Photography by Frédéric Sautereau Translation by Jason Bushman & Ernesto González-Giraldo

Three weeks since the earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the suffering continues. French photojournalist Frédéric Sautereau spent a week in Port-au-Prince documenting the situation. Internationally recognized for his work dealing with the dual notions of border and divide, Sautereau has reported on places in turmoil – political, economic, or otherwise – including Kosovo, Gaza, Burma, North-Kivu, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11. Shortly after returning from Haiti, PLANET° was fortunate enough to speak with Sautereau about his poignant photographs and just how far Haiti is from a full recovery.
     As with our previous coverage of the Haiti Earthquake, we urge you to donate to Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders. Please bear in mind that with Red Cross, ninety cents of every dollar goes to administrative expenses and only ten cents reach the people.

How do you view your role as a photojournalist in the wake of the disaster in Haiti?

I am a journalist, so my role is to present the images I see, what I perceive and understand from the situation. As for what’s happened in Haiti, it means trying my best to convey the situation of distress and chaos, which now rules in this region, and also for the purpose of representing the deaths. I try to do this with intellectual honesty.

Man With Bird, Allison Schulnik 2009. Images courtesy of Mark Moore Gallery

Allison Schulnik paints rejects. For her second solo exhibit at the Mark Moore Gallery, aptly titled Home for Hobo, the Los Angeles based artist focuses on one of her recurring subjects — the hobo clown — to extend her family of outcasts to include possums, raccoons, and Klaus Kinski. Comprising ten paintings, four sculptures, and a four-minute claymation music video for Grizzly Bear, all dated 2009, Schulnik’s new work embodies the same macabre sensibilities of her previous works, utilizing kitsch subject matter in the traditional formats of portraiture, landscape, and still life. Refreshingly honest, Schulnik’s work is that of excess. Caked in thickly applied impasto, her fantastical characters appear to be melting off the canvas, residing somewhere between their world and ours. Schulnik remarks, “It just felt right for the characters that they should not be so together. They’re falling off of their skeleton, they’re falling off of their own frame.” Simultaneously stunning and unsettling, the characters stare longingly for something that only exists within their fictional frames — beauty, love, refuge, recognition.
     Growing up in San Diego, Schulnik describes her childhood as unstructured. “I went around town making art and being bad and being good.” Trained in different forms of dance, Schulnik left the art of moving for the art of the moving picture. Attending the California Institute of the Arts, Schulnik received her BFA in Experimental Animation in 2000. After graduating, Schulnik worked in studio animation for about six years before transitioning entirely to her solo work. A lover of all the archaic forms of art making, Schulnik is a purist at heart.

Photography by Chris Jordan

Halfway between the U.S. and Japan lies an island of albatross that have unintentionally become plastic consumers. Lighters, small toys, golf balls, toothbrushes, and bottle caps imported from the nearby Pacific Garbage Patch are among the birds’ staples. Rupturing this surreal symbioses are Chris Jordan’s Midway photographs. Taken only weeks ago, the images depict decaying carcasses of albatross chicks gorged with plastic. Intolerably beautiful (a phrase taken from another project of Jordan’s depicting our collective environmental impact), the photographs are visible consequences of our everyday lives.
     Nestled in the North Pacific, Midway Atoll is a collection of three small islands that are home to seventy percent of the world’s Laysan Albatross. A once-flourishing ecosystem, the islands are now covered in plastic, brought there by adult albatross that mistake it for food and feed it to their young. Consisting on this diet of human garbage, forty percent of all albatross chicks die every year from starvation, suffocation, or poisoning. What this means for the future of the albatross is hard to determine: “But to find lethal quantities of our plastic trash inside baby birds on one of the remotest islands on Earth — it’s like a diagnosis for our planet,” Jordan remarks. “It’s a warning sign of a far bigger and more frightening issue.”

Photography by Scarlett Hooft Graafland

Dutch photographer Scarlett Hooft Graafland transforms inhospitable terrain into new surreal spaces. For My White Night, Graafland’s canvas is the vast white space of Igloolik, a tiny Inuit village in Nunavut, Canada. Mixing elements of photography, performance, and sculpture, the work addresses topics such as climate change and generational gaps. Allowing the landscape to “dictate the work,” Graafland creates “visual question marks without giving answers.” Inspired to work in such remote conditions because of her “nostalgia for regions that are still completely natural,” Graafland chose Igloolik because of its “traditional Inuit life and cultural activities.” What she found, however, was a land “captured between traditional life and westernized equipment.”
     With over half of the population under the age of 16, most of the youth know nothing of the traditional ways of Inuit life and are completely Westernized — “going to school, learning how to use the computer, consuming Western food and drinks like soda and juices.” Addressing this disconnect is “Lemonade Igloo”. For it, Graafland fashioned lemonade ice blocks out of water and lemonade powder, and then had the elderly Inuit men use the blocks to build an igloo. When it was all finished, Graafland invited the Inuit children inside to drink orange juice.
     Other works illustrate the vastly differing seasonal weather conditions characteristic of arctic environments, as well as the devastating effects of climate change.

For those looking for an eco-friendly way to get around the city, without actually having to exert extra energy en route, there’s P.U.M.A. Designed by Segway — the company who developed the Segway— and General Motors, P.U.M.A., which stands for Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility, may just be the solution for eco-conscious urbanites everywhere. Like the Segway, the P.U.M.A. features advanced sensing and dynamic stabilization with a zero turning radius. Unlike its older brother, it includes a domed weatherproof roof and seating for two. Suitable for both city roads and bike lanes, the P.U.M.A. can travel between 25 and 35 mph for twenty-five to thirty-five miles on a single battery charge — which take five to eight hours — making it an ideal vehicle for short commutes. Costing, approximately sixty cents in electricity per charge, and estimated to cost less than most current small cars, the P.U.M.A. is also highly cost-effective. With only one prototype in existence, and no plans to start selling the P.U.M.A. anytime soon, our hopes of owning the perfect clean transportation vehicle will just have to wait. In the meantime, you could always get a bike. We still think those are awesome.

Lefse Records

Thank Alan Palomo for not taking acid. If he had, then Neon Indian, the lo-fi pop duo consisting of the VEGA lead singer and Brooklyn-based video artist, Alicia Scardetta, would never have come to fruition. Started with the song, “Should Have Taken Acid With You” — which Palomo had written as a humorous apology to Scardetta after their plans on taking LSD together fell through — the project soon manifested itself into a full-fledged multimedia collaboration. Hazy lyrics and synth sequences give songs like “Terminally Chill” and “Mind, Drips” a sound reminiscent of lazy, strung-out summer days. With the debut LP Psychic Chasms out this week and gigs lined up through January, the ambitious 21-year-old took some time out of his busy schedule to speak with PLANET° about blogs, Ecco the Dolphin, and a heated exchange with a similar “Neon” band.

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Neon Indian – Terminally Chill

Photography by Guillaume Herbaut

In the Ukraine, a country where females are victims of sexual trafficking and gender oppression, a new tribe of empowered women is emerging. Calling themselves the “Asgarda”, the women seek complete autonomy from men. Residing in the Carpathian Mountains, the tribe is comprised of 150 women of varying ages, primarily students, led by 30 year-old Katerina Tarnouska. Reviving the tribal traditions of the Scythian Amazons of ancient Greek mythology, the Asgarda train in martial arts, taught by former Soviet karate master, Volodymyr Stepanovytch, and learn life skills and sciences in order to become ideal women. Little physical documentation existed on the tribe, until recently, when renowned French photographer, Guillaume Herbaut, met the Asgarda back in 2004 in the midst of the Orange Revolution.

Photography by Dustin Thompson

Coming a long way since the days of the taco truck, the LA mobile food movement has evolved to encompass everything from Vietnamese and veggie hot dogs to Korean BBQ and architecturally influenced ice cream sandwiches. And now, sushi. Fishlips Sushi — LA’s first fresh sushi truck — may just be the culinary zenith of the food truck world. Operated by three seasoned sushi chefs, the truck offers top quality, highly affordable, made-to-order sushi inspired by the sushi carts of ancient Japan. The surprisingly vast menu features temari — little balls of rice topped with fish. All rolls emanate from one of four bases — California, spicy tuna, shrimp tempura, vegetable — to produce innovative selections like the Long Beach and signature Fish Lips roll. With fish coming straight from distributors and everything made from scratch, the truck delivers sushi on par with that of top-notch competitors at a street food price. To top it all off, orders are nicely garnished, neatly packaged, and graciously served, making for the perfect “fast-food” alternative for health-conscious and convenience-oriented Los Angelenos.

If in Los Angeles, you can track Fishlips’ location via their website and Twitter to find when it’s coming to a location near you: http://www.fishlips-sushi.com

Dark Night of the Soul – the first collaboration and installation between Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, and David Lynch – explores the idea of collective introspection. Now showing at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, the exhibit consists of a two-room installation streaming the album written by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, accompanied by photos taken by Lynch. Inspired by the album, Lynch’s photo sets read like mini-storyboards, and resemble a series of film stills. The album features guest vocalists The Flaming Lips, Gruff Rhys of The Super Furry Animals, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Frank Black of The Pixies, Iggy Pop, James Mercer of The Shins, Nina Persson of The Cardigans, Suzanne Vega, and Vic Chesnutt. The interplay between music and visuals in Dark Night of the Soul heighten and confuse the sensory experience, creating a myriad of emotions and responses.
     Hauntingly beautiful and grotesque, poignant and sometimes comical images accompany lyrics about revenge, war, pain, loss and hallucinatory states. From the opening track, The Flaming Lips’ “Revenge”, to David Lynch’s “Dark Night of the Soul”, we are taken on a disturbing and cerebral journey, one that moves increasingly from the tangible to the surreal. Each track is accompanied by a set of three or four images, which individually and collectively tell a story.