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Made some photographs for The New Yorker about BBQ in North Carolina.

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Article.

The Golden Age of travel is over. But the allure of the glamorous flight attendant still lingers.

Sara, Iceland Air

Tiger Airways, Singapore

Even now, many of us still have the quintessential image of a flight attendant from the Golden Age of travel in our memories. Perfectly coiffed, effervescent and small in frame, she — always a “she” — is wearing a small cap and a smile.

The profession began in the 1930s by hiring nurses, who were thought to be ideal candidates because of their inherently caring and good-natured dispositions. Women with small physiques also were favored because it was believed they could glide down the narrow aisle of early airplanes with ease. It evolved into an attractive field where young women could have broader professional horizons, including more independence, travel, meeting potential life partners. Some saw it as a stepping-stone into modeling or acting.

Photographer Brian Finke explores this insular world and its evolution in his book “Flight Attendant.” He spent nearly two years traversing the friendly skies, following the life of flight attendants in the air and on the ground, from Delta and Hawaiian Air, to Hooters Air, Southwest, Air France, British Airways, Air Asia, and dozens more. His images of flight attendants waving, applying makeup and deboarding plans while smiling appear as if they were ripped from an advertisement in a glossy magazine.

Yumiko Cathay, Pacific Airways

British Airways flight attendants

“Finke’s approach in photographing Flight Attendants is neither nostalgic nor unduly real,” writes writer Alix Browne in the book’s introduction. “We catch these women in their choreographed moments, familiar to the point of being generic — demonstrating safety procedures, smiling and waving as if in an advertisement.”

Brown also says that while many flight attendants today do exist as a sort of high-flying tribe all their own, with distinct uniforms and mannerisms that are similar no matter what airline you’re flying, they are also just like the rest of us.

“Here, attractive young women, distinctively garbed as a little bit soldier, a little bit fashion model, and a little bit schoolgirl, do the ordinary things we all have done: leaving an apartment, buying a toothbrush, playing billiards, or picking up a kid from daycare. The absurdity of both their circumstances and ours is exaggerated here. In these pictures we recognize that our world includes both these strange inhuman beings and ourselves.”

Roshayati, Air Asia

Christy, Southwest Airlines

Delta Airlines

Sarah, Hooters Air

Wenyi and Kate, Tiger Airways

Cathay, Pacific Airways

Kikuchi and Imada, Japan Airlines

Lily and Azriza, Air Asia

Article.

Football, Cheerleading and Hometown Glory

In Texas, where football is an unofficial religion, a photography project documenting the sideline drama and athleticism of football and cheerleading would not be unwelcome.

But the photographer Brian Finke was a reluctant convert to this pastime, even though he was raised in suburban Houston.

“It was something very familiar growing up in Texas,” he said. “My two sisters were cheerleaders, so it was too close and overly familiar. I almost didn’t find the interest in it.”

Yet after high school — when he lived in New York as a student at the School of Visual Arts — Mr. Finke saw the film “Bring It On,” a sassy teen comedy about competitive cheerleading.

The movie would be the motivation in part for a project on these two historically related, but increasingly independent, competitive sports.

Although the high-camp of the film was an element of cheerleading culture he had witnessed firsthand, he immediately began to devote personal time to capturing the athleticism, nuance of experience and culture of the sport.

“2-4-6-8: American Cheerleaders and Football Players,” Mr. Finke’s first published monograph, was the result.

The images, made between 2001 and 2003, used strobes to produce what Mr. Finke calls “stylized documentary.” They burst with color and capture a seemingly limitless amount of teenage energy.

Originally focused only on cheerleaders, he later broadened the work to include football players. He wanted to highlight a type of social symbiosis, and the shared themes of strength and agility, discipline and camaraderie, and the ubiquitous desire to achieve hometown glory.

The personal project coincided with Mr. Finke’s professional career. When sent on assignment for magazines in different cities, he photographed teams and squads from outside the Lone Star State, capturing the culture of high school sport in suburban America.

“What I love about high school sports is the enthusiasm,” Mr. Finke said. Of one football player (slide 6), he added: “This guy played offense and defense, played the entire game, and gave it his all, and I love that commitment to it.”

Mr. Finke also learned what many cheerleaders have known for decades: The physical toll of stunts, the term used to describe the body pyramids and tosses of a routine, was taxing. This aspect of cheerleading solidifies as something all its own. “It’s pretty brutal on people’s bodies,” Mr. Finke recalled, “and you can’t really do it for a long time.”

Along with sentimental moments, the photographs also play on a sense of the absurd. Intense faces, heavy makeup and heavily teased hair play on the particularly gendered stereotypes often held about young girls and women who cheer. There is also humor and a touch of irony in his capture of runt-sized receivers and the hypermasculinity of male cheer squad members.

Mr. Finke sought out empowering moments from the sidelines and the competition floor.

“I think they represent both in a lot of different light and that’s what makes it interesting,” he said. “I wanted to take the viewer in different directions and on different paths.”

Mr. Finke continues to document peripheral sports like body building, and much of his personal work seeks to comment on American suburban and working-class culture.

When asked what this body of work means to him personally, he seemed uncertain. “I just want to make it about the people,” he said. In the end he hoped to touch on different emotions, cast a wide net and represent his projects in an authentic way.

By Philip Richardson

Article.

In 2003, he was assigned him to cover the Mr Olympia competition in Las Vegas. Invented in 1965, Mr Olympia existed basically so that the winners of the Mr Universe competition had somewhere to go beyond Mr Universe.  (It’s what the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Pumping Iron is all about – Schwarzenegger’s last competition before retirement, his road to Mr Olympia.)

That’s how it started. But Finke couldn’t stop.

He told BuzzFeed: “I had always been taking a lot of sports photos, but I was fascinated by how extreme a sport and lifestyle bodybuilding was.”

“So I continued to explore this subculture, trying to showcase the emotional and quirkier moments both onstage and offstage. The stuff we normally don’t get to see.”

According to Finke, there’s no one kind of person that becomes a bodybuilder.

“People come to it from all sorts of places. One woman I photographed used to be a sorority girl in college and became a professional bodybuilder.”

“People come to the sport from different backgrounds, and the reasons why they do it vary.”

If you ask Finke what the weirdest thing about bodybuilding is, he’ll tell you the tanning process is intense.

It’s applied by airbrush and done so that competitors look more alike. It makes the judging process easier.

There’s no distinction between genders – the male and female competitions are equally fierce – but amateur vs professional are whole different worlds.

Most of Finke’s photographs were taken at the homegrown amateur kind.

“I never asked anyone to pose for the camera; the participants were there to compete and I was there to observe and photograph.”

“When I’m photographing, I feel like I can never make anything up that’s better than what’s naturally happening.”

“Once when I was photographing at a competition, the women competitors were backstage pumping up…”

“… There were dumb bells scattered around on the floor and the women were wearing these great high heels – the juxtaposition was badass.”

“I was crawling around of the floor photographing details – just the high heels and weights – when the contestants started making fun of me, saying I had a foot fetish.

“Whatever, it was a great shot.”

New York : Most Muscular by Brian Finke at SVA Chelsea Gallery

written by La Rédaction / The Staff