Forever Young - The Vice Magazine Photo Party

Every photographer I know despises Vice magazine. Jealousy, I imagine, plays a large part; rifling through the pages of August's annual Photo Issue is like taking a trip back to the kind of promised youth that many of us didn't get, a youth spent photographing attractive friends willing to pose while wearing carefully-edited clothing or, more often, no clothing at all.

And Vice seems to be decidedly against the push towards high-end digital magazine photography. If you're looking for work shot with a Canon EOS 1Ds MkIIIs, 580EX IIs, L-Series lenses, or any of the other tech gear lusted after by amateurs and professionals alike, you'd be better served elsewhere. Most of the photos in Vice look like they were taken with thrift store cameras on grainy film past its expiration date. Most deliberately ignore the classic rules of photography. But Vice, being an international mag with considerable clout, prints and presents the photos beautifully, so that what you get is a collection of expensive blurred and grainy photos of somebody's young, naked girlfriend. Why shouldn’t we non-Vice photographers be jealous?

To make matters worse, this year the mag decided to celebrate three of its young photogs with a gallery showing at the Scion Installation L.A. Gallery in Culver City. The opening had all three artists—Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, Maggie Lee, and Tim Barber—in attendance along with an almost-capacity crowd of onlookers, most of who waited in line for the free Asahi Beer and tried to take photographs of the prints with their digicams.

But there was a smaller group too, one that was a little older and more accustomed to art galleries and free valet parking. They wore sensible khakis and semi-circled the space, not straying far from the photos. Vice and the near-mythos behind it didn't seem to matter much to them. They drifted, wordlessly, from print to print, altogether unconcerned with hype. Then they left, walking right past the three artists in their skinny jeans, past the party photographer snapping away, and past the restless crowd working so hard at youth.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://www.lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=08/03/2009