Shaun Ross
.

This week I watched a documentary about the hunt for Albinos in parts of Africa and it completely took my by the throat. Wanting to share this film, I surged for a connection with my blog and found it in Shaun Ross.

‘.

Albinism in humans (from the Latin albus, “white”) is a congenital disorder characterized by the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes due to absence or defect of tyrosinase, a copper-containing enzyme involved in the production of melanin. It is the opposite of melanism. 

“I was always the outcast, but a confident outcast”  

Shaun Ross (born May 10, 1991) is an American professional fashion model, actor and dancer best known for being the first male albino pro model. He has been featured in photo-editorial campaigns in fashion publications including British GQ, Italian Vogue, i-D Magazine, Paper Magazine and Another Man. He has modeled for Alexander McQueen and Givenchy.

Ross’s mom gave birth to him on the highway on the way to the hospital. “The nickname my parents always called me was Nissan,” Ross said with a laugh.

Ross is of African-American descent. Born in the Bronx, when he was growing up, Ross dealt with much discrimination for being albino. He was bullied frequently by his peers, called names such as “Powder”, “Wite-Out”, and “Casper”. After training at the Alvin Ailey School for five years, Ross was discovered on YouTube and crossed over to the fashion industry in 2008 at 16 years old.

models Shaun Ross & Diandra Forrest
.

In 2009, Ross appeared on the Tyra Banks Show. He shared the show with fellow albinistic African American model Diandra Forrest; together, they shared their life stories about how different life was for them. Later that year, Ross played a role in a short film by Yoann Lemoine which won a first-place prize in a contest sponsored by Italian Vogue. Ross also has worked with other directors, such as Julien Seri, Jason Last, Jessica Yatrofsky and Ella Manor in both film and television. Ross, who is bisexual, participates in the underground ballroom scene in New York, where he often vogues as a free agent.

.

Shaun Ross in People Magazine:

Growing up in New York, I had to face scrutiny of my looks for as long as I can remember. Looking different, feeling different, all because of the way the world wants to classify you. I got called “weird,” “powder,” or “Casper.” When the world doesn’t want to see you – or better yet, accept you the way you are – the last thing you think you could become is a supermodel. 

Society makes it seem that the most beautiful people in the world are models; they are the perfect design of what a human being should look like: female models with long straight hair and a tiny thin waist and male models with bleach blond hair or Herculean bodies. When you’re raised with the public telling you that you are ugly or you have a disease, you don’t think you have a chance. 

As a child, I was always very outgoing and charismatic, traits I got from my parents. They helped me gain the confidence to eventually become a dancer, like my idols Michael and Janet Jackson, Madonna and Beyoncé. Later, Shameer Khan scouted me for a modeling contract. When this break led to me becoming the first male model with albinism, I knew I was helping to change the way people thought. I was breaking the mold by changing the standards of beauty with the help of others before me like Alek Wek, Stacey McKenzie and Connie Chiu.

Ross says that his condition doesn’t define him or confine him in any way. It has just always been there. The problem lies with others and with people’s perception.

Ph. David Armstrong for Another Man Magazine
Ph. Danny Roche, Vogue Italia
Ford Motor Company campaign "Be Unique"

,

http://www.inmyskiniwin.com/

Ross summed up his attitude with a hashtag he uses to his growing social media following, #InMySkinIWin, which he says promotes a level of comfort with yourself. He started it to raise albinism awareness, but has since expanded the meaning to just loving who you are.

http://shaundross.tumblr.com/

.

.

Documentary

The hunt for Albinos

In parts of Africa people believe that giving birth to an Albino “creature” is a curse. Some also believe that owning a part of their body will make them rich. Albinos are hunted down and hacked to death. Or, if lucky, they will only lose an arm (sold for $225).

In this amazing documentary Joseph Terner reaches out to the same people who made his life hell. He explains Albinos are not the product of a curse, but that of a genetic mutation.

.

.

Ph.Terry Richardson for Nixi Magazine
;
;

Info:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shaun-ross/

http://www.people.com/article/shaun-ross-model-albinism-tanzanian-refugees

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/10/living/fashion-week-imperfect-model-shaun-ross/

Flappers were a “new breed” of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms. Flappers had their origins in the liberal period of the Roaring Twenties, the social, political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of World War I, as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.  (Wikipedia)

The empress of the Jazz Age, Zelda Fitzgerald  inspired fashion in much the same way she inspired her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing: firmly and fiercely. The two married in 1920, and soon after Scott achieved literary success with This Side of Paradise. Feisty, talented and a prodigious social butterfly, Zelda quickly made a name for herself as his charismatic muse. Dubbed the “first American flapper” by her husband, Zelda epitomized the Roaring Twenties with her bobbed hair, short skirts and unapologetic drinking as she made her way through the most exclusive social circles in New York and, later, Paris. She wore a flesh-colored bathing suit to fuel rumors that she swam nude–she liked the attention. However, in reality, life wasn’t quite so enchanting — the Fitzgeralds’ marriage was often turbulent. Zelda spent much time in and out of institutions being treated for mental illness. She was staying in an institution in North Carolina in 1948 when she died after a fire broke out. However, despite the personal hardships, Zelda had embodied everything that fabled era promised: defiance, recklessness and, above all, glamour.

Zelda & Scott Fitzgerald

Zelda & Scott Fitzgerald
.

Zelda, Scott & Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald

Zelda & Scott Fitzgerald
Zelda, Scott & Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald
Zelda & Scott Fitzgerald
.

.

Zelda Wasn’t ‘Crazy’

According to Zelda biographer, Theresa Ann Fowler: “Zelda did suffer some mental health crises — depression, primarily — and was an uninhibited, uncensored woman who didn’t always think before she acted, but she wasn’t crazy. Unwise? Sometimes. Insane? No.”

.

.

Book

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the “ungettable” Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn’t wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner’s, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel―and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera―where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein.

Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby’s parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous―sometimes infamous―husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott’s, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda’s irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

.

.

John Rawlings (1912-1970) was a Condé Nast Publications fashion photographer from the 1930s through the 1960s. Though Rawlings left a significant body of work, including 200 Vogue magazine and Glamour magazine covers to his credit, he never achieved the name and fame of his lengendary colleagues and masters Cecil Beaten and Horst P. Horst.

The introduction of American photographer John Rawlings to Vogue’s visual team in 1936 was certainly one of Conde Nast’s best strategic moves. At a time when opulence, pretentiousness, and theatrical lighting were prevalent in fashion photography – fueled by the European school led by the British Beaton, the German Horst, and the Russian Hoyningen-Huene – Nast and Vogue’s editor in chief Edna Woolman Chase decided they needed a change of direction and placed their bets on a talented but unknown twenty-four-year Midwesterner.

In two memos sent by Chase, one to her staff in 1937 and another to the photographers in 1938, she demanded more information and less art in Vogue pictures: “Several of the photographs for September fifteenth are nothing but black smudges,” she wrote in the second. “Concentrate completely on showing the dress, light it for this purpose and if that can’t be done with art then art be damned. Show the dress. This is an order straight from the boss’s mouth and will you please have it typed and hung in the studio”. 

The change of direction would take a few years, but the man to lead it, John Rawlings, would become one of the most prolific and important photographers of the twentieth century, with more than two hundred Vogue and Glamour covers to his credit. 

His beginnings were unremarkable. Born in Ohio in 1912, John Rawlings attended the local Wesleyan University, and upon graduation in the early 1930s he relocated to New York, where he became a freelance store window dresser. After buying a Leica to photograph his work and show it to potential clients, Rawlings discovered that he enjoyed taking pictures and eventually started to photograph some of the aristocratic clients themselves, alone or with their dogs. A few of those shots found their way to the desk of Nast, who decided to offer Rawlings a job at the Vogue studios as prop builder, studio hand, and apprentice to the legendary masters Beaton and Horst. The young man was so dedicated and worked with such unbridled enthusiasm that four months later he not only was promoted to first assistant to the masters but also got his first photo published in the September 15 issue of Vogue. Impressed by his precocious talent and visual style, Nast and Chase rewarded him in 1937 with a job at the British Vogue studio in London, where he would train and work until the early 1940s. During his time there, Rawlings experimented with his style and began to develop his signature uses of light, setting and posing. His British Vogue work was so impressive it began cirulating in French and American Vogue as well.

Charles Dare Scheips Jr., former director of the Conde Nast Archives, called Rawlings “The first major Conde Nast photographer to demonstrate a truly American eye.”

Rawlings is credited as the first fashion photographer to associate fashion with Hollywood celebrities and also said to have single-handedly elevated commercial photography to an art form. 

.

Book    

 John Rawlings: 30 Years in Vogue

With over 200 Vogue and Glamour covers to his credit and 30,000 photos in archive, John Rawlings (1912-1970) immortalized the era in which American fashion and style truly came into their own. During his three-decade affiliation with Conde Nast, Rawlings’s work paralleled his publishers’ and editors’ efforts to reformat and expand the power and scope of the fashion press. Rawlings was in the elite circle of Irving Penn, Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, and George Platt Lynes, all top Vogue photographers, yet never received the kind of attention lauded on his colleagues — until now. Drawing on the photographer’s rediscovered archive, curator Kohle Yohannan presents glamour portraits as well as never-before-published nudes that testify to the artist’s ground-breaking and compelling body of work. Photographs of stage, screen, and society stars of the 1940s and 1950s, including Marlene Dietrich, Salvador Dali, Veronica Lake, Lena Horne, and Montgomery Clift are featured.

Veronica LakeVivien Leigh
Photographer Irving Penn in his American Field Service uniform.
Actor Peter Ustinov
.
.
.

.
.
info:

http://bygonefashion.livejournal.com/195868.html

http://www.fashionmefabulous.com/2011/03/famous-fashion-photographers-john.htmlshion Me Fabulous