 24, 1952
Filmmaker, screenwriter, editor, photographer, painter, and musician, Gus Van Sant is known as one of the founding figures of New Queer Cinema. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Sean Penn, and Dustin Lance Black each created award-winning work under his direction.
Gus Green Van Sant Jr. was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 24, 1952. His father, Gus Green Van Sant Sr., sold menswear and became president of White Stag’s apparel operation, the company behind the classic Mac raincoat. His mother, Betty Seay Van Sant, took care of the household that moved with his father’s work: Denver, Illinois, California, Connecticut, and Oregon.
He found no peer group at Darien High School, then Catlin Gabel School in Portland. A Super-8 camera gave him a way of building a place instead of passing through one. At the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, he set out to paint and discovered Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and William S. Burroughs. He graduated in 1975 and returned to Portland, recording sound for director Penny Allen’s Property in 1979 and playing in a band called Destroy All Blondes.
In 1981, he made his own first film, Alice in Hollywood, a forty-five-minute critique of the industry that was never released. New York advertising work helped him save twenty thousand dollars before he moved into Portland television commercials. One of them was a shower-scene parody of Psycho, which taught him the industry’s visual grammar from the inside. In 1985, he spent the savings on Mala Noche, a four-person crew shooting Walt Curtis’s novella on Portland’s skid row in sixteen-millimetre black and white. In 1986, the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama programme gave it a first international audience; the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named it the year’s best independent film the following year. Short films followed: Five Ways to Kill Yourself (1987), Ken Death Gets Out of Jail (1987), My New Friend (1988).
Universal Pictures invited him to Hollywood on the strength of Mala Noche’s reception. He pitched Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, but Universal turned both down as too risky to fund.
In Portland, in the autumn of 1988, he shot Drugstore Cowboy from James Fogle’s then-unpublished novel. Avenue Pictures, headed by producer Cary Brokaw, financed the production once Matt Dillon signed on to star, casting Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros, and, in a supporting role, William S. Burroughs alongside him. In January 1990, the National Society of Film Critics named it the year’s best film and named Van Sant best director, ahead of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, Lies, and Videotape.
In My Own Private Idaho (1991), an original screenplay reworking the Falstaff and Prince Hal storyline from Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix played two Portland hustlers, even though Phoenix’s own agent withheld the script from him. Reeves drove a copy to the Phoenix family home in Florida himself, by motorcycle, over the Christmas holidays.
Van Sant directed Idaho with no fixed script for its most private scenes, trusting his actors to find the words themselves. The campfire confession between Mike and Scott, the film’s most quoted scene, came from Phoenix’s own improvisation. A studio-backed young star pairing with a street-cast, openly gay narrative of this kind was almost unprecedented in American film. The method it established, actor-authored scenes inside a director’s frame, became a reference point for independent filmmakers who followed.
Critics in 1991 called the film’s gay sex scenes scandalous. In early 1992, gay-male protesters picketed that year’s Academy Awards over My Own Private Idaho’s total absence from the nominations, carrying placards calling the film a masterpiece and the shutout proof of the industry’s own prejudice. That same year, critic B. Ruby Rich named Idaho, alongside Poison, Paris Is Burning, and Young Soul Rebels, as founding work of what she called New Queer Cinema. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, his following picture for Fine Line in 1993, returned poor box office on a much larger budget.
To Die For, in 1995, put him inside Columbia Pictures for the first time as director only, working from Buck Henry’s script rather than his own. Nicole Kidman starred as an ambitious local weathergirl. Joaquin Phoenix took his first adult role as one of the teenagers she recruits.
Miramax bought Good Will Hunting from Castle Rock in 1995, a script by then-unknown actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and considered Mel Gibson to direct it before the two writers held out to play the leads themselves. Miramax set Van Sant aside during the deal, then brought him back once the two unproven actors could still be cast in the lead roles at that budget. The film earned nine Academy Award nominations, including Van Sant’s first nomination for Best Director. Robin Williams won Best Supporting Actor. Affleck and Damon won Best Original Screenplay.
Between 2002 and 2007, Van Sant built a second, parallel body of work: Gerry, co-written with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck; Elephant, set in a Portland high school; Last Days, built around Kurt Cobain’s final days; Paranoid Park, following Portland skate culture. Harris Savides shot all four. In May 2003, the Cannes jury awarded Elephant the Palme d’Or. Good Will Hunting brought Van Sant enough credit for five years of self-directed work to travel through film festivals without studio marketing.
Red Hot Chili Peppers and Hanson both hired him to direct music videos. He shot the cover and booklet photography for the Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik. He published a novel, Pink, in 1997, and photography books, 108 Portraits in 1993 and One Step Big Shot in 2010. Two albums followed, Gus Van Sant in 1997 and 18 Songs About Golf in 1998.
In 1998, Universal Pictures greenlit the shot-for-shot Psycho remake Van Sant had proposed for years, an idea one of its own executives, Casey Silver, had called a very stupid idea before Good Will Hunting’s release. Vince Vaughn played Norman Bates, and Anne Heche played Marion Crane. The film returned a small profit. Critics called it an unnecessary experiment. Van Sant called it, twenty-five years later, part of the same experiment he had started as a film student with a parody Psycho advertisement. In 2000, he cast Sean Connery as a mentor to a teenage writer in Finding Forrester, and folded in “Deep Night,” the same Rudy Vallee recording he had used in Idaho nine years earlier.
Milk, in 2008, brought Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay of Harvey Milk’s life to Focus Features, with Sean Penn in the title role. The film opened nationwide on 26 November 2008, three weeks after California voters passed Proposition 8. The film put forward the contested suggestion that Dan White, Milk’s assassin, may have been a deeply closeted man himself. Milk earned eight Academy Award nominations, Van Sant’s second for Best Director. Penn won Best Actor, and Black won Best Original Screenplay. GLAAD named it Outstanding Film of the year.
Restless (2011), Promised Land (2012), and The Sea of Trees (2015), which was booed at Cannes, kept him working through mixed reception, alongside a run of films he executive produced rather than directed, including Howl, Speedway Junky, Revolution, and Age Out. He sold his Sauvie Island compound outside Portland (2015), and Los Feliz, in Los Angeles, had become his settled address (2016). Asked once whether coming out had affected his career, he answered plainly: “I’m sure it has affected some things, but none that I can see.” Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) reunited him with Joaquin Phoenix. Andy, a stage musical about Andy Warhol, with book and score by Van Sant, premiered in Lisbon (2021). He directed six episodes of FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans (2024), one titled Hats, Gloves, and Effete Homosexuals. Dead Man’s Wire (2025) premiered out of competition at Venice, with Kelly Lynch and John Robinson back in his cast alongside Bill Skarsgård and Al Pacino.
Today, streaming platforms and awards bodies may still pay a director for the actors and franchises his name can draw, rather than the scripts he writes on his own. Van Sant built a second, parallel body of work, in Portland and beyond, funding his work on credit the studio system had earned him. A student’s discovery of Warhol at Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, and a Portland television parody of Psycho’s shower scene shot a decade on, converge now in the Academy Film Archive, which began receiving deposited prints in 2013. That archive holds Milk too. The Academy holds his negatives now, permanently. It has yet to give him the one prize that would have credited the director, not just the film. Delivering the names and faces the powers that be expect, we make the work they routinely sideline.
About the Authors
Dr. Troy Wise earned his PhD at UAL Central Saint Martins and works across fashion, communication and cultural systems. As a narrative architect, he focuses on how stories, images and design decisions shape what brands and institutions do, then builds strategies that redirect those choices. Through teaching and workshops with universities in the UK and internationally, he extends this systems work into studio, classroom and industry settings. He is founder and co editor of Image Amplified and co leads IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock, using Aesthetic Narrative Imagination (ANI) to analyse and redesign the systems behind luxury, queer fashion and media, including The Relevant Queer.
Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central Saint Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries, a programme that uses design thinking to address complex social and cultural problems. He also holds two MAs and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co editor at Image Amplified since its start, he works with IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock and The Relevant Queer to bring a systems focused, historically informed perspective to fashion and culture analysis.
They are based in London.
Sources:
]]>
“Somewhere along the line, an artist has to figure out how not to think only about himself.”
TRQ: Gus Van Sant, Born July 24, 1952
Filmmaker, screenwriter, editor, photographer, painter, and musician, Gus Van Sant is known as one of the founding figures of New Queer Cinema. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Sean Penn, and Dustin Lance Black each created award-winning work under his direction.
Gus Green Van Sant Jr. was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 24, 1952. His father, Gus Green Van Sant Sr., sold menswear and became president of White Stag’s apparel operation, the company behind the classic Mac raincoat. His mother, Betty Seay Van Sant, took care of the household that moved with his father’s work: Denver, Illinois, California, Connecticut, and Oregon.
He found no peer group at Darien High School, then Catlin Gabel School in Portland. A Super-8 camera gave him a way of building a place instead of passing through one. At the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, he set out to paint and discovered Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and William S. Burroughs. He graduated in 1975 and returned to Portland, recording sound for director Penny Allen’s Property in 1979 and playing in a band called Destroy All Blondes.
In 1981, he made his own first film, Alice in Hollywood, a forty-five-minute critique of the industry that was never released. New York advertising work helped him save twenty thousand dollars before he moved into Portland television commercials. One of them was a shower-scene parody of Psycho, which taught him the industry’s visual grammar from the inside. In 1985, he spent the savings on Mala Noche, a four-person crew shooting Walt Curtis’s novella on Portland’s skid row in sixteen-millimetre black and white. In 1986, the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama programme gave it a first international audience; the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named it the year’s best independent film the following year. Short films followed: Five Ways to Kill Yourself (1987), Ken Death Gets Out of Jail (1987), My New Friend (1988).
Universal Pictures invited him to Hollywood on the strength of Mala Noche’s reception. He pitched Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, but Universal turned both down as too risky to fund.
In Portland, in the autumn of 1988, he shot Drugstore Cowboy from James Fogle’s then-unpublished novel. Avenue Pictures, headed by producer Cary Brokaw, financed the production once Matt Dillon signed on to star, casting Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros, and, in a supporting role, William S. Burroughs alongside him. In January 1990, the National Society of Film Critics named it the year’s best film and named Van Sant best director, ahead of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, Lies, and Videotape.
In My Own Private Idaho (1991), an original screenplay reworking the Falstaff and Prince Hal storyline from Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix played two Portland hustlers, even though Phoenix’s own agent withheld the script from him. Reeves drove a copy to the Phoenix family home in Florida himself, by motorcycle, over the Christmas holidays.
Van Sant directed Idaho with no fixed script for its most private scenes, trusting his actors to find the words themselves. The campfire confession between Mike and Scott, the film’s most quoted scene, came from Phoenix’s own improvisation. A studio-backed young star pairing with a street-cast, openly gay narrative of this kind was almost unprecedented in American film. The method it established, actor-authored scenes inside a director’s frame, became a reference point for independent filmmakers who followed.
Critics in 1991 called the film’s gay sex scenes scandalous. In early 1992, gay-male protesters picketed that year’s Academy Awards over My Own Private Idaho’s total absence from the nominations, carrying placards calling the film a masterpiece and the shutout proof of the industry’s own prejudice. That same year, critic B. Ruby Rich named Idaho, alongside Poison, Paris Is Burning, and Young Soul Rebels, as founding work of what she called New Queer Cinema. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, his following picture for Fine Line in 1993, returned poor box office on a much larger budget.
To Die For, in 1995, put him inside Columbia Pictures for the first time as director only, working from Buck Henry’s script rather than his own. Nicole Kidman starred as an ambitious local weathergirl. Joaquin Phoenix took his first adult role as one of the teenagers she recruits.
Miramax bought Good Will Hunting from Castle Rock in 1995, a script by then-unknown actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and considered Mel Gibson to direct it before the two writers held out to play the leads themselves. Miramax set Van Sant aside during the deal, then brought him back once the two unproven actors could still be cast in the lead roles at that budget. The film earned nine Academy Award nominations, including Van Sant’s first nomination for Best Director. Robin Williams won Best Supporting Actor. Affleck and Damon won Best Original Screenplay.
Between 2002 and 2007, Van Sant built a second, parallel body of work: Gerry, co-written with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck; Elephant, set in a Portland high school; Last Days, built around Kurt Cobain’s final days; Paranoid Park, following Portland skate culture. Harris Savides shot all four. In May 2003, the Cannes jury awarded Elephant the Palme d’Or. Good Will Hunting brought Van Sant enough credit for five years of self-directed work to travel through film festivals without studio marketing.
Red Hot Chili Peppers and Hanson both hired him to direct music videos. He shot the cover and booklet photography for the Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik. He published a novel, Pink, in 1997, and photography books, 108 Portraits in 1993 and One Step Big Shot in 2010. Two albums followed, Gus Van Sant in 1997 and 18 Songs About Golf in 1998.
In 1998, Universal Pictures greenlit the shot-for-shot Psycho remake Van Sant had proposed for years, an idea one of its own executives, Casey Silver, had called a very stupid idea before Good Will Hunting’s release. Vince Vaughn played Norman Bates, and Anne Heche played Marion Crane. The film returned a small profit. Critics called it an unnecessary experiment. Van Sant called it, twenty-five years later, part of the same experiment he had started as a film student with a parody Psycho advertisement. In 2000, he cast Sean Connery as a mentor to a teenage writer in Finding Forrester, and folded in “Deep Night,” the same Rudy Vallee recording he had used in Idaho nine years earlier.
Milk, in 2008, brought Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay of Harvey Milk’s life to Focus Features, with Sean Penn in the title role. The film opened nationwide on 26 November 2008, three weeks after California voters passed Proposition 8. The film put forward the contested suggestion that Dan White, Milk’s assassin, may have been a deeply closeted man himself. Milk earned eight Academy Award nominations, Van Sant’s second for Best Director. Penn won Best Actor, and Black won Best Original Screenplay. GLAAD named it Outstanding Film of the year.
Restless (2011), Promised Land (2012), and The Sea of Trees (2015), which was booed at Cannes, kept him working through mixed reception, alongside a run of films he executive produced rather than directed, including Howl, Speedway Junky, Revolution, and Age Out. He sold his Sauvie Island compound outside Portland (2015), and Los Feliz, in Los Angeles, had become his settled address (2016). Asked once whether coming out had affected his career, he answered plainly: “I’m sure it has affected some things, but none that I can see.” Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) reunited him with Joaquin Phoenix. Andy, a stage musical about Andy Warhol, with book and score by Van Sant, premiered in Lisbon (2021). He directed six episodes of FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans (2024), one titled Hats, Gloves, and Effete Homosexuals. Dead Man’s Wire (2025) premiered out of competition at Venice, with Kelly Lynch and John Robinson back in his cast alongside Bill Skarsgård and Al Pacino.
Today, streaming platforms and awards bodies may still pay a director for the actors and franchises his name can draw, rather than the scripts he writes on his own. Van Sant built a second, parallel body of work, in Portland and beyond, funding his work on credit the studio system had earned him. A student’s discovery of Warhol at Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, and a Portland television parody of Psycho’s shower scene shot a decade on, converge now in the Academy Film Archive, which began receiving deposited prints in 2013. That archive holds Milk too. The Academy holds his negatives now, permanently. It has yet to give him the one prize that would have credited the director, not just the film. Delivering the names and faces the powers that be expect, we make the work they routinely sideline.
About the Authors
Dr. Troy Wise earned his PhD at UAL Central Saint Martins and works across fashion, communication and cultural systems. As a narrative architect, he focuses on how stories, images and design decisions shape what brands and institutions do, then builds strategies that redirect those choices. Through teaching and workshops with universities in the UK and internationally, he extends this systems work into studio, classroom and industry settings. He is founder and co editor of Image Amplified and co leads IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock, using Aesthetic Narrative Imagination (ANI) to analyse and redesign the systems behind luxury, queer fashion and media, including The Relevant Queer.
Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central Saint Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries, a programme that uses design thinking to address complex social and cultural problems. He also holds two MAs and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co editor at Image Amplified since its start, he works with IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock and The Relevant Queer to bring a systems focused, historically informed perspective to fashion and culture analysis.
They are based in London.
Sources:
]]>
“These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed. We were here; we existed. This is how we were.”
TRQ: Robert Giard, Born July 22, 1939
Self-taught portrait, landscape, and figure photographer Robert Giard is known for traveling by bus, train, and plane to photograph more than 600 gay and lesbian writers in response to the AIDS crisis. His work is now archived at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the New York Public Library. His subjects included Allen Ginsberg, Edward Albee, Adrienne Rich, and Tony Kushner.
Robert Joseph Giard Jr. was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 22, 1939. His father, Robert, and his mother, Antoinette “Toni” Giard, raised him in a working-class section of the city, alongside his sister, Cynthia, and his brother, Burton. French and Irish on one side of the family, Lithuanian on the other, the Giards were the first in their line to send a child to college, on a full scholarship to Yale. At his junior high school graduation, the family heard him named class valedictorian and had no idea until that moment.
At ten years old, Giard looked up the word “homosexual” in the family dictionary, a symbolic act, he said, after which he had been a gay reader ever since. He kept his orientation hidden through his years at Yale’s Branford College, where his closest friends, Bob Phillips, Jack Cullinan, and the late Peter Roth, had no idea. Reading became the tactic his self-construction was built on, years before he ever picked up a camera.
After completing his M.A. in Comparative Literature at Boston University in 1965, Giard moved to New York and taught intermediate grades at the New Lincoln School. By 1972, he began to photograph, concentrating on landscapes of the South Fork of Long Island, portraits of friends, and the nude figure. His photographs began appearing in Architectural Digest, National Geographic, and Time-Life’s Photography Year, 1982 Edition.
Critics called Giard’s style direct, unblinking, and sometimes overly earnest, closer to the nineteenth-century portraiture of David Octavius Hill and Nadar than to the knowing irony of contemporaries like Robert Mapplethorpe and Herb Ritts. Mapplethorpe worked under cold studio light, building high-contrast images meant to shock. Ritts shot in California sunlight for magazine covers and luxury campaigns, his portraits announcing beauty as their own advertisement. Giard photographed in the available light of his subjects’ own homes, and the commercial gallery circuit that carried Mapplethorpe’s and Ritts’s names into wider circulation passed him by.
Giard’s own subjects were photographed in their own homes, in available light, without the staging his contemporaries built into a studio or a beach. In June 1985, he sat in a darkened, arena-style theater, its walls inscribed with the names of the dead, watching Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. Weeks later, he saw William Hoffman’s As Is. By the end of the evening, Giard had decided his work should record his own experience, his history, and his culture, for other gay people to use. He began with the man whose play had moved him. Hoffman became his first sitter.
Hoffman gave Giard ten more names, addresses, and phone numbers, each one a further instance of the experience Giard had set out to record. Those ten led to ten more. Giard never held a driver’s license, so he answered the growing list by bus, train, and plane, traveling to each name in turn. What began as one sitting, in response to one evening, had already outgrown the shape of a single life, his own included.
Before each sitting, Giard read the subject’s own work, then wrote and telephoned to arrange a visit. He worked in black-and-white film, on a twin-lens Rolleicord camera, using only the light already in the room, and posed his subjects in simple settings, surrounded by the things they loved. He developed and printed every image himself. By 1997, when Particular Voices won the Lambda Literary Award for Photography and Visual Arts, Giard had photographed more than 600 writers, an archive no publisher, museum, or grant had commissioned him to build. The Beinecke later placed his archive beside the papers of James Purdy, Edmund White, and David Leavitt.
Among those Giard photographed were Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Edward Albee, James Purdy, Adrienne Rich, and Andrea Dworkin. He also photographed playwright Tony Kushner, whose work was staged at the same theatre Giard attended in 1985. He photographed emerging novelists making their first mark alongside them: Sapphire, David Leavitt, Shay Youngblood, Michael Cunningham. The portraits, he wrote, were a happy meeting place for the artistic self and the personal self, the reconciliation he sought sitting between the humanist and the formalist.
In 1988, the New York Public Library acquired the archive of the International Gay Information Center, the record of gay rights organizing in America since 1982. In 1990, the library began acquiring Giard’s portraits, adding to the same growing collection. In 1998, the library exhibited 110 of his prints, the same year Particular Voices reached bookstores. In 1999, Giard gave his own notebooks to the library’s first curator of photography, Julia Van Haaften. Uncatalogued for a quarter century, they stayed closed to researchers until 2024.
Giard earned a B.A. from Yale in English literature in 1961. Twenty-four years later, he built the archive. In 2004, the university’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired his complete work, placing it beside the papers of James Purdy, Edmund White, and David Leavitt. The degree Yale gave him and the archive Yale later took in shared nothing but his name.
In 1974, Giard and his life partner, Jonathan Silin, settled in Amagansett, Long Island, where they remained for nearly thirty years. Silin, an early childhood educator, published his own book in 1995, Sex, Death, and the Education of Children: Our Passion for Ignorance in the Age of AIDS. Their household became the base from which Giard read, wrote, and traveled to every sitting.
His photograph of Audre Lorde later appeared in advertising for NYC Pride. Daniel Cooney Fine Art mounted a solo show of his prints in 2019, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall. Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto took on his representation. Fifty-three vintage prints, out of an archive of more than 600, made up that 2019 show, a fraction of what he had built pulled out for sale.
His archive holds more than 1,500 vintage prints and 7,800 related work prints. Yale acquired it across four separate purchases: February 2005, October 2011, November 2018, and September 2019. Silin kept finding more to send. Yale kept buying it, seventeen years after Giard died.
In 1996, Deborah Light, founder of the Thanks Be to Grandmother Winifred Foundation, commissioned Giard to photograph its 321 grant recipients, women fifty-four and older whose projects addressed social, economic, and medical problems affecting other women. By 2002, he had photographed 241 of them.
Giard died on July 16, 2002, of a heart attack on a bus traveling from Minneapolis to Chicago for another sitting. The Robert Giard Foundation formed that year, with Jonathan Silin as co-president. In 2008, it launched a fellowship with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2019, the foundation relaunched the award with Queer|Art, a $10,000 grant for emerging LGBTQ+ photographers. In 2020, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art mounted Uncanny Effects: Robert Giard’s Currents of Connection. The foundation itself closed in 2022. Queer|Art kept the grant running. His portraits became the pictures by which many of these writers are known.
Giard read each subject’s work, then wrote to them before traveling by bus, train, or plane to sit with them in their own homes. He kept notebooks of every visit, and the New York Public Library let them sit uncatalogued for twenty-five years while his photographs hung on its walls. Yale took seventeen years, across four separate purchases, to finish acquiring the rest of what he built. He was still traveling for the Grandmother Winifred project, still adding names to a list of 321, when he died on a bus between Minneapolis and Chicago in 2002. Beyond his story, institutions still keep the finished object while the labor that made it goes unrecorded. We still show up in person to capture someone’s story and face handing it to an institution that keeps the photograph on display while the human connection stays hidden.
About the Authors
Dr. Troy Wise earned his PhD at UAL Central Saint Martins and works across fashion, communication and cultural systems. As a narrative architect, he focuses on how stories, images and design decisions shape what brands and institutions do, then builds strategies that redirect those choices. Through teaching and workshops with universities in the UK and internationally, he extends this systems work into studio, classroom and industry settings. He is founder and co editor of Image Amplified and co leads IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock, using Aesthetic Narrative Imagination (ANI) to analyse and redesign the systems behind luxury, queer fashion and media, including The Relevant Queer.
Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central Saint Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries, a programme that uses design thinking to address complex social and cultural problems. He also holds two MAs and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co editor at Image Amplified since its start, he works with IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock and The Relevant Queer to bring a systems focused, historically informed perspective to fashion and culture analysis.
They are based in London.
Sources:
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Nick Andrews teams up with models Oskar Hollis + Carlos Bain and The Perfect Man to deliver a perfect duo in the soft light of high summer in “At Ease” for the Summer 2026 issue.
Styling is expressed through the story’s wardrobe, with Carlos in white linen trousers by R.M. Williams and Orlebar Brown, and Oskar in pieces by Frescobal Carioca.
“Photography is par excellence a medium expressive of our mortality, holding up, as it does, one time for the contemplation of another time.”
TRQ: Robert Giard, Born July 22, 1939
Self-taught portrait, landscape, and figure photographer Robert Giard is known for traveling by bus, train, and plane to photograph more than 600 gay and lesbian writers in response to the AIDS crisis. His work is now archived at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the New York Public Library. His subjects included Allen Ginsberg, Edward Albee, Adrienne Rich, and Tony Kushner.
Robert Joseph Giard Jr. was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 22, 1939. His father, Robert, and his mother, Antoinette “Toni” Giard, raised him in a working-class section of the city, alongside his sister, Cynthia, and his brother, Burton. French and Irish on one side of the family, Lithuanian on the other, the Giards were the first in their line to send a child to college, on a full scholarship to Yale. At his junior high school graduation, the family heard him named class valedictorian and had no idea until that moment.
At ten years old, Giard looked up the word “homosexual” in the family dictionary, a symbolic act, he said, after which he had been a gay reader ever since. He kept his orientation hidden through his years at Yale’s Branford College, where his closest friends, Bob Phillips, Jack Cullinan, and the late Peter Roth, had no idea. Reading became the tactic his self-construction was built on, years before he ever picked up a camera.
After completing his M.A. in Comparative Literature at Boston University in 1965, Giard moved to New York and taught intermediate grades at the New Lincoln School. By 1972, he began to photograph, concentrating on landscapes of the South Fork of Long Island, portraits of friends, and the nude figure. His photographs began appearing in Architectural Digest, National Geographic, and Time-Life’s Photography Year, 1982 Edition.
Critics called Giard’s style direct, unblinking, and sometimes overly earnest, closer to the nineteenth-century portraiture of David Octavius Hill and Nadar than to the knowing irony of contemporaries like Robert Mapplethorpe and Herb Ritts. Mapplethorpe worked under cold studio light, building high-contrast images meant to shock. Ritts shot in California sunlight for magazine covers and luxury campaigns, his portraits announcing beauty as their own advertisement. Giard photographed in the available light of his subjects’ own homes, and the commercial gallery circuit that carried Mapplethorpe’s and Ritts’s names into wider circulation passed him by.
Giard’s own subjects were photographed in their own homes, in available light, without the staging his contemporaries built into a studio or a beach. In June 1985, he sat in a darkened, arena-style theater, its walls inscribed with the names of the dead, watching Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. Weeks later, he saw William Hoffman’s As Is. By the end of the evening, Giard had decided his work should record his own experience, his history, and his culture, for other gay people to use. He began with the man whose play had moved him. Hoffman became his first sitter.
Hoffman gave Giard ten more names, addresses, and phone numbers, each one a further instance of the experience Giard had set out to record. Those ten led to ten more. Giard never held a driver’s license, so he answered the growing list by bus, train, and plane, traveling to each name in turn. What began as one sitting, in response to one evening, had already outgrown the shape of a single life, his own included.
Before each sitting, Giard read the subject’s own work, then wrote and telephoned to arrange a visit. He worked in black-and-white film, on a twin-lens Rolleicord camera, using only the light already in the room, and posed his subjects in simple settings, surrounded by the things they loved. He developed and printed every image himself. By 1997, when Particular Voices won the Lambda Literary Award for Photography and Visual Arts, Giard had photographed more than 600 writers, an archive no publisher, museum, or grant had commissioned him to build. The Beinecke later placed his archive beside the papers of James Purdy, Edmund White, and David Leavitt.
Among those Giard photographed were Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Edward Albee, James Purdy, Adrienne Rich, and Andrea Dworkin. He also photographed playwright Tony Kushner, whose work was staged at the same theatre Giard attended in 1985. He photographed emerging novelists making their first mark alongside them: Sapphire, David Leavitt, Shay Youngblood, Michael Cunningham. The portraits, he wrote, were a happy meeting place for the artistic self and the personal self, the reconciliation he sought sitting between the humanist and the formalist.
In 1988, the New York Public Library acquired the archive of the International Gay Information Center, the record of gay rights organizing in America since 1982. In 1990, the library began acquiring Giard’s portraits, adding to the same growing collection. In 1998, the library exhibited 110 of his prints, the same year Particular Voices reached bookstores. In 1999, Giard gave his own notebooks to the library’s first curator of photography, Julia Van Haaften. Uncatalogued for a quarter century, they stayed closed to researchers until 2024.
Giard earned a B.A. from Yale in English literature in 1961. Twenty-four years later, he built the archive. In 2004, the university’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired his complete work, placing it beside the papers of James Purdy, Edmund White, and David Leavitt. The degree Yale gave him and the archive Yale later took in shared nothing but his name.
In 1974, Giard and his life partner, Jonathan Silin, settled in Amagansett, Long Island, where they remained for nearly thirty years. Silin, an early childhood educator, published his own book in 1995, Sex, Death, and the Education of Children: Our Passion for Ignorance in the Age of AIDS. Their household became the base from which Giard read, wrote, and traveled to every sitting.
His photograph of Audre Lorde later appeared in advertising for NYC Pride. Daniel Cooney Fine Art mounted a solo show of his prints in 2019, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall. Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto took on his representation. Fifty-three vintage prints, out of an archive of more than 600, made up that 2019 show, a fraction of what he had built pulled out for sale.
His archive holds more than 1,500 vintage prints and 7,800 related work prints. Yale acquired it across four separate purchases: February 2005, October 2011, November 2018, and September 2019. Silin kept finding more to send. Yale kept buying it, seventeen years after Giard died.
In 1996, Deborah Light, founder of the Thanks Be to Grandmother Winifred Foundation, commissioned Giard to photograph its 321 grant recipients, women fifty-four and older whose projects addressed social, economic, and medical problems affecting other women. By 2002, he had photographed 241 of them.
Giard died on July 16, 2002, of a heart attack on a bus traveling from Minneapolis to Chicago for another sitting. The Robert Giard Foundation formed that year, with Jonathan Silin as co-president. In 2008, it launched a fellowship with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2019, the foundation relaunched the award with Queer|Art, a $10,000 grant for emerging LGBTQ+ photographers. In 2020, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art mounted Uncanny Effects: Robert Giard’s Currents of Connection. The foundation itself closed in 2022. Queer|Art kept the grant running. His portraits became the pictures by which many of these writers are known.
Giard read each subject’s work, then wrote to them before traveling by bus, train, or plane to sit with them in their own homes. He kept notebooks of every visit, and the New York Public Library let them sit uncatalogued for twenty-five years while his photographs hung on its walls. Yale took seventeen years, across four separate purchases, to finish acquiring the rest of what he built. He was still traveling for the Grandmother Winifred project, still adding names to a list of 321, when he died on a bus between Minneapolis and Chicago in 2002. Beyond his story, institutions still keep the finished object while the labor that made it goes unrecorded. We still show up in person to capture someone’s story and face handing it to an institution that keeps the photograph on display while the human connection stays hidden.
About the Authors
Dr. Troy Wise earned his PhD at UAL Central Saint Martins and works across fashion, communication and cultural systems. As a narrative architect, he focuses on how stories, images and design decisions shape what brands and institutions do, then builds strategies that redirect those choices. Through teaching and workshops with universities in the UK and internationally, he extends this systems work into studio, classroom and industry settings. He is founder and co editor of Image Amplified and co leads IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock, using Aesthetic Narrative Imagination (ANI) to analyse and redesign the systems behind luxury, queer fashion and media, including The Relevant Queer.
Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central Saint Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries, a programme that uses design thinking to address complex social and cultural problems. He also holds two MAs and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co editor at Image Amplified since its start, he works with IA Intelligence Hub x Culture Clock and The Relevant Queer to bring a systems focused, historically informed perspective to fashion and culture analysis.
They are based in London.
Sources:
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