Flasher chic

Some photos I took with the clothing line Wowch for Oak, a New York Boutique. Very silly but fun..

All photos Copyright © 2008 Laura Helms

Puppy Love

Anyone want an adorable little poodle puppy? My boyfriend found him abandoned Saturday night at the park at S5th and Marcy in Williamsburg, and we've been looking for his owner ever since then. We've had no luck, so we are trying to find a wonderful home for him to go to. He's the best little puppy! We would keep him but we have three cats and a small apartment, so it just won't work for us right now. He has a great personality and is great fun to be around. I've been taking him out every morning for my run around the track so he is super energetic.

This cute little baby deserves a great home and lots of love- he will definitely give you lots...

E-mail me!

Images of Untrusted Divine Things

One of my most favourite people, Jun Iseyama, in the world, who is also one of the best artists I know, is having a show in Chelsea at the moment. The opening was on Friday, so I went to see her (she's moved far away from here which is very saddening) and catch up with others but the definite highlight was seeing her beautiful works. While some might find them disturbing with their sexual yet childlike imagery, I find so much beauty in the grotesqueness of the caricatures and the flashes of colours across the paper.

From the press release:

With Images of Untrusted Divine Things, Iseyama merges her own cast of hybrid, sexualized, and child-like characters with scenes from Goya’s infamous Caprichos series. Mimicking, tweaking and deconstructing the iconic scenes of 18th century Spanish social and political satire, Iseyama develops a foundation to express her own desires, anxieties and fears.

Iseyama navigates a balance between past and present, Japan and the West, self awareness and naïveté, darkness and comedy. These contradictions are manifested in her visual style. Dark, dry, graphite lines collide with wet, drippy, vibrant bursts of watercolor.

Story Is There For The Taking

A few images from the lookbook I shot for Staerk's Spring/ Summer 2009 collection, The Storyteller. Everything in the collection was so beautiful, it's hard to choose just a few images to put up here. Camilla is an amazing designer with such a strong sense of style and proportion- with every collection she seems to refine and streamline her look into one that is both wholly original and totally wearable.





You can see the runway show here, and view past collections, learn more and buy current styles at Camilla's site here.

Waffle House Wedding

These photographs from the Gwinnett Daily Post (the local paper in Gwinnett, Georgia) are pretty amazing. Taken by the staff photographer, Benjamin Hager, they are wonderfully evocative.

Copyright © 2008 Benjamin Hager for The Gwinnett Daily Post

Russia! Russia! I see you now, from my wondrous, beautiful past I behold you! How wretched, dispersed, and uncomfortable everything is about you...

Copyright © 2008 James Hill for The New York Times

Combining some of my passions (photography, russia and farming) is this new audio slideshow by James Hill on the NY Times' wesbsite- Russia, the Land. Some of the photos aren't great, but it is definitely interesting to watch, especially if you've ever read any of the many great Russian novels about agrarian life there.

Someday I'll make it there, and actually get the opportunity to use the Russian I worked so hard to learn.

Clingstone, Rhode Island

Copyright © 2008 Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

My dream house.

169 Bowery, June 2008

All photos Copyright © 2008 Laura Helms

It's a cage without a key

Here are a few more photographs of one of the metal shops that I mentioned in this post. Work Manufacturing is a fully equipped metal, machine and wood shop run by Alex Kravchuk hat specializes in vintage-inspired industrial design. They've worked on quite a few restaurants in New York, such as Moto and Smith & Mills, so you may have seen their work before.

Work Manufacturing, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
All photos Copyright © 2008 Laura Helms

You can visit Alex's website here.

My external hard drive that has everything, everything, on it died last night! I'm so upset I couldn't sleep and I'm such a mess right now. Pray that Tekserve can save all of my data!

Though deep set and somewhat shadowed

I'm planning a trip out to LA in the next couple months to shoot, and the #1 place I want to photograph is Cal-Earth, a super adobe village in Hespiria. This sustainable desert village was founded by Nader Khalili, a Iranian-American architect who created the superadobe system. These structures are built by layers of sandbags that are set in a circular plan with four point barbed wire between each layer for stability, and is corbeled at the top to create a domed roof. Khalili invented this building type after years of studying traditional adobe buildings in Iran and while working with NASA on moon buildings. The amazing thing about these buildings are that they are hurricane, flood and earthquake resistant and are also sustainable, adaptable and totally affordable.

This is from an article in the Washington Post:

Khalili traces his mid-career epiphany to a realization that 800 million people were consigned to "totally unsuitable housing," through war, natural disaster or unkind history. As an architect, he concluded that "the only thing they had in common to them was the earth under their feet." In the Iranian desert, he studied structures that had stood for 4,000 years. He found that they were largely shell structures -- domes, arches and vaults -- made from earth, water, air and fire.

Khalili's Superadobe structures respect the age-old form but include modern innovations, such as polyester bags, cement mixed in to strengthen the mud and barbed wire for structural support. They can be built for very little money anywhere relief officials and housing authorities are open to something other than steel and concrete boxes.

I first learned about Cal-Earth on NPR after Khalili died in March- I wasn't able to find the very interesting segment that they did on him at the time, but this is a good little story about the superadobe village. The history of these structures is just incredibly fascinating to me, and they are really gorgeous buildings- I think I could take some very gorgeous photos there.